Old Books

Kate and I went to the library, in part because I wanted us to get out of the house and do something, and in part because I wanted to look for this book I'd read about in Entertainment Weekly. (All copies were out, naturally.) We ended up in the kids section, naturally, a pretty cool setup on the third floor with books that a small child can reach and stuffed toys for even smaller kids. Kate crawled around with surprising speed. We even tried doing a puzzle, which is to say, I tried to do the puzzle while she tried to put pieces in her mouth.

Anyway, I ended up taking two books out for Jack, one a recent one about How Do Dinosaurs Play with Their Friends (we both like that series of books), and one that caught my eye among the "Classic" kids books: "Herbert the Lion." That's one I immediately remembered from my own childhood, and I snapped it up without even looking at it. Jack and I would read it tonight.

To his credit, Jack pretty much likes any new books. (These days he also likes stories, so each night as I'm putting him to bed I'm making up stories, often on topics involving things like superheroes fighting with monsters, which he can't get enough of.) And even an old book like "Herbert the Lion" is new to him.

I'm reading it and I happen to check the publishing date. 1931! That's older than either of my parents. And I'm reading it thinking, did my parents read this book to me because THEY had had it read to them when they were kids? Did my grandparents read this book to my parents that I'm now reading to my son? And 35 years from now will JACK be in some huge futuristic library where he finds a tiny digital microchip which has a picture of a Lion on it and minuscule text that reads "Herbert the Lion," and he too will pick it up to read to his child? Maybe.

The third book we read tonight was "The Story of Ferdinand," another book I remembered from my childhood. That was written in 1936.

One aside: it's interesting the way different books could be seen as representatives of their times. In Herbert the Lion, Sally's parents move to the country so Sally can stay with her lion. In Ferdinand, it's OK if the bull wants to just sit quietly and smell the flowers.

In contrast, a while back my Mom gave us some other books we'd had as children. These were from the 1950s. In "Scuffy the Tugboat," a cute little tugboat ventures out into the big river and shipyard, finding it exciting at first but then dangerous and scary. At the end, he goes back to his safe, secure bathtub. In another (whose name I've forgotten), a little train keeps wanting to jump off the tracks and go exploring and adventuring. At the end, everyone else in the trainyard gets together to teach him how dangerous it is and to always stay on the tracks. Jack of course thought it was great; Emily and I were both troubled by its heavy-handed message of obedience and conformity. I won't claim to be a 20th-century historian or anything, but based on this admittedly small sample, I've got to say I like children's books of the 30s more than those of the 50s.

Jack likes all of them, however, which is I guess the most important thing.