Used Book Report: Savers & Goodwill

After a crazy morning yesterday, the universe decided to offer some balm in the form of used book blessings.  I learned the phrase "fisher of books" from the Collecting Children's Books blog (RIP) and I think some of these were very good catches!

Someone thought they were too old for their once carefully curated Calvin & Hobbes collection and donated it to Goodwill. I'll be happy to add this to our book stock for what I hope will be the inevitable C&H phase/obsession. (J's dad loved reading Calvin & Hobbes.)

Did you know there was a companion to The Golden Book of Fairy Tales? Me neither. Meet The Snow Queen and Other Tales, also by Ponsot & Segur. (For the record, I spent many hours of my childhood reading a version of The Snow Queen, illustrated by Susan Jeffers. I can still see many of the pages in my mind!)

I believe when I saw the Provensens' Aesop's Fables on the shelf at the Goodwill I actually shouted, "NO WAY! SHUT THE FRONT DOOR!" Or something exclamatory to that effect. I love Provensens. I love Golden Books. I love illustrated classics. I am veryveryvery hapy to have found this.

Here's just one example of the high-'60s illustration style. Check out the orange and pink and avocado color scheme on the fable of the crow and the pitcher. The layout of the book is one black-and-white full-page spread with two fables, and then a cartoon-like full-color spread on the next page that illustrates one of the previously described fables.

Apparently Norman Bridwell wrote more than Clifford the Big Red Dog...The Witch Next Door is simple and cute. Next is a Gail Gibbons non-fiction about the sun and light. I have mixed feelings about her output, but a few extra facts won't kill us. And Grandfather Twilight by Barbara Berger gets a lot of love on some message boards I follow.

Some Parents Magazine Press Read-Alouds written or illustrated by Quakenbush, Calemenson, Asch and Jerry Smath. 

Syd Hoff I Can Read books (love the Barkley cover!) and one easy reader about a tortoise and hare sorting out their friendship.

More Parents' Magazine Press, including How Fletcher Was Hatched by the Devlins, The Great Sea Monster, and Granny's Fish Story, all of which have been featured on the great Vintage Children's Books My Kid Loves blog.

Some latter-day Golden Books published or reprinted in the 1970s and 1980s: Whales , written by Jane Werner Watson (she is a Golden goddesss) and illustrated by Richard Amundsen, a Sesame Street science book for very little kids called The Whole Wide World: A Question and Answer Book, and a Patricia Scarry-Tibor Gergely collaboration called Animal Friends All Year Long. I also picked up a Little Golden Books compilation (not pictured) that I thought had some stuff that was new to us, but then I realized I had all the titles in another compilation. Oh well! (P.S. I will send cookies to anyone who can 'splain me the official relationship between Golden and "Merrigold Press." I find the reprint relationship between the two institutions intriguing and baffling.)

One lone Best in Children's Books, volume nine, hard-to-clean cover either dirty or slightly mildewy, but no smell. :)

Just for fun, from the Best in Children's Books above, a Kate Seredy illustration for "The Princess and the Pea."