It looks like brothers have a lot to be thanked for (except in the case of Nilpaurion Felagund, who has a sister to thank
). I of course stole my own brother's copies of the books all those years ago; I saw him reading them and being late for meals because of them and thought they had to be good! Looking back I must have been such a
pain, as not only did I pinch his Tolkien books so that he had to come into my room to get his own books back, but I used to pester his friends about them too. As I got older I got even worse as I started nicking his records too.
Brothers always use to have such interesting stuff in their bedrooms though! Good books, noisy records, weird things they'd found like bullet casings and spent grenades and collections of knives and stones and that kind of thing. One of the things I always associate with reading Tolkien is grey walls as my brother had decided to make his room look more 'military' and painted the walls to resemble the innards of a battleship, so if I had been told not to remove his books then I had to go and sit in there to read them and put up with the gloomy atmosphere!
Then my mother bought me my own set of LotR but the nicking didn't really stop as I had the David Day Bestiary and the Carpenter biography while he had the Journeys of Frodo and the Foster Complete Guide. Being the parent of a brace of young Tolkienists must be a nightmare in household discipline terms!