Big Book Sale

The University Women's annual book sale is having its fiftieth anniversary, so in honour of that, the prices were half what they normally charge.  Which was already pretty low, but that's even better.

So for under ten dollars, I brought home:

Oxford Book of English Verse, 1961 edition (different from the older one I have)

Fowler's Modern English Usage, with a 1939 inscription

Gods, Graves, and Scholars, 1953 hardcover

The Australia Book, by Eve Pownall, illustrated by Margaret Senior

The Wrong Box, by Robert Louis Stevenson & Lloyd Osbourne, The World's Classics Series, small hardcover with dust jacket, 1954 printing...with an inscription by one of my own poetry professors...easily my favourite find tonight.

Froissart's Chronicles, Everyman's Edition

The Golden Book of the Renaissance, adapted for young readers by Irwin Shapiro

Feeding Wild Birds in Winter, by Clive Dobson

Hands on Nature: Introducing Flowers, Ferns, Fungi, & More

Secret Laughter, by Walter de la Mare (Puffin paperback)

Fanny and the Monsters, by Penelope Lively

Rebecca's Nancy, by Joan Reimer Goman.  It's a cute little storybook about an Old Order Mennonite girl who can't find her rag doll.

For the Scholastic shelf:
Is This You?, by Ruth Krauss and Crockett Johnson
Questions and Answers About Ants, by Milicent E. Selsam
Kid Power, by Susan Beth Pfeffer

From the book sale

The pickings were a bit slim in the children's room, but the prices in there were reasonable and I did bring home a few books for the Scholastic shelf.

TX 1159 Charlie the Lonesome Cougar
TX 801 The Mad Scientists' Club
TX 1111 The Shaggy Dog
TX 945 Hans Brinker--oops, this one is abridged
TX 3330 The Magic of Oz
TJ 2904 Pigeon of Paris, by Natalie Savage Carlson (TJ's are harder to find)

I also found a French workbook...sort of a workbook...called Pourquoi? Comment?  I'm still figuring out what that's about.

In the main room I found copies of J.B., by Archibald MacLeish; Howard's End is on the Landing, by Susan Hill; a nice copy of Longfellow's Evangeline; an extra copy of Babies Need Books, probably to give away; and an Abbey Classics copy of Lorna Doone.  The cover art made it look like it's abridged, but I don't think it is--I'll check it against an online version, but it looks pretty genuine from here. (It turned out to be somewhat abridged, which surprised me since it was still full of dialect and didn't appear to be dumbed-down. Also I can't find anywhere on the book itself that says "abridged" or "adapted." But the Project Gutenberg version is definitely longer.)

So--not a bad trip!

Church sale morning

It was too rainy for much yard saling today, but there were some rummage sales. Crayons brought home some additions to her horse collection (not in the photo). Mama Squirrel found science kits, books, a roll of knit fabric, a new pack of notecards, and a useful tin for putting things in.

"Explore the science of magic with Bob Friedhoffer, the mad scientist of magic!"

I'm impressed with that Magnetism kit--I didn't expect all the parts to be there, but it's pretty close to being intact. The only thing really missing is one large magnet that's used in a couple of the experiments.

Is anyone else out there familiar with picture books by Bettina Ehrlich? The covers usually just say "by Bettina." I've come across a couple of them lately, including The Goat Boy today; they remind me a bit of Edward Ardizzone's style.

Why there weren't enough children's books...and why there aren't enough children's books

[Baker:] Where are you off to?
[Belle:] The bookshop. I just finished the most wonderful story about a beanstalk and an ogre and a -
[Baker:] That's nice. ...

Have you ever found your own particular suddenly meshing with a much larger general?  For instance, when you read those books about Boomers and GenXers and Beepers, and you suddenly realized that that 40ish guy you knew who worked a McJob and lived in his parents' basement with a reel-to-reel tape recorder wasn't that unique?

I started thinking awhile back about what kids' books used to be like, back when I was growing up--we'll say from the '60's through the '80's.  There were some things that puzzled me, or that I thought I had misremembered.  But I put a lot of that down to growing up in Ontario (rather than in the catalogue-happy U.S.) and in a small-town, working-class kind of place where you wouldn't expect to find a lot of bookstores.

