Basic Reading: Thrifty Classics

Basic reading. A memory collection of books, comics, and magazines I read from elementary (McQueeney) through middle school (Briesemeister). Ranging from very simple to what I would describe as ‘cusp books’, that would lead to more adult reading. They will come in batches; some are representative parts of series. Some we had; some we saw in libraries. Most have appeared on the blog before, but I think arranged here by category and time they can be more illuminating of certain aspects of my childhood.

Another source of childhood reading would be rather cheap books that we could get at department stores like Gibson’s, or even from a grocery store, like Baenziger’s, where often you could get a free book with a can of coffee. These would be Whitman books like The Wizard of Oz, Huckleberry Finn, or Black Beauty. More cheaply made would be Children’s Press books like The Swiss Family Robinson, Robin Hood (not the Howard Pyle; Charles Gilson, whose retelling was vastly different), or Pinocchio. These books would quickly lose their covers and fall apart. One of the two books we got from the Companion Library of Classics (the other was Nonsense Poems by Edward Lear), The Jungle Book, is the only complete volume to survive from our childhood, although I have bought a replacement volume of The Wizard of Oz and another for Nonsense Poems. These lines of books were mostly copyright free classics, but with some recognizability tied to popular movies. The Disney adaptations of Peter Pan and Pinocchio (chock full of illustrations on almost every other page), although about the size of Big Little Books, were Golden Star Library books.

[Update: After a bit of research, I find that there were only ever four Disney books in the Golden Star Library, and just eight other volumes in their entire run. I often think about the odd chances that built our Basic Readings.]