The historian Jill Lepore:
On March 28th, driving on a highway, I saw a homemade sign hanging on a banner made of sheets stitched together and draped over the railings of an overpass. It read:Lepore is reading little books, Penguin’s Little Black Classics: “A Hundred Classics to Get Me Through a Hundred Days of Trump” (The New Yorker ).SAVE OUR DEMOCRACYI had to pull over on the soft shoulder, not soft enough, and weep, thinking of No. 76, Virgil:
UPHOLD OUR CONSTITUTIONLook where strife
has led
Rome’s wretched citizens.
The Four Seasons Reading Club is now trekking through Hans Christian Andersen’s stories and fairy tales. The Little Black Classics, which I’d never heard of before, will be our next stop.
[I am confused about the count: the boxed-set that Lepore describes has eighty paperbacks. There are now 129 books in the series. The additional individual volumes, or at least some of them, do not seem to be available, or easily available, in the States. The lines from Virgil are from Eclogue 1 in Guy Lee’s (Penguin) translation. But the line break should follow “led”: “Look where strife has led / Rome’s wretched citizens.” I’ve written before to The New Yorker about errors of fact (no reply, no correction). These bits I’ll keep here.]
comments: 6
As a boy, I noticed that Penguin paperbacks always had a line at the bottom of the back cover, "For copyright reasons, this edition is not for sale in the USA." That might explain missing volumes.
Say, when I advised an adult from California, when he moved to Britain, to buy his boy children's annuals, he had never heard of such a thing. Perhaps they don't have them in the States.
I first learned of "the mighty transistor" from a science annual, and my family got the Rupert (Bear) annual every Christmas.
I've never heard of children's annuals either. If they're a US thing, I've missed them.
The Penguin Great Ideas series (small paperbacks with beautiful covers) had a number of volumes that didn't appear to make it to the States. I always wanted the Dickens volume Night Walks.
I can't resist talking about my beloved annuals. There were ones for boys and ones for girls. My Tiger Annual had two comic-style stories of Oloc the Gladiator, a comic style one of robot vehicles (operators never seen) attacking a moon base, prose stories of course, a nonfiction on ring craft (don't try to show your boxing opponent you are not groggy) as well as how-2 stuff, a maze to pencil in, and forth. The Doctor Who annuals had the same. From the second one, because there was a new actor, a box explained the legend of the Phoenix, while another box featured the visage of Einstein and how "there can be no space without time, and no time without space." I thought, Wow! I have been thinking in terms of space-time —Republic versus empire, early work versus later work— ever since. For a "thinking tool" for international affairs this beats living in a bubble of now-time.
The Rupert annuals would also include a maze and such. I remember the plans for folding a paper frog that would jump, but my paper wasn't thick enough. Rupert ran daily in a newspaper, for two different age groups:
Each (annual) page had four picture, with rhyming underneath (easy) and denser prose on the bottom half of the page.
I apply Rupert to the TV version of Doctor Who: when a character doesn't quite die, by super-briefly coming back, I figure that's for the kids reading the poetry, while we adults can, a la bottom prose, believe (head cannon) that no, that person is gone.
I found a seller of children’s books with many older annuals for boys, girls, and boys and girls: https://humford-mill-books.myshopify.com/collections. I think I missed out.
Sean, you might want to post something about these books.
Michael, I do believe I will. Thank you for the link.
I had forgotten about the Wolf Cub (Cub Scouts) annual. I remember the cubs went do to door on "bob a job" where they would do something for a bob. I forget what amount of currency a bob was. They foiled burglars, and knew to hide their faces in the dark. A comic style story was about a cub getting a medal for saving a child from incoming tide. I recall a one-panel cartoon where the cubs are walking past a ship and a sailor holds a rope saying, "How's your knots, mate?"
Kids love secrets: One of the nonfiction stories began with a man all sooty because he had been doing brickwork all night on a fireplace: he traveled building ingenious "priest holes" including a staircase that would collapse if you took the wrong steps, giving the priest time to get away.
I look forward to reading whatever you write about it.
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