I don't remember most kids I knew owning a lot of books.  My sister and I actually did better than most:  our mom got us the Parent's Magazine Press picture books by mail (Miss Suzy and the rest), plus we got several monthly magazines over the years, plus we were taken to flea markets and odd places where we found older treasures, plus my mom had been a teacher and had a few anthologies and such things around.  Also, we had a great public library, and a fairly good school library. But the standard at-home books of the time were the drugstore, supermarket and discount department store books:  Wonder Books, Little Golden Books, Dr. Seuss, anything printed by Whitman-Golden...and some series books that were easy to come by like Trixie Belden and the purple-bound Bobbsey Twins.  Most homes might have a few older hand-me-down classics around--Grandpa's copy of The Water Babies, or an older sister's cache of Scholastic books.

What there weren't a lot of...from the way things looked to me then...were places where grown-ups bought interesting books--or a lot of grownups who seemed to want to buy or read them.  Most living rooms had chairs, ash trays, televisions, but not bookshelves.  (One of my great-aunts was the exception--she had a little painting/sewing room with a wallful of books.)  And most children's picture books--again, other than the inexpensive ones like The Poky Little Puppy--and novels--other than the short list of real classics--were borrowed from the library.
 
So I thought about this--realizing that I was fortunate to have been gifted early on with old-but-cherished copies of Winnie the Pooh, Heidi, and Fifty Famous Fairy Stories...and wishing we had held on to that long-gone Mother Goose that I've never been able to identify...and wondering when all that changed...

And then recently I came across this, in Perry Nodelman's 1990's book The Pleasures of Children's Literature:

"In the mid-1980's, the sales of children's books in North America skyrocketed.  The most obvious reason was that the children of the so-called baby-boomers....were beginning to read.  Furthermore, the baby-boomers seemed more willing, or able, than their parents had been to buy children's books.  Because many of them had put off having children until much later in their lives than had been typical, many had already established careers.  Even those well off were often in two-career marriages.  There was more money to spend on relatively nonessential things like children's books."

Yes!--I thought--everybody during the '70's worried about money.   And yes, I think it's true that the later, younger '80's parents wanted more for their kids, wanted to buy them more stuff, wanted them to "read" more (in a qualified sense), had higher expectations (also in a qualified sense).  The inconsistent part, though, is that the parents of the kids I knew were usually as generous as they could afford to be when it came to Christmas and birthday toys...but we hardly ever asked for specific books.  First of all, the Sears catalogue didn't carry books, except for a few Dr. Seuss and baby titles. Besides, wasting your Christmas wishes on books seemed akin to the dentist suggesting you ask Santa for an electric toothbrush.

And though I loved books myself, I didn't have a strong desire to own more than a few.  The library had all my favourites, and surely they would be there forever.

"Meanwhile, the political climate meant that government at all levels had less money to spend on libraries.  According to Adam Hochschild [New York Times Book Review 1994], 'fifteen or twenty years ago, some 85% of all children's books were sold to school or public libraries.  This figure has plummeted'....The dramatic increase in the proportion of books purchased by parents and other relatives transformed the children's book business....Now, the people who buy the most books aren't experts, and they have no way of choosing books other than to try to figure out what the children they know might like.  This means, primarily, things they or their children are already familiar with."--Nodelman, 1996/1992

So there's the crunch, you see.  All of a sudden there was more money and more interest in buying children's books.  But according to Perry Nodelman, that did not mean that parents (and kids with money to spend) immediately went out and started buying the same sorts of books that discriminating librarians and teachers had once chosen for them.  Other than picture books, which did survive as something fairly easy to market, the rapidly changing publishing industry and bookselling industry started to concentrate only on

"1.  Reprintings and new editions of favorite books from the baby-boomers' youth: books by Dr. Seuss, book versions of classic Disney cartoons.

"2.  Other movie and TV tie-ins; books about characters the baby-boomers' children were already familiar with from other media.

"3.  Books about new characters, but ones that came in series, so that once children became familiar with these characters they could read new books about them again and again."--Nodelman, 1996/1992

Now obviously there is more to the last twenty years of children's publishing than that; otherwise how could the Horn Book have survived?  Obviously there are still at least a few good books for older children still being written and still being published and still being sold.  But I think Perry Nodelman makes some good points...and his timeline of the change in the mid-1980's comes more than coincidentally close to that pre-1985 CPSIA ruling (outlawing pre-1985 children's books because of supposed lead hazards).  Why have we been fussing about that for the last few years?  Because those pre-1985 books, lots of them, are the good ones, the lasting ones.  Not the TV tie-ins, not the "classic Disney," but the real stuff.

