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Children’s Books

A couple of days ago, we moved out these two extremely old bookshelves of ours (we’re painting the house) to find a terrible roach infestation stuck somewhere in between them. Putting that fairly repulsive matter aside, I did (re)discover a few treasures from the old bookshelves.

It started with a four-volume edition of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales. There’s a bit of history in this in that it’s from my aunt (dated 1991), and two (I think) of the same set of books were given to my other cousins (two sets: one for a brother-sister pair like in my case, and I suppose there was probably another set to my aunt’s son). It’s a fairly nice edition, and in reasonably good condition, though the box didn’t exactly fare as well. (It still holds its shape, though.) The pages have turned a bit yellow and the books smelled of mothballs when I first removed them from the shelf. They’re otherwise in great shape, though.

They now occupy a nice spot on my personal shelf.

This spurred me to look for some of my favourites when I was younger. And by younger, I mean much younger. I came across books I had long grown out of, like the random bestsellers and thrillers that I used to read. Although I had no clear idea of what I was looking for, I had a sense of it, and those were obviously not the things I wanted to see. And after much searching, I came across Ffangs the Vampire Bat and the Kiss of Truth, which is a children’s book by Ted Hughes published in 1986. The illustrations are by Chris Riddell, whose name I had recently seen on the cover of a different edition of Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book (where he did the illustrations instead of Dave McKean). I had won this book in 1994 for coming in third in class, and as I remember, this is the one book that I actually enjoyed out of all the books I had got from school.

For the most part, it’s written in (my memory might fail me here so I might be wrong about this) free verse, and has characters ranging from a talking rooster to a tiny woman. It has plenty of ghosts too, a ratty rat, and a giant whale. I remember this book fondly because the illustrations were and still are very lovely, and the text went down very easily even though sometimes I got lost and wasn’t quite sure why something was happening. (I was eight when I first read it.) There’s also a girl at the end (who delivers the kiss of truth in the title) with an asp in her mouth, which was a remarkably striking image for me, even if I didn’t know it back then.

I clutched the book to my chest and realised that I was looking for books like these.

Eventually, my search also turned up Asimov’s Little Library of Dinosaurs. It comes in a little box and has five tiny volumes each detailing a different class of dinosaur. I think it was this that began my love affair with dinosaurs because thereafter I bought plenty of dinosaur books for no particular reason. All of them were more complex than this set, but I still loved this the most. I suppose it’s true, what they say, that there’s always something special about that first one, huh?

The box is kind of coming apart, and the colours are all faded, but now it sits safely on my shelf and will hopefully not face further deterioration. The copyright says 1989, so this set is pretty old too. I was three years old when it was published, and Asimov was still alive back then.

The last of the books that I moved up to my shelf was Little Woolly Lamb by Tony Hutchings. This is the simplest of the books, marked for ages 1-4. It has 10 pages worth of content, with each page being a gigantic illustration (relative to the page size) accompanied by a sentence or two. In it, the little woolly lamb has no idea what sort of animal it is, so it goes around looking and trying to match its baa-baa with the sounds that the other animals make. I don’t know why I treasure this book so dearly. It’s just rather adorable, I suppose. The illustrations, in particular, have a charm to them that up to this day still makes me smile whenever I open up the book.

And those were the books I moved up, the ones I remembered with remarkable fondness. I didn’t have many children’s books. I stepped up quite quickly into the 10-13 year old books, and then into stuff that was probably too difficult for me even though I didn’t care. (So much so that I think by the time I hit 18 I found myself in some ways burnt out.) I think maybe that’s why I’ve always had an ambition to have a children’s section in my library. Part of it probably comes down to how I think children here don’t end up reading very good material because a reasonable amount of competence in language is considered acceptable (for administration and work). I never, for instance, read Alice until I was much older, which is all fine and dandy, except that I think maybe I could’ve have had that as part of my childhood.

That children’s section of my library is still very tiny now. I’m trying to be as selective as I can, to pick out the ones that I find really special. Apart from the two I’ve just rediscovered (I’ve placed the fairy tales in my literature section), I’ve got the classic Where The Wild Things Are, Gaiman’s The Day I Swapped My Dad For Two Goldfish, and Raymond Briggs’s The Snowman.

(A note on The Snowman: It too was one of my favourites when I was very young, except that my edition was I think a Ladybird pocket book that used a few of the illustrations and basically summarised the entire story in a few sentences. A year or two ago, my sister bought me the original version from Randomhouse.)

It’ll grow, as children grow. Give it some time. In the meantime, I’m just happy to have found these little gems from my childhood.

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© 2008 a modest odyssey.