...
Show More
Although I've posted this review on the readily accessible Dover reprint of this children’s literature classic, that’s not actually the version The Eight-Year-Old is reading.
I generally love the Dover reprints. Most of our Burgess books are from the Dover collection. But in the case of The Burgess Bird Book for Children and The Burgess Animal Book for Children, it’s worth trying to find a copy from the 1940s and 1950s. Part of the magic of these two Burgess books is seeing Louis Agassiz Fuertes’ illustrations of the birds and animals featured in the story in full color. The illustrations in the Dover reprints are in black and white. It keeps the cost down, certainly, but it’s not the same.
So while we have the Dover reprints for books like The Adventures of Happy Jack and Old Mother West Wind, I really wanted the Eight-Year-Old to read his longer nature books in an older version with color photographs.
I had my copy of The Burgess Bird Book for Children from my childhood library already, and this past summer, The Eight-Year-Old and I stumbled across a 1950 edition of The Burgess Animal Book for Children in an antique store in upstate New York. The cover is falling apart, but it has all of those glossy full-color photograph pages.
(Antique stores are one of my favorite places to shop for books for The Eight-Year-Old, btw. Every once in a while you can find a surprisingly good selection of now out-of-print children’s classics for $1 or $2, or if you’re feeling especially profligate, as I clearly was in this case, $8. But then, I’d been looking for this book for a very long time.)
The Eight-Year-Old tells me that the Animal book isn’t quite as engrossing as the Bird book was. But The Burgess Animal Book for Children can’t be all that bad, because she pulled it out again this week to read for at least the fifth time.
See the original post on Caterpickles.
I generally love the Dover reprints. Most of our Burgess books are from the Dover collection. But in the case of The Burgess Bird Book for Children and The Burgess Animal Book for Children, it’s worth trying to find a copy from the 1940s and 1950s. Part of the magic of these two Burgess books is seeing Louis Agassiz Fuertes’ illustrations of the birds and animals featured in the story in full color. The illustrations in the Dover reprints are in black and white. It keeps the cost down, certainly, but it’s not the same.
So while we have the Dover reprints for books like The Adventures of Happy Jack and Old Mother West Wind, I really wanted the Eight-Year-Old to read his longer nature books in an older version with color photographs.
I had my copy of The Burgess Bird Book for Children from my childhood library already, and this past summer, The Eight-Year-Old and I stumbled across a 1950 edition of The Burgess Animal Book for Children in an antique store in upstate New York. The cover is falling apart, but it has all of those glossy full-color photograph pages.
(Antique stores are one of my favorite places to shop for books for The Eight-Year-Old, btw. Every once in a while you can find a surprisingly good selection of now out-of-print children’s classics for $1 or $2, or if you’re feeling especially profligate, as I clearly was in this case, $8. But then, I’d been looking for this book for a very long time.)
The Eight-Year-Old tells me that the Animal book isn’t quite as engrossing as the Bird book was. But The Burgess Animal Book for Children can’t be all that bad, because she pulled it out again this week to read for at least the fifth time.
See the original post on Caterpickles.