And I learned something else from Nodelman's chapter about publishing.  This is about the U.S., so I'm not sure how it relates to Canada (other than the major publishers being in the U.S.), but it's interesting anyway:

"In the early 1980s, in order to encourage aggressive sales, the U.S. government raised the taxes charted on goods left in warehouses at the end of each year.  As applied to books, this meant that publishers could no longer afford to keep large numbers of titles on their backlists.  Books that had been in print for decades suddenly became unavailable.  Now, only those titles that still sell widely remain in print for very long."

I mentioned this to The Apprentice, and she pointed out that maybe this will change again with the advent of electronic book readers and publishing on demand. Maybe so.  Maybe in the near future there won't be any such thing as an out-of-print book.

But will there be anything left that we care to read?

When I realized myself that it was getting harder to find the kind of children's books that I used to like myself, and the books that were recommended by authors like Gladys Hunt and Dorothy Butler, I started bringing home any of the good ones that I could find at library sales and thrift shops, from other homeschoolers' for-sale lists, from yard sales, from anywhere.  I have a lot more children's books now than I did as a child.  That's all right, because I've had the excuse of having young Squirrelings for almost two decades now.  But am I going to sell them all off (the books, not the Squirrelings) when the last one leaves home?

Not on your life.

Image obviously copyright and owned by Walt Disney, although I found it on somebody else's blog

Book sale finds

This weekend was the big University Women's book sale. We didn't make it there yesterday--we had a really busy day between homeschool co-op in the afternoon and the Apprentice's choir coffeehouse in the evening. But we dropped in this morning when things were a little quieter.

This is what we brought home:

Two videos: Grammar Rocks and Miracle on 34th Street (1947 version) . Mr. Fixit found some videos as well.

A whole boxful of children's books for $4:

Making Simple Clocks, by Marjorie Stapleton

Sing a Song of People, by Roberta McLaughlin and Lucille Wood

Prières dans l'Arche, by Carmen Bernos de Gasztold (Prayers from the Ark, in French)

The Glass Mermaid, because Crayons requested it

Bored of the Rings, as a joke for The Apprentice

The Jungle Book II, by Rudyard Kipling

Soup, by Robert Newton Peck

The Light Beyond the Forest, by Rosemary Sutcliff

Did you carry the flag today, Charley?, by Rebecca Caudill

A Jean Little bindup of Different Dragons, Lost and Found, One to Grow On

Sarah, Plain and Tall, by Patricia McLachlan

Justin Morgan had a Horse, by Marguerite Henry

Amy and Laura, by Marilyn Sachs

The Painted Garden, by Noel Streatfeild (the story that features grown-up Posy and Pauline from Ballet Shoes)

Celebrating Children's Books, edited by Betsy Hearne and Marilyn Kaye

Some "schoolish" stuff in the same box:

Insects Activity book (word searches and things like that)

Nature's Wonderful Family, edited by Jack Mysers, Ph.D. (a Highlights for Children book)

Les Insectes, by Marie-Claude Ouellet--a workbook in French

Ma grammaire d'observation, by Daniel Poulin/Claude Simard--kind of a junior French grammar-at-a-glance

Jouer avec le français--a workbook meant for older children whose first language is French, but still interesting for French class

Six small French books in the same series by Lise Bernard--some "real life French" stuff again meant for French-speaking students, but with possibilities for learning French as well.

Some for the vintage Scholastic shelf: Two on an Island, Magnets and How to Use Them, Codes and Secret Writing, If You Lived in Colonial Times, and a couple of others

Four $1 books from the main room at the booksale:

Step Into Patchwork (I'll Teach Myself #3)

Collected Poems of Karol Wojtyla

Robertson Davies: Man of Myth, by Judith Skelton Grant

Flower Fairies of the Wayside

Three $1 books from the library discard rack later in the morning:

Living a Beautiful Life, by Alexandra Stoddard

How to Talk Dinosaur with Your Child, by Q.L. Pearce

Glenn Gould, by Peter F. Ostwald

Back to the Library Sale

We did go back to the library sale, and brought home another boxful. The Apprentice also filled up a bag with CDs, audio books and books of her own (including some Biochemistry software).

Still it was kind of sad leaving all the rest of those boxes behind to be euthanized recycled.

