Road Apples
Feb. 15, 2010


Moldy memories from the Internet bookshelves

By Tim Sanders

There are a lot of things about computers that drive me nuts; complicated, mysterious electronic things like monitors, and mice sitting on their pads, and tiny little cursors which certainly are aptly named. There are some things about computers, however, that I like. One of them is how easily they facilitate finding old books.

When I was a youngster, my parents told me reading would improve my mind, which they felt was desperately in need of improvement. Many of those old books of my youth I remember fondly, but are now out of print.

Here are some of those old books I was able to locate after all these years, using the Internet.


JOHNNY CROW’S PARTY - When I was very young I had a children’s book called “Johnny Crow’s Party,” written and illustrated by Leslie Brooke in 1907. I don’t know where my parents found that old book, but I liked it because, like so many books from the early 1900s, the illustrations were really well done, and the rhymes on each page seemed to credit the book’s little readers with a modicum of intelligence.


“And the Kangaroo
Tried to paint the Roses blue
Till the Camel
Swallowed the Enamel ...
In Johnny Crow’s Garden.”


Try to find lines like that in today’s kiddies’ books.


THE BEAUTIFUL STORY-GOLDEN GEMS OF RELIGIOUS THOUGHT - This book had a whole lot of engravings of Biblical scenes. One excellent illustration pictured a lone promontory amidst dark clouds and a raging sea. Atop the rock sat a mother tiger with her cub in her mouth, surrounded by some children. In the water below were two people reaching upwards in a last desperate attempt to escape the deluge. Beneath “The Flood” caption was the quote, “And the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth.” There were a lot of other engravings in that book, but I particularly liked that one because of the superb artwork, the very dramatic depiction of the Great Flood, and the painstaking attention to detail, including the naked lady at the bottom right of the engraving with her right bosom fully exposed for studious young Bible scholars everywhere to admire–which I certainly did. I was confident that had I been perched atop that rock with those other children, I’d have done my duty and helped the naked lady climb aboard. I later learned from an eBay site that all of those engravings were done by Gustave Dore, a 19th Century French artist. They appeared in a beautifully gilt bound book just like the one I remembered, and I would gladly have bid on it, if it weren’t already going for several hundred dollars. Naked lady or no naked lady, that was out of my price range. Dore also illustrated such well known works as Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” and Cervantes’ “Don Quixote.” Judging from his Biblical engravings, his other illustrations were probably just chock full of naked ladies, but back then I was blissfully ignorant of them.


THE MYSTERIOUS STRANGER AND OTHER CARTOONS - I was able to find an excellent first edition of a John T. McCutcheon cartoon book published in 1905. I had another one of his books as a youngster, but several of its pages were damaged.

Had McCutcheon been French, and drawn naked ladies, I’m sure I couldn’t have afforded it. But McCutcheon was only a Chicago Tribune Cartoonist from Indiana, who kept all his people clothed in proper Victorian fashion. Thus the book went for about $30 on eBay.


THE MERRY ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD - I was fascinated by Howard Pyle’s Robin Hood stories for several months in the mid-1950s. I had a plastic sword with a child-proof rubber tip on the end. It had actual plastic jewels in the handle, and a very realistic tin scabbard.

Sometimes, when nobody else was around, I would put on a suit of long underwear, a pair of Robin Hoodish hunting socks, attach a bath towel cape around my neck with a safety pin, strap on my scabbard and leap dramatically from my bed, drawing my sword and saying things like “UNHAND THAT MAIDEN, VARLET” and “TASTE MY BLADE, YOU CUR!” I’m not proud of that, but after I matured and entered my Wyatt Earp phase, I did trade in my sword for a six-gun.

One of the things I remember about the Robin Hood book was a really neat illustration of Robin Hood lying on a cot in an abbey, looking all sad and pitiful, drawing his bow. Under that picture was the caption, “Robin fhooteth his laft fhaft.” The author’s need to deliver such somber lines in Sylvester the Cat dialect always bothered me. I later learned that in Old English script, the “s” was made to resemble an “f,” just to confuse later generations of children. On the computer I learned that Pyle had his own school for illustrators, and taught several notable artists, including Andrew Wyeth. I also found that very same volume on the Project Gutenberg Online Book Catalog, an Internet site which allows you to read original book copies at no cost.


WHERE DID YOU GO? OUT. WHAT DID YOU DO? NOTHING. - This excellent 1957 book was about children, but not exactly a children’s book. In it playwright and author Robert Paul Smith bemoaned the fact that kids in the ‘50s were being structured out of their creativity by well-meaning but meddlesome adults. It was hilarious when I read it as a kid, and even more so when I read the copy Marilyn found for me on eBay. Much of the book deals with activities Smith and his childhood friends invented in the 1920s and ‘30s, when they had enough sense to realize that parents were to be avoided whenever possible. I learned a lot from that book, much of which was perfectly legal.


There’s some valuable stuff on the Internet, if you know where to look. I’m in the process of buying a vintage plastic sword on eBay. Don’t worry, it has the mandatory rubber safety tip on the end.