So Many Dishes

I was so lucky that my parents, who were readers themselves, encouraged my love of reading. From my earliest memories, there were lots of Golden Books: Home for a Bunny and The Little Miner were a couple of favorites. My parents subscribed to an anthology series for young readers when I was in elementary school, and I know I read those voraciously.

One of my uncles worked for a major publishing house in New York, and I still treasure two of the books he gave me. They were both anthologies: The Illustrated Treasury of Children’s Literature and Family Reading Festival. The former started with Mother Goose rhymes, and included poems, fables, fairy tales, and excerpts from well-known books. Although the second book was aimed at family reading time, I read these stories and poems on my own. There were excerpts from Twain and Kipling, Cicero and Louisa May Alcott. Poetry covered Shakespeare to Ogden Nash. I learned a great deal.

Another set of books that I loved growing up, and is still part of our library, is The Bookhouse. Published in 1920, these books were my mother’s as a child, and were on the shelf at my grandparents’ house. Originally, there were six books, but my mother was only able to find three of them, which Ken and I now have. They are certainly conversation pieces, but I pull one of them off the shelf whenever I need to remember Oranges and Lemons in its entirety.