In Praise of Stuffy Old Books

In Praise of Stuffy Old Books May 26, 2016

bookshelf-1082309_640

I have such a find for you today, I hardly know how to begin.

I was downtown at the Franciscan-sister-run thrift store, looking for shorts, and of course I was drawn like a moth to their “free book” bookcase in the back. There’s often not anything good there, but I always look. Today, there was a treasure. It’s an identical copy of a book I pored over when I was a very small girl, too young to read the text. In fact, it was a book my father pored over when he was slightly older than I was. He kept his copy nice, until decades later when I ruined the spine with careless reading. This copy is pristine with a firm spine and bright, clean pages that smell like aged vanilla, without a hint of mildew or dust.

The book is The Golden Treasury of Natural History by Bertha Morris Parker. It was put out by Simon and Schuster in 1952. It’s sitting here beside me, wafting fragrance like a pound cake. There’s a picture of a lizard crawling up the book’s spine, which confused me when I was a little girl; I thought it was a picture of an esoteric mouthless creature standing up and waving his arms. There is a painting of frog eggs in water inside the front cover, which I thought was a petri dish of frog eyeballs. I don’t think I approached this book more than once after I was literate. Sometimes my father would read snatches of it to me, but mostly I pored over the illustrations and felt wise. I thought I was learning a great deal about the mysterious ways of science.

Now that I’m grown and have my own copy, I’ve been looking through the text. It’s hilarious; fungi are called “plants that are not green,” typhoid is classified as a plant, the mass of Pluto is indicated with a question mark. Cells are defined as “tiny blocks of protoplasm.” Apart from the outdated science, the whole thing is written in the most patronizing stuffy schoolmarm voice imaginable; the word “gay” is used in hilariously quaint ways. But it feels so right, so scientific. And those illustrations… well, just look at these shoddy cell phone camera photos of the illustrations. The whole book is like this:

IMG10013

Fine respectable cover.

IMG10009

Prehistoric man can’t get over how fabulous he is, and prehistoric dinosaur ain’t so bad himself.

IMG10012

In Maryland they’d assume this page was from a cookbook.

IMG10011

Fit for a witch’s tome.

IMG10010

I confess that when I was four, I was so afraid of this obese plesiosaur that I had to stand back from the book when turning the page.

Every page is that lavish– all in full color, and all paintings. Books should be like that. Books for children about science should have beautiful paintings that get children excited about science and show them that science is about dinosaurs and flowers and interesting things. And every family should own a few painfully outdated and stuffy old books that smell like pound cake. They’re treasures. They make study feel as though you’re participating in something ancient, which you are, no matter what your area of study. Now if only I could find a copy of our old Jerusalem Bible, with colorplates of Rahab piling straw on sulky-looking Israelite spies that four-year-old I couldn’t be convinced weren’t “bad guys,” and Pilate washing his hands in a basin held by a slave whom I think was supposed to be African, but who for some reason was painted in a light shade of ashen gray as though he were a Roswell alien. I have never read a Bible as reverently as I did back then, “reading” those stuffy illustrations and ad libbing my own sacred stories. Children ought to do that.

Children need a good supply of stuffy old books.  They also need informative new books, and more than a few fun books that teach nothing. They need books with bright colors but humiliatingly awful text. They need books with good text and not enough pictures. It’s good to throw in a few books far too old for them as well; I read the entire The Hunchback of Notre Dame when I was twelve, because a librarian had misshelved it near the Baby-Sitters’ Club books.  A smattering of your old textbooks from college stored on low shelves are good too, for developing interests. And you need at least one book with obnoxious, ill-mannered poems in it that your child will memorize and recite at bad times even after you’ve hidden it. This is, in my opinion, the best way to educate. I’m going to show this stuffy old book to my daughter right now.

(First image courtesy of pixabay. Subsequent images are from The Golden Treasury of Natural History by Bertha Morris Parker, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1952, and are used in accordance with fair use.)

 


Browse Our Archives