Saturday, June 19, 2004

BOOK OF THE (OCCASIONAL) DAY Health Stories, third-grade hygiene from 1935. From the preface: "The aim is to develop--from both personal and social viewpoints--health attitudes, habits, and knowledge appropriate for the grade level. The resulting behavior should help to develop a healthy body and a healthy personality." There was a time when our children and their health actually mattered this much to educators. Anyway, this is a charming little volume filled with delightful, colorful illustrations. 12:36:03 AM    comment []

Thursday, June 10, 2004

Run for your lives! It's the return of ... The Book of the Day! Anna Botsford Comstock wrote this 900-plus-page three-pound textbook in 1911. This is a 1944 printing of an edition revised in 1939. "The author feels apologetic that the book is so large," Professor Comstock writes in her preface. "However, it does not contain any more than any intelligent country child of twelve should know of his environment; things that he should know naturally and without effort, although it might take him half his life-time to learn so much if he should not begin before the age of twenty..." Later she adds, "Nature-study is, despite all discussions and perversions, a study of nature; it consists of simple, truthful observations that may, like beads on a string, finally be threaded upon the understanding and thus held together as a logical and harmonious whole.... First, but not most important, nature-study gives the child practical and helpful knowledge. It makes him familiar with nature's ways and forces, so that he is not so helpless in the presence of natural misfortune and disasters. Nature-study cultivates the child's imagination, since there are so many wonderful and true stories that he may read with his own eyes, which affect his imagination as much as does fairy lore; at the same time nature-study cultivates in him a perception and regard for what is true, and the power to express it...." The list of the value of "nature-study" to the child goes on and on, so poetically and touchingly I have a hard time not typing in the whole two pages of reasons. 11:05:37 PM    comment []

Friday, May 28, 2004

BOOK OF THE DAY High-school zoology, altogether practical, from 1915. 5:33:32 PM    comment []

Wednesday, May 26, 2004

BOOK OF THE DAY A second-grade reader from 1934. (Truth to tell, I like watching the boys wigwag, too.) 2:23:33 PM    comment []

Tuesday, May 25, 2004

BOOK OF THE DAY Let's not neglect arithmetic! This 490-page textbook from 1926 includes some remarkably practical applications! I'm considering taking a few months to study it myself. 1:57:28 PM    comment []

Sunday, May 23, 2004

BOOK OF THE DAY You could learn some interesting things from this grade-school reader's miscellany of 1930, including how to remove tusks from inebriated elephants... 12:43:50 AM    comment []

Friday, May 21, 2004

BOOK OF THE DAY This poor damaged little book is a second reader from, I'd guess, the 1880s or thereabouts; it's stamped here and there with a Sacramento bookseller's mark (Weinstock, Lubin & Co.), and there's a logo from a San Francisco seller glued in it, as well. The title page has been removed so I can't nail down the year of publication, and it suffers from a little water damage. Aside from the dear engravings, the most interesting thing about the book to me are the jottings of a--Japanese?--child apparently coming to terms with written English, and the change in name to "Sammie" from something like "Shirichi" (?). 9:05:51 AM    comment []

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