Books we didn't have:

Give the Dog a Bone, by Steven Kellogg

April's Kittens, by Clare Turlay Newberry (I got this to replace another copy which I was scolded for selling)

What Do You Do, Dear? by Sesyle Joslin, pictures by Maurice Sendak

Exploring Nature Around the Year: Fall, by David Webster (we have the Winter book in this series)

Hurry Home, Candy, by Meindert DeJong (to replace that copy that we couldn't use for school because it was missing a section)

Puppy Summer, by Meindert DeJong

Circus Shoes, by Noel Streatfeild (we do have The Circus is Coming, which is the same book, but there are a number of changes between the two, and it's uncertain whether Streatfeild herself revised it or whether someone else had a hand in it.)

The Fearless Treasure, by Noel Streatfeild

Missee Lee, by Arthur Ransome

Kaleidoscope, by Eleanor Farjeon, illustrated by Edward Ardizzone

Minnow on the Say, by A. Philippa Pearce

David Balfour, by Robert Louis Stevenson, illustrated by N.C. Wyeth (really nice hardcover)

Saints: Adventures in Courage, by Mary O'Neill (rough shape, but interesting)

God's Troubadour: The Story of St. Francis of Assisi, by Sophie Jewett

Miss Bianca and the Bridesmaid, by Margery Sharp

My Father's Dragon, by Ruth Stiles Gannett

Companion to Narnia, by Paul E. Ford

The Swans of Ballycastle, by Walter Hackett

Miss Happiness and Miss Flower, by Rumer Godden

The Fairy Ring, edited by Kate Douglas Wiggin and Nora Archibad Smith, revised by Ethna Sheehan

Pegeen, by Hilda van Stockum

The Carved Lions, by Mrs. Molesworth

The House of Arden, by E. Nesbit

The Wonderful Garden, by E. Nesbit

The Second Mrs. Giaconda, by E.L. Konigsburg

Emily's Runaway Imagination, by Beverly Cleary

Otto of the Silver Hand, by Howard Pyle

Underground to Canada, by Barbara Smucker

Chemistry For Every Kid: 101 Easy Experiments That Really Work



Books we already have but these are nicer copies or particular editions:

The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame, hardcover illustrated by Graham Percy (I like Shepard's illustrations, but these are nice too)

Rufus M., by Eleanor Estes

Little Plum, by Rumer Godden, hardcover to replace our paperback

Pilgrim's Progress (Mary Godolphin's version), illustrated by Robert Lawson


Books we already have but I got them anyway to swap or sell:

The Young Brahms, by Sybil Deucher

The Happy Orpheline, by Natalie Savage Carlson

Library sale!

I can't believe it's been a year since the last big library sale here. Seems just last week I was grousing about Crayons' predilection for pink books.

This year's sale worried me a bit--there were just too many books in the children's section. Now, granted, I don't always get there during the first few hours, so maybe it's always like that--but it seemed to me that they were getting rid of a few too many good books this year. Nice for us, but not a good sign of the times.

I bought one boxful, and wished I had time to go through more of the boxes--maybe I'll get back sometime later in the weekend.

This is what we found:

Books we didn't have:

Open the Door: Stories Collected and Arranged by Margery Fisher (with a nice jacket by Edward Ardizzone)
Stories for Nine-Year-Olds and other younger readers, edited by Sara and Stephen Corrin
Favorite Fairy Tales Told in India, retold by Virginia Haviland
Sir Gibbie, by George MacDonald
The Golden Key, by George MacDonald, pictures by Maurice Sendak
The Ordinary Princess, by M.M. Kaye
The Children of Odin, by Padraic Colum
Theras and His Town, by Caroline Dale Snedeker
With Wolfe in Canada, by G.A. Henty
The Siege and Fall of Troy, retold for young people by Robert Graves
The Light Beyond the Forest: The Quest for the Holy Grail, by Rosemary Sutcliff
The Big Six, by Arthur Ransome
Fu-Dog, by Rumer Godden
The Wandering Wombles, by Elisabeth Beresford
Tingleberries, Tuckertubs and Telephones, by Margaret Mahy (a book The Apprentice used to like)
The Five Sisters, by Margaret Mahy (this one has some wizard stuff in it)
Warton and the Contest, by Russell E. Erickson (one of the Warton and Morton Toad series)
Betsy's Busy Summer, by Carolyn Haywood
The Middle Moffat, by Eleanor Estes
The Most Wonderful Doll in the World, by Phyllis McGinley
River Winding: Poems by Charlotte Zolotow
Looking at Architecture, by Roberta M. Paine
The Young Author's Do-it-Yourself Book
The Golden Book of Fun and Nonsense: Lightly Comic, Highly Humorous, and Largely Nonsensical Verse, selected and edited by Louis Untermeyer, illustrated by Alice and Martin Provensen
Birds, Beasts and the Third Thing: Poems by D.H. Lawrence, illustrated by Alice and Martin Provensen
Clever Cooks: A Concoction of Stories, Charms, Recipes & Riddles, Compiled by Ellin Greene
The Pooh Song Book
The Pooh Cook Book

