Books about electronics, several of them, mostly collection of data sheets about valves, transistors, passive components - you can learn a lot by reading these. A moving coil meter, a soldering iron. Then I've build my lab bit by bit - starting, when I was about 14, with a simple stabilized and protected 0-30V, 300mA power supply, next came a scope - there was no way at that time and place to buy a proper scope(the USSR, mid-1970th), so I've bought as a junk a very old valve scope (AC only, 250kHz bandwidth) , removed all circuitry from it, leaving only the CRT, the case and the mains transformer, and built a rather nice (single channel though) DC-10Mhz scope, using my own circuit design (I was 16 by then). After that a better dual rail power supply, a function generator and an AC millivoltmeter (1mV - 100V full scale, 5Hz-500kHz BW). I've used that equipment for next fifteen years to design and test hundreds of circuits.
Cheers
Alex