Coming up on my three year anniversary of blogging about books, and I'm getting wistful. When I started buying vintage books for my son, it was mainly as a way to save money. I'd spent his first year collecting expensive, heirloom hardcopies of classics and my wallet couldn't keep up with the demand. As I've said before, I found a copy of
Why I Built the Boogle House for $2.95 and my fate was sealed. Very quickly the act of buying and sharing vintage books with my son transformed from being a financial one into one of reunion and revelation. Once you begin the search through used book shops and thrift stores, you run into all kinds of old friends you'd forgotten you'd loved. Pictures and stories bring up old memories, and the old memories become new when shared with a child.
I started this blog as a way to broadcast my building excitement for what I was discovering, and found there were others out there, too, looking for long-lost loves. Not antique dealers or sellers or collectors, but people just looking to reconnect with a wee bit of their past. I'll never forget the feelings of longing and melancholy that overtook me upon finding my childhood copy of
Our Best Friends in my mother's attic. Or getting teary-eyed reading my son
The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes for the first time. Or coming upon John Goodall's
The Sleeping Beauty and remembering how I loved it as a girl.
As one reader commented after seeing the scans of
A Rocket Trip to the Moon...
Brought tears to my eyes--because this was one of my favorites as a kid, and I completely forgot about it (and must have lost it...)I experience this almost everyday in my travels. Sometimes it's the book cover. Sometimes just a half image from a drawing tucked deep inside its pages. Maybe it's recalling the way the book felt in my little hands or a rainy afternoon spent at the library a million years ago. That feeling of a childhood lost and remembered. Picking up these little volumes of my personal history and discovering new titles I'd never dreamed existed, all in the hopes of passing down a love of books to my son. He is five years old now. How many years do we have left? How many years before his books become truly his and his alone?
Surely, he will have his own favorites and pick his pages to remember, but for me, I guess I am creating my own new memories. For me, standing in his room... looking at a bookshelf of possible moments to snuggle in and make up silly voices and fall in love with illustrations and stories and imagine the whole world right there in our hands... if that isn't hope, I don't know what is.
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I'll leave you this week with a quick poem from Kim's Place and Other Poems by Lee Bennett Hopkins ~ drawings by Lawrence Di Fiori ~ Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1974.
How Joe the Bear and Sam the Mouse Got Together
And soooo, the bear and the mouse meet and agree to do something together but they find all sorts of obstacles get in the way... 
One wants to live in a big house, the other wants to live in a small house... one likes to go fast, the other likes to go slow...one likes to play drums while the other prefers the violin... until at last they find something they can agree on...
You will live in a big house.
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Wednesday again, and yet another book from the archives has floated to the top of the heap in need of some new scans and an update. Please enjoy a two-year-old post, made brand spanking new with loads of purdy pictures.... One Monster After Another by Mercer Mayer. Enjoy!
The Mysterious Tadpole
"Class, this is a tadpole," said Mrs. Shelbert. She asked Louis to bring it back often so they could all watch it become a frog. Louis named the tadpole Alphonse. Every day Alphonse ate several cheeseburgers. Louis found that he was eager to learn. When Alphonse became too big for his jar, Louise moved him to the sink. After Alphonse outgrew the sink, Louis's parents agreed to let him use the bathtub. One day Mrs. Shelbert decided that Alphonse was not turning into an ordinary frog. She asked Louis to stop bringing him to school.
Not unlike A Fish Out of Water, soon Alphonse is in dire need of someplace to live. Louis enlists the help of (who else!?!) the local librarian who guesses the creature's true origin, and together they hatch a plan to score some sunken pirate booty to pay for a private swimming pool for Alphonse. To say that the creature is beyond cute is an understatement, and the well of love the little boy shows toward it is heartwarming to say the least. Magic, adventure and sweetness, the perfect combination for wee little reader who wants it all.
(I thrifted this autographed copy, but apparently you can get your own personalized Kellogg doodle through The Essex Inn Bookstore.)
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Oh my goodness, we got a new puppy, and I'd forgotten how much like a new baby that is, so I'll make this quick! 
The Amazing Mumford and His Amazing Subtracting Trick
Other Old Sesame Street Titles:
Lafcadio, The Lion Who Shot Back
"But you can make lots of money and you can be the greatest shooter in the world and you can be famous and eat wonderful foods and wear silk shirts and yellow shoes and smoke fifty-cent cigars and go to wonderful parties and have everyone pat you on your back or scratch you behind the ears or whatever people do to lions; I don't know."
And boy, does he get a marshmallow. He also gets rich and famous and becomes so much NOT a lion that he is hardly recognizable. One day he finds himself in the jungle, almost a man, hunting the lions he once hung with. A wonderful open-ended Shel finale leads to a great lesson on understanding that often when we seek the material, we lose ourselves.
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Time for Update Wednesday (the day when I hit the archives and update posts from way back when I was stingy on the scans)! For your viewing pleasure is Allan Sherman's Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh! Enjoy!
Bennett Cerf's Book of Laughs
Marvin got a new watch. Jenny asked him, "Does your watch tell the time?"
The pictures (by New Yorker legend, Rose) are hysterical -- making Marvin sneaky, sweet and crude, often all at the same time. Soooooo 1950s.
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It's my birthday. (I know, me and Dooce, right?) What better way to celebrate than by giving something away. This weekend I was doing the customary bringing of the books from the back of my son's shelves forward to rotate reading stock, and I realized I had two copies of this wonderful Science I CAN READ book, Plenty of Fish. So, of course, now I'm giving one away! All you have to do to be entered to win is comment on this post before 11:59 pm on Sunday, July 25. A winner will be selected the next day at random.
Sesame Street 1, 2, 3 Storybook
Other Old Sesame Street Titles:
Coming up on my three year anniversary of blogging about books, and I'm getting wistful. When I started buying vintage books for my son, it was mainly as a way to save money. I'd spent his first year collecting expensive, heirloom hardcopies of classics and my wallet couldn't keep up with the demand. As I've said before, I found a copy of Why I Built the Boogle House for $2.95 and my fate was sealed. Very quickly the act of buying and sharing vintage books with my son transformed from being a financial one into one of reunion and revelation. Once you begin the search through used book shops and thrift stores, you run into all kinds of old friends you'd forgotten you'd loved. Pictures and stories bring up old memories, and the old memories become new when shared with a child. 
Time for another Update Wednesday, the day when I reach into the archives and update a previous post from back in the days when I was stingy with the scans. Click below and feast your eyes on this gorgeously illustrated oddity from Ezra Jack Keats, Maggie and the Pirate, updated with all new pictures and not-so-new color commentary. Enjoy!
