Photo Post: Favourite Pre-1985 Children's Books (CPSIA)

The Love2Learn blog is hosting a sort of combination show-and-tell and meme called The Illegal Books Meme. What are your favourite out-of-print, pre-1985 children's books that the CPSIA has now made illegal to buy and sell?

I live in Canada. Nobody's going to separate me from my books just yet. In fact, I have the impression that nobody here has even heard of the CPSIA. Not even the woman at the nearby independent toy store (the sort of place that sells special-needs items and nice wooden puzzles). I asked her if any of her American suppliers might be affected by the new legislation, and she had no idea what I was talking about.

But I'm a homeschooler, too. I've been involved for almost a decade with the Ambleside Online Curriculum, which attempted from the beginning to use either public-domain or still-in-print books. But just because the D'Aulaire biographies are still in print doesn't mean that everybody can or wants to buy a brand-new copy of them; swapping resources or finding them through used sources has been very common. And we (Amblesiders, CM homeschoolers) are not in a unique homeschooling niche--what would the library sales do without homeschoolers?

Besides that--I'm concerned about the small publishers and other small businesses (many of them family-run) who have said that they won't be able to continue producing the kits and toys that make homeschooling more interesting for many people. These products aren't sold only to U.S. customers--they find their way to Canadian vendors, or Canadian homeschoolers order them directly from those companies.

Or they did.

So it all affects us too.

I asked Mr. Fixit to take pictures of some of our older children's books--sorry for the occasional crooked volume here, I'm not a photo stylist. Some of the books here may have been reprinted, and I'll try to note that if I find out it's the case. On the other hand--people have pointed out that even if new or newer copies are still available, trashing the pre-1985 copies of a book just makes all the books harder to find and more expensive. Where's the logic in that?

More to Collect and Paint from Nature (open book, upper left) (1964), and Our Wonderful Wayside (1966), both by John Hawkinson. Recommended in the old edition of Books Children Love.

The New Golden Treasury of Natural History, by Bertha Morris Parker. What kind of a snake is that? What's a quetzal? Our copy is dated 1968, but who cares if the snake pictures are forty years old? The snakes don't change.

Play Story Geography (open book below The New Golden Treasury). A really hard-to-find 1932 school text that I've found very useful with my children. Not growing up around rivers or mountains, they are often baffled by words in older books like banks, ford, channel, range, pass; this book explains what those things are (do you know which is the right bank of a river)?

Friendship Press Christian chapter books printed in the 1950's and 1960's, used in after-school clubs and popular in church libraries. Three of my own childhood favourites are pictured on the right there: The Buffalo and the Bell; Sun Hee and the Street Boy; and George and the Chinese Lady.

Below is a close-up of George, and one of More to Collect and Paint from Nature.

An electic selection: Rumer Godden's Candy Floss (our hardcover copy was printed in 1963) and Impunity Jane (the copyright date is 1955 but a library stamp says 1962).

Dr. Beaumont and the Man with the Hole in His Stomach. Hardcover, ex-library, 1978. Here's a close-up (not for the faint of heart though).

Father Fox's Pennyrhymes, by Clyde Watson, illustrated by Wendy Watson. Dilly dilly picalilly, tell me something very silly. Hardcover, ex-library, 1971.

Loud-Mouse, by Richard Wilbur. One of our favourite learning-to-read books. Hardcover, ex-library, reprinted 1982.

A few from my Scholastic collection. Some are still in print, others I don't think you can find new. I don't buy collector copies and I don't worry if somebody wrote their name in pen inside the cover; I just buy them because I like them and it's a bit of nostalgia for me. But the kids read them too. (I didn't put Magic Elizabeth in this photo but it's a favourite.)

An Inheritance of Poetry, on the right there. Copyright 1948, but a library stamp in our copy says 1964. A lovely book of "300 selections from the world's outstanding verse." We've often used it for school-time reading.

Best in Children's Books, all printed around 1960. A good way to get to know some of the best children's writers and illustrators from around that time, and sometimes a surprise source of stories that we've been looking for for school. (One of our volumes contains the text of The Velveteen Rabbit; another has the D'Aulaires' George Washington.) Here's a closeup (it's a Thornton Burgess story):

Graham Oakley's Church Mice books. Our copies are dated 1974 through 1976. Some of the funniest picture books we've ever read.

As a P.S...At least my half-dozen copies of Pilgrim's Progress will stay safe. Who would ever figure that for a kid's book?

Photo credits: Mr. Fixit