Sarah's Books - Used & Rare

I spent time with my gloriously pregnant younger sister over the weekend, part of which was devoted to a large baby shower for her and her husband and friends and extended family. Of course (while I couldn't resist getting a few pieces of clothing that rated off the chart on The Scale of Ridiculously Cute Things), I gave books. I'm starting them out with a stack of board books by Sandra Boynton - I figure if she and her husband are going to have to read something several thousand times over the next two or three years, it may as well be funny, short, and have a good rhyme scheme. I will ease them into the classics and our family favorites a bit later.

Then this morning before work I walked over to the post office to buy some stamps, and ended up with the children's book animal stamps, one of which features Garth Williams's Wilbur from E.B. White's Charlotte's Web. So all this has me thinking about what children's books really stuck with me from my own childhood. My older sister has a daughter, and I've loved being the book auntie - she is ten and we have long phone conversations about what she's been reading. I made sure she encountered Laura Ingalls Wilder, Robert McCloskey, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Herge's Tintin, etc., and it seems to have worked, she is a total book nut. It helps that both of my sisters are readers, of course.

My own favorites I still have on a shelf at home, and they include The Secret Garden and A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett, Charles Kingsley's The Water Babies, with Heath Robinson's illustrations, The Reluctant Dragon by Kenneth Grahame, He Went With Marco Polo by Louise Andrews Kent, Blueberries for Sal and One Morning in Maine by Robert McCloskey, and one of my very favorites, Howard Pyle's The Wonder Clock. His beautiful illustrations haunt me to this day. My other absolute favorite (I can't pick just one, obviously) is Beatrix Potter's The Tailor of Gloucester (see image above), with its tiny mouse-note, No more twist. My least favorite children's book is also by Beatrix Potter, oddly enough. I was discussing it with a few new friends in the shop last week, who were widely read in children's literature, and they said I was not alone in my choice of The Tale of Samuel Whiskers. The image it contains of Tom Kitten being rolled up in dough by the rats in has horrified me my whole life. It’s one of the few children’s books I regret reading. But I digress. Back to book-love: I also read and re-read books by Lois Lenski, Rumer Godden, Holling Clancy Holling, C.S. Lewis, and Lucy Maud Montgomery.

A great reference for learning more about children's authors and illustrators is editor Anita Silvey's fat doorstop of a book Children's Books and Their Creators (Houghton, Mifflin 1995). It contains alphabetical entries on writers and artists, as well as general information on broad themes in children's literature, and copious quotes from the authors and artists themselves. Now that you know some of mine, dear readers, what were your favorites?