Each of my grandmas had books I enjoyed, but my dad's mom kept books from his childhood for us. I so loved two sturdy, spiral-bound books that had layered pages. They open like calendars, and each wish from one of the characters results in an important visual addition to the story, like the swing in the farm story and the candy counter in the store story. They are called build-up books, and the titles foretell the actions of each story:
Let's Have a Farm and
Let's Have a Store.
I must have memorized the text of each because when I found them on the shelves to read with my niece last week, the words were so familiar. She even spied the copyright date (almost hidden by the spiral binding) of 1945. On the back sides of each first page are the words "To Gary From Mary Kay" (one of his cousins). Almost 70 years later, they are still charming, delightful books!
How true that long-ago words from books seem delightfully familiar many years later. I think those words help shape our young vision of the world, and reading them again gives us a shock of recognition.
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