www.byzcath.org Forums General Discussions Town Hall Bed Time Stories

Since there are many experienced parents and grandparents in this forum, I thought I'd give this topic a shot.

I am not satisfied with the current crop of story books which are published for children. Too often fathers are presented as "uninvolved" or "dumb" or otherwise boring and the stories themselves are far less intricate than some of the older stories I grew up on.

I may look into some good story and picture books if any are recommended, but I would like to know if there are any opinions on what I am reading Thomas right now.

I have a good 1947 edition of "Golden Treasury of Children's Literature" and a collection of Hans Christian Anderson which will supply the main fuel of the reading books. But I have also been reading parts of Icelandic Sagas, stories from the Arabian Nights, and various short stories too for diversity. Last night I read Poe's "Hop-Frog" http://classiclit.about.com/library/bl-etexts/eapoe/bl-eapoe-hop.htm

I realize that my selections will change to Thomas preferences when he gets older, but I was wondering if there is a greater benefit to modern story books that may be missing in what I read him.

I will be using the "Golden Treasury" as a picture book too, as it has wonderful illustrations.

As for when Thomas is going to learn how to read, I plan to use the latest and greatest resources for that purpose.

Terry

I have been watching Clifford the Big Red Dog with our grandbabies. I never paid much attention to it before, but the tv programs do try to teach values. So maybe that would be a good one to consider.

Marley at three years of age, has discovered black and white westerns with his grandfathers on both sides. So for a little guy he is an 'officianoto' (don't know how to spell the word) of westerns and the characters. So he loves to be read the old kids stories about the wild west and animals. Go figure!

The author came to our school to speak and sign books. I like Clifford the Big Red Dog.

I didnt' catch his age, but I use Clifford and Curious George quite a bit with pre-schoolers in my library. Those books and videos each teach a lesson based on values. When he gets a bit older and can appreciate the humor, a good book is "No Such Thing," by Jackie Koller. It's the story of a boy who thinks there is a monster under his bed, and a monster who thinks a boy lives above his bed. Their moms tell them they are imagining things, but the two meet, become friends, then switch places and call their moms. Another one for older kids, is the classic, "The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs," by John Scieszka. The wolf says the traditional story is wrong because the pigs aren't telling the truth. He's not a bad guy at all, just misrepresented as big and bad by the pigs. It's hilarious. I use the brothers Grimm fairy tales quite often and the Andersen tales, too. The kids still love those old stories. There are plenty of good books out there, you just have to look for them. Talk to a Catholic school librarian in your area for some book recommendations.

The following article on Little Golden Books appears in the current issue of The Weekly Standard at Picture Perfect [theweeklystandard.com]

Picture Perfect
Why Golden Books are golden.
by Claudia Anderson
06/29/2009, Volume 014, Issue 39


Golden Legacy
Original Art from 65 Years
of Golden Books

It may not have been quite Periclean Athens or Florence under the Medicis, but the eruption of creativity that constituted the quarter-century ascendancy of the Little Golden Books was dazzling enough in its own right, a remarkable convergence of artistic and commercial genius. The exhibition now touring the country of 60 original paintings for this lavishly illustrated children's book line--astonishingly vibrant works of art in their own right--tells a multilayered story of American popular culture at its best.

It begins in 1942, when Simon and Schuster's Little Golden Books burst upon the publishing scene and into the nurseries of America. Printed on fairly good paper, with cardboard covers and the trademark golden element on the cover (later the spine), the books were priced at 25 cents, one-sixth to one-eighth of what the Babar books or Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel were then selling for. Drugstores, five-and-dimes, and train stations willing to sell them were given special display racks. Within five months, the first dozen titles, mostly folk tales and nursery rhymes and prayers in the public domain, had sold a million and a half copies, and The Poky Little Puppy, illustrated by Gustaf Tenggren, was on its way to becoming the best-selling English-language children's picture book of all time.

That was only the beginning. In 1947, the Little Goldens appeared in supermarkets. Available and affordable in towns too small to have a bookstore, they democratized quality picture books for children. By 1959, more than 150 titles had sold over a million copies each.

The editors had a wealth of talent to draw on. New York was teeming with refugees from the war in Europe, among them accomplished artists. Tibor Gergely would illustrate over 70 Golden Books (the larger line of which the Little Goldens were probably the most successful format), among them The Great Big Fire Engine Book, Tootle, and Scuffy the Tugboat. He was born in Budapest and drew caricatures for Viennese newspapers before emigrating to the United States in 1939.

Feodor Rojankovsky was a graduate of the Moscow Fine Arts Academy. Wounded during service in the Russian infantry in World War I, he sketched and painted war scenes that became his first published art. He worked in Poland, then Paris in the 1930s, fleeing to America after the fall of France in 1940. His The Three Bears bristles with Russianness, planting in young Boomer minds an image of the quintessential wooden dacha in the woods.

Garth Williams fled Britain around the time of the Blitz. Though better known as the illustrator of E.B. White's Stuart Little and of the 1953 edition of the Little House books, he chose to devote some of his energies to Little Golden Books, where economies of scale permitted extensive use of color. His Baby Animals were so exquisite that my mother dismembered the book and framed the baby seal and baby monkey and tiger cub to hang in my bedroom. Williams was paired with the Little Golden Books' most gifted writer, Margaret Wise Brown, in the inimitable Mister Dog, one of the first Little Golden Books to be published in French. It appeared in 1952 as Monsieur Chien.

Another pool of talent was refugees from the animation studios in California. Artists like Aurelius Battaglia (Little Boy with a Big Horn), Mary Blair (I Can Fly), and Alice and Martin Provensen (The Color Kittens, Mr. Noah and His Family) were alumni of either Disney or the Walter Lantz Studio, creator of Woody Woodpecker. They were ready to spread their creative wings, and did so in some of the best-loved Little Golden Books, as well as in works for other series. (The Provensens' superb and inexplicably out-of-print illustrated children's Iliad and Odyssey--not represented in the traveling show--was a Giant Golden Book.)

Then there were assorted individual artists of various background. Eloise Wilkin, a Rochester mother of four, called her subject matter "the small child in the daily rounds of his activities." The exhibition includes delicate watercolors of hers for Baby Listens and My Little Golden Book About God: a small boy discovering a bird's nest; two children on a sunlit beach awed by a flight of gulls.

The great Leonard Weisgard--who painted covers for the New Yorker before he was 20 and whose half-century career ranged far and wide--illustrated another Margaret Wise Brown classic, Pussy Willow, for Little Golden Books. Even more arresting than his painting of the soft grey kitten peering up between grasses and wild strawberries at a grasshopper in flight is his picture for Indian, Indian: a black-haired, clay-colored little boy encountering a recumbent white horse with flowing mane, full of power and grace, in a field of daisies.

It is surprising how undated these pictures are. A few images and titles are politically incorrect by present standards. Doctor Dan the Bandage Man's counterpart is, I'm afraid, Nurse Nancy. And the traditional family ideal implicit in We Help Mommy, We Help Daddy, and The Happy Family--whose cover shows a girl in a dress picking flowers from a flower bed and a boy pushing a hand mower across the surrounding lawn--has taken a beating in the decades since these books appeared. Mostly, though, the Little Goldens dealt in timeless themes. They were fairy tales and folk tales, animal stories and childish fantasy.

And such illustrations! While the range of visual styles is wide, the pictures in the traveling show are characterized by a vitality and an artistic maturity seldom encountered today in inexpensive mass-market products for preschoolers. Masterly use of color and fine attention to detail, expression, and background are other common features. The feeling for nature palpable in so many of these works reflects an age when more artists grew up amid farms and streams and forests.

That these marvelous paintings have been unearthed and taken on the road, for the nostalgic delight of aging Boomers, and the edification of their offspring, is largely due to one man. The idea came from Leonard Marcus, a historian of children's literature and himself a Boomer nurtured on Golden Books.

With a biography of Margaret Wise Brown already under his belt, Marcus produced Golden Legacy: How Golden Books Won Children's Hearts, Changed Publishing Forever, and Became An American Icon Along the Way in time for the 65th anniversary of the Little series. Mulling a possible exhibition, he traveled to Racine, Wisconsin, home of the Western Printing Company, Simon and Schuster's partner in the production of the Golden Books.

"On the nondescript edge of town," he told me, he was taken into a "vast, hangar-like warehouse with industrial shelving floor to ceiling" stacked with envelopes containing the original art. Forget Athens and Florence. Said Marcus, "I felt as if I were entering King Tut's tomb."

Already affiliated with another institution--the National Center for Children's Illustrated Literature, in Abilene, Texas--whose mission includes sending exhibitions of children's book art on tour around the country, Marcus got busy. With himself and Diane Muldrow of Golden Books as co-curators, the Abilene center mounted the show, which opened there in November 2007. Today, the center handles booking and uses its own trucks to transport the pieces from city to city, for 10-week stays at a cost of only $5,000 to the hosting museum or library, shipping included.

Booked nearly solid through January 2012, "Golden Legacy" opened at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha on June 6. It is slated to be seen later in Amherst, Massachusetts; Wauconda, Illinois; Weslaco, Texas; Chicago; Richmond; Salt Lake City; and Greenville, South Carolina.

Its last stop was the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, where Ellen Riordan, children's services coordinator, called it "far and away the most successful show we've had," with intergenerational appeal.

A visitor's sole disappointment was that the works on display included just a picture or two from favorite books. Leonard Marcus concedes, "We give token representation to artists who deserve their own shows." Recalling that pharaonic warehouse filled with treasures--all subsequently acquired by Random House and moved two years ago to storage in Connecticut--he adds, "This exhibition could've been a thousand times as big."

If only!

Claudia Anderson is managing editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.

Don't forge "Uncle Wiggily", the rabbit gentleman. I grew up with them (they are geared to probably ages 3-9).

Here's one customer review from amazon.com [amazon.com]:
This is a precious collection of stories, in chapter form detailing adventures of Uncle Wiggily, the bunny rabbit gentleman, who understands people talk, and dedicates his life to helping other animals and children. When I started reading this book to my six year old, it took a couple of stories for him to become involved in the book. After that, he loved the stories, and begged for a new one each night. These stories are set in such an innocent time, that is requires adjustment from most children initially to get involved, compared to the books and television shows that are currently available. The book provides imaginative stories that promote virtuous behavior. While each story addresses a different plot, each involves some of the same characters. I would highly recommend this book as a permanent addition to your children's library. Each of our subsequent children have loved it!

I have given "Uncle Wiggily" books as gifts for many years and have always gotten positive feedback.

He'll be 10 months next Monday, so I don't expect him to grasp the stories I read him. But when I do read to him right now I want him to hear the pace and flexibility of the language, as reading does take on a different tone than speaking.

All the recommendations are helpful. I just don't want to fall upon some random selection and read a book like my little sisters brought back from pre-school. It was a story about a little girl with two mommies who show her how to bake a cake. My dad blacked out the references to the other mommy.

Thank you!

Terry

Uncle Rhemus, Br'er Rabbit, and the Tar Baby

"Uncle Rhemus, Br'er Rabbit, and the Tar Baby "

You don' want to be throwed in dat dere briar patch!

I enjoy the old cartoons too. It's too bad some of the ones released to DVD were edited to remove references to smoking or voices of the southern African-American dialect.

Be *careful* with actual Grimm, for Heaven's sake!

I don't remember how old mine were when I checked out an unabridged Grimm from the university library (5 & 4? 6&5?).

I started with Snow White. It's not the Disneyfied poisoned apple and that's it. The old lady gives her a comb for her hair that the dwarves pull out to revive her, a string/ribbon for her bodice that they remove after it chokes the air out of her, and only then, after promising each time not to talk to strangers, does she have apple lodge in her throat.

The indeed build the glass coffin, and give it to the prince (who first asked to buy it), who promises to love her as if she were alive. No kiss, though--that was lifted out of Briar Rose (Sleeping Beauty). His retainers drop the coffin, and the apple is dislodged.

Oh, and forget the cute animals chasing her off the cliff and being struck by lighting.

Everything above was OK. Fortunately I was reading a couple of lines ahead and made something up--she arrives at the wedding out of curiosity, where they have iron shoes waiting in the forge, red hot. They forced her into these and made her dance until she died . . .

Oh, and I checked out an original Uncle Remus, too. But the dialect was too thick for me to make sense of without major effort on just about every sentence.
hawk

My favorite is Hansel and Gretel, which is a nice gloss on the German habit of abandoning children in the forest when times are tough--not to mention resort to cannibalism during periods of famine. Gotta love the Thirty Years War.

In reading, I am not very impressed with the original Grimm, but for the collection that it is. I'd rather read an obscure story of Washington Irving. I much prefer Hans Christian Andersen's stories. His "The Shadow" is my favorite.

About 2 years ago I ordered 2 books which are the writings of Hans Christian Anderson. Admittedly, I ordered them specifically for The Little Matchgirl (that was essentially me as a kid), but now I am hanging onto them to read to my grandkids when they're older. Some of my favorite bedtime stories of the newer versions are any of the Corduroy books, the Little Bear Series, and a wonderful book I just discovered which is perfect for before bedtime - When I'm Sleepy.
abby
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aficionado sayeth my spell checker.