Books we have but these are different editions or special:

The Worker in Sandalwood, by Marjorie Pickthall
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow & Rip Van Winkle, by Washington Irving, illustrated by Leonard Everett Fisher
The Rainbow Fairy Book, edited by Andrew Lang, illustrations by Michael Hague (not in very good shape, but I brought it home anyway)

Books we have but I picked them up to swap or sell:

The Gammage Cup, by Carol Kendall
The Daughter of Time, by Josephine Tey
Seabird, by Holling Clancy Holling
The Light Princess, by George MacDonald, pictures by Maurice Sendak

Videos and misc. stuff: an audio book of Ramona the Pest, and some videos including Runaway Ralph, the puppet opera version of Hansel and Gretel, and The Love Bug.

Book sale finds

This weekend was the big annual used book sale! We found:

Two volumes of Best in Children's Books that we didn't have

Maggie Rose: Her Birthday Christmas, by Ruth Sawyer, pictures by Maurice Sendak

The Illustrated Cider With Rosie, by Laurie Lee

Far to Go, by Noel Streatfeild (paperback in pretty rough shape)

Thomasina, by Paul Gallico

Figgs & Phantoms, by Ellen Raskin

The Dolls' House, by Rumer Godden (we have a copy but I couldn't pass it up)

The Jungle Books Vol. 2, by Rudyard Kipling

The Street of the Flower Boxes, by Peggy Mann

Aunt Charlotte's Stories of Bible History, by Charlotte M. Yonge

Gateways to Bookland (a reader)

Life of Robert Louis Stevenson for Boys and Girls, by Jacqueline Overton, with a gift inscription from 1915

Cape Breton Harbour, by Edna Staebler

Kingfishers Catch Fire, by Rumer Godden (one of her adult novels)

A Severe Mercy, by Sheldon Vanauken (a nicer copy than the one we have)

The Jesus I Never Knew, by Philip Yancey

The Oxford Book of English Verse 1250-1918, Chosen and Edited by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (1948 printing)

The Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language, Selected and Arranged with Notes by Francis Turner Palgrave

Two older books of poetry that Crayons picked out


For the Scholastic shelf:

Ginnie and the Mystery Doll

Ginnie and the Mystery House

Kid Sister, by Margaret Embry

Library Sale

The big downtown library had its annual sale this weekend, and we brought home a box and a bagful of books, about forty in all. Some were Crayons' choices, some were mine, and a few The Apprentice picked out. Some we've read before, and some just looked interesting.

A Story of the Group of Seven (Hunkin--about a well-known group of Canadian artists)
Cornelius Krieghoff (Hugues de Jouvancourt) (one of our term's artists)
Adventures of Richard Wagner (Opal Wheeler)
Young Brahms (Sybil Deucher--same series as the Wheeler music bios)
Elisabeth & the Water Troll (Wangerin)
Meet the Malones (Weber)
Beany Malone (Weber)
The Glass Slipper (Eleanor Farjeon--her version of Cinderella)
Go With the Poem (Lillian Moore)
The Unbroken Web (Richard Adams)
The Cuckoo Clock (Mary Stolz)
The Story of Holly and Ivy (Christmas story by Rumer Godden; we already have a copy of this, but this edition has illustrations by Barbara Cooney)
The Coat-Hanger Christmas Tree (Eleanor Estes)
'Round the Christmas Tree (Corrin)
The Alley (Eleanor Estes)
Doctor on an Elephant (Kroll)
Diamond in the Window (Langton)
Harry's Mad (Dick King-Smith--about a parrot)
Ben and Me

