In this article, the author offers an appreciation of the writers and their books that have shaped her teaching and thinking. Her face-to-face encounters with these books prompted her to question her own beliefs about literacy, about authority, about language, about writing, about literature. She was surrounded by the living animations of the professional literature she had poured over, and with each encounter, the books themselves mattered more than ever. This led her to what might seem like an obvious conclusion. National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) was not only an organization of earnest teachers looking for practical answers to real classroom dilemmas. It was a living library, a place where practitioners and scholars gathered and exchanged ideas until it was difficult to tell one from the other. That living library is brimming with walking books that wed theory to practice, bring scholars and teachers together, and create the production of the repository of professional knowledge that is NCTE.