we've had good luck finding used books lately, seemingly everywhere we look. at yard sales or thrift shops, you have to dig but there are treasures to be found. in my mind, the perfect used kids books are softened with age, full of retro graphic allure and can be read with sentimental earnestness and an ironic sense of humour all at the same time.
we unearthed a slightly raggedy copy of the paper airplane book at a church rummage sale a few weeks ago on our way home from a hike at buntzen lake - for ten cents! it is far more detailed in terms of flight physics than is necessary for the purposes of folding a simple plane, but that's part of the charm. and talk about being from another time - my favourite part? check out the top left of the photo... hey kids - why not use a loose razor blade to add some special slots to the the tail? i'm sure scissors were hard to come by but razor blades were readily available in the medicine cabinet or in halloween candy (false!) in the olden days.
we found a copy of the stellar the best things from the st. vincent de paul thrift store on main street. the graphics are awesomely mid-70s. i was a little put off by the lack of words at first, thinking it would be too simple but cole loves it. he does call it "the weird book" but he opens it up and asks everyones name and what they're doing. each page shows kids doing various activities at home or school or the park and the lack of text allows you to freestyle, often with random and funny results. jamie has cole thinking that one little boy's name is beezork 1 and he's an astronaut from places unknown. this seems believable to cole.
and today we scored the motherlode of vintage-ish golden books at a random thrift stop on the way to the library. i love books with late 50's/mid-60's era graphics and these are mostly double-digit early 80's reprints of classics. that counts as vintage now, i think. gotta love applying that term to things from my childhood! and golden books aren't such great quality hardbacks, but when they're used they get so soft that it doesn't really matter.
my very favourite of the bunch has to be three bedtime stories. originally published in 1958, it's fairly standard stuff - three little bears/kittens/pigs, but i had this book when i was little and loved it. finding it on the bookshelf actually caused me to squeeeee! and looking at the pictures again with cole really brought back memories.
other favourites - the airplane book. from the standpoint of a kid reading about airplanes, it's totally awesome and fact-filled. planes go up, come down, folks get on, etc. to the well-traveled eye it seems obviously from 1972. after all, aside from old school male/female roles, apparently you can expect an actual meal while traveling, get seat selection at the gate and presumably that guy with a beard and tinted glasses won't be getting the side-eye from uninformed yokels.
we help daddy is awesomely 1962. it's about two kids who help their dad do various chores around the house. cole loves it - helping, daddy and exciting tools are all involved. it's also quite hilarious - this ceaselessly toiling dad puffs away on a pipe on every page. well, except on the page he's lighting it, or the page where the little girl holds it so dad can use the saw. and the story is told from the perspective of the little girl, who seems to get a lot of lame make-do tasks while her older brother actually gets to do the helping. quite a bit of helping too - i hope that kid gets allowance. ;-)
there are tons of others too - a copy of caps for sale (peddlars! monkeys! school library check-out card included!), animal counting book (a vintage japanese book in english) and others about santa, dinosaurs, animal babies, rhymes, counting and more. i think i need more shelving.
this kid loves books. today after our thrift stop we went to the library (the fancy tommy douglas branch in burnaby) and he had a field day. he actually chased a little four-year-old girl down and once she stopped running he stood in front of her and earnestly said, "i like books." trying to make friends, searching for common interests. seriously - my heart - melting. the girl ran off but the librarian heard him and came to invite him to storytime, picked him up and showed him the view of the back room.