Backyard Vacation: Outdoor Fun
Mountain Bluebird (Hirschi)
Thanksgiving Fun
An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving (Alcott)
Cat's Cradles, Owl's Eyes
Crystals and Crystal Gardens
Sugar Free Kids' Cookery
Make Clothes Fun!
Miss Patch's Learn to Sew Book
Dancing Is (Ancona)
Ballet Company
Have Fun with Magnifying
The Past of Pastimes (Bartlett)
World of Swans
Music for Very Little People
Winners! Super Champions of Ice Hockey (don't ask)
Not Much News: Ruby's Letters from Home (Edna Staebler)
These High Green Hills (Jan Karon)

Booksale finds

This weekend was the annual University Women's Booksale. Some years I never get out of the main room to look at the kids' books or anything else. This year I didn't get out of the kids' room (which was the same room as the tapes and videos, so Mr. Fixit and the Squirrelings found some multimedia stuff there as well).

I was kind of going for the oddball stuff--the "maybe someday this will be worth something" or just for fun books.

I found several volumes of the Best in Children's Books that we didn't have, AND 11 volumes of a 12-volume My Bookhouse set.

Inside Music: How to Understand, Listen to, And Enjoy Good Music, by Karl Haas.
Ola, by Ingri and Edgar Parin D'Aulaire.
How to Make Snop Snappers and Other Fine Things, by Robert Lopshire.
Mystery in the Night Woods, by John Peterson. Vintage Scholastic. For all the rodent/critter-story fans:
The Winter Fun Book, by the editors of OWL magazine. (One of Ponytails' favourite magazines.)

The Children Come Running.

Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, a souvenir book written for "young Canadians" at the time of her coronation.

Hiawatha's Childhood, illustrated by Herbert Morton Stoops. (really.) A 1941 picture book with lithographs.

The Greedy One, by Patricia Miles Martin, illustrated by Kazue Mizumura. 1964. A small hardcover story about Japan.

The Story of Grettir the Strong, by Allen French. We already have one copy of this, but I thought it was worth getting and maybe passing on to someone.

The Circus is Coming, by Noel Streatfeild. Like Ballet Shoes only about living in the circus.

Last but not least, one which I'd never heard of but thought looked interesting: The Land the Ravens Found, by Naomi Mitchison.
(And the whole lot cost under $7. That's the best part.)

A Truth Revealed

Mama Squirrel has discovered this scientific truth:

The fastest way to get young squirrels interested in reading is to start packing or opening boxes intended for a homeschoolers' book sale.

All of a sudden every single book is their favourite again, including The Foot Book and The Norfin Trolls Laugh Out Loud. "Have we ever read this one?" "Crayons hasn't read that one yet!" "You can't sell that!" "No, actually, that's going in the Free box." Wails of anguish...

Someone told Mama Squirrel that they have resorted to doing such packing in the middle of the night, out of sheer self-preservation. Lacking such a sense of stealth (and preferring to sleep in the middle of the night), Mama Squirrel has been using the basement rec room of the Treehouse to box up the extra, outgrown, unwanted, unloved books. And the squirrelings have been unboxing them just as fast. There are now books all over the floor of the nest and Mama Squirrel is ready to start pulling her fur out. She can't decide if The Norfin Trolls are closer to the Albatross or Poe's raven:

This twaddle all over the Treehouse floor
Shall be lifted--nevermore!

Or maybe she will see them, like the Velveteen Rabbit, reborn and hopping back up on the shelf to join the Real Books.

(This idea makes Mama Squirrel very nervous and she wonders if she should tape the boxes shut this time.)

500 Copies of Pilgrim's Progress

My kids were teasing me yesterday after we came home from a book sale with yet another copy of Pilgrim's Progress. I think that makes about 5 different editions we have now, including my favourite with Edward Ardizzone illustrations. The one I found yesterday was published by Sears, probably in the 1920s, and is in amazingly solid condition except for a little chipping at the bottom of the spine.

But the kids have nothing to complain about; here's an essay by somebody who has 500 copies, or did nine years ago anyway. [Updated link]

We also found four volumes of Charlotte Mason (we dug around to see if the other two were in a box but didn't see them); Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales; a book of James Whitcomb Riley's poems (Ponytails wanted that one); a James Herriot picture book; Claire Turlay Newberry's book Smudge; and a nicely-abridged copy of Don Quixote for the Apprentice's school next year. All in all it was a successful trip.