Posted on by TracyC

Invincible Louisa

Invincible Louisa by Cornelia Meigs, 1933.

This is the story of Louisa May Alcott, the famous 19th century author who wrote Little Women and other books for children.

The book begins with Louisa May Alcott’s birth on November 29, 1832 in Pennsylvania and explains about her parents’ backgrounds. When Louisa’s mother, Abba (short for Abigail), had first become engaged to her father, