July 11, 2003
LITERARY NOSTALGIA
I'm no Lawrence Ferlinghetti, nor do I aspire to be, but I gots books. In fact, I have to throw out about a hundred a year to make room for more. Who remembers these book sets from childhood?
World Book: The gold standard for plagiarizing little shits. As most of my siblings were older I think our edition was 1960, the green and white version, with the annual yearbooks through 1964. My parents apparently reached the healthy conclusion that yearbooks were bullshit about then. Yeah, kids' houses with Britannica or the repulsive Grolier were weird. Smelled kind of queer, like they had grandparents locked in the back or something. If you couldn't jimmy up a 2 pager on Columbus from World Book in thirty minutes you're not reading this now.
Childcraft: Everybody had these. Fifteen maroon and white volumes chock full o' tomfoolery. Some volumes had bizarre experiments you could conduct on plants, others had articles like YOUR NEIGHBORS - DICTATORS, TROUBLEMAKERS, OR FRIENDS? by Hilda Taba, Ph.D. Think this was Cold War propaganda? Hell, no. She was talking about your next door neighbors. Fucking crank. Ever use your Childcraft? I didn't think so.
The American Heritage Junior Library, and its evil twin Horizon-Caravel: American history, world history, all written in great prose that did not condescend to the young reader, and full of images. Nelson and the Age of Fighting Sail? Check. Russia under the Czars, replete with a chapter on Rasputin? You betcha. These were the books to turn a kid onto the world. I not only read them all, I still have them and still read them. Hell, I learned from the Nelson volume what a mistress was. I learned from the Czars volume what a filthy sexually deviant Siberian mystic was. 'Nuff said.
Junior Classics: The Youngfolks Shelf of Books! Now we're getting traction. Ten volumes of adventure, romance, cruelty, adultery, sadism, and criminal misanthropy. From Ali Baba to Brer Rabbit's Cradle to Thackeray's How Betsinda Got the Warming Pan (!?!) these had it all. I felt guilty reading them. I was sure my parents had no idea how twisted some of this was. In fact, I'm going to go now, as I have the overpowering urge to read How Betsinda Got the Lash.