A couple of weeks ago the Fall 2009 Children’s Book Announcements issue of Publishers Weekly came out. As a librarian, reader and writer, waiting for it feels a lot like waiting for Christmas to me. At work, I keep a note on my computer's desktop to remind me of the date the fall and spring announcements will be available. I select most of the books for our library district from these lists. One interesting book that I am sure to buy this fall is Anita Silvey’s Everything I Need to Know I Learned from a Children’s Book.
She asked over a hundred influential people which children’s book changed the way they saw the world. I'll report on who was interviewed, and what they said after I read the book.
But here's my story: It was the My Bookhouse Books, a series of seven volumes published in 1925, in Chicago. My mother, who grew up in nearby Lake Forest, was a year old when the books were published, but she remembers a peddler coming by her parents’ house and her mother buying the volumes, in 1929. They were an extravagant purchase for those days, but her mother wanted her to have them.
Flash forward a couple of decades. My mother married a man from Washington State, and the books followed her. I came along a few years after that, and as soon as I was able to read, the books became mine. I especially enjoyed volume 1, In the Nursery, which was mostly nursery rhymes. Many of them are ageless. I sang or recited them to my own children, and use some every week in my Lapsit programs at the library. How did the books change the way I viewed the world? They opened to me the delightfulness of language, and the transformative power of story.
This memory feels especially apt for me today. It's my mother's 85th birthday, and I spent the day with two of my sweet little grandchildren.
What was your favorite children's book, and how did it change the way you viewed the world?
3 comments:
There's something special about nursery rhymes! I dearly loved my copy of "The Real Mother Goose," illustrated by Blanche Fisher Wright. Too many children are growing up never hearing these sweet (okay, sometimes creepy and political) rhymes.
I also loved a book my grandma bought me called "Share with us...Letters: Numbers, Words: Animals." This book is now in my daughter's possession. It's a British publication, published by Brimax Books. It had EVERYTHING in it (as suggested by the title). I loved big books full of short stories, like the endless varieties of fairy tale collections, or Richard Scarry's big books.
Another favorite was "Tony the Lion," by Ken Wagner--an adorable story of a lion who gives away all his hair to birds to build nests.
Ahhh...how fun to reminisce!
It's hard to pick a single one, but...we had those same My Bookhouse books! They were some of my favorites and I definitely use the stories and rhymes in storytimes. I haven't managed to find all of them, and my mom won't let me have the originals *pout* but I'm glad to see someone else remembers them with love.
Some of my wackier childhood favorites...Fanny and May by Jon Buller about elephants living in a house made out of cake. Tangle and the Firesticks by Benedict Blathwyt about tiny people living in the forest. Tan Tan's Suspenders by Kazuo Iwamura about a little monkey who uses his suspenders to do amazing things. And I could go on and on...
Oh, those books sound interesting. I wonder if Amazon has old copies. One I remember with great fondness was "Little Black Sambo" which would be politically incorrect today, but the five-year-old that I was certainly didn't see any harm in it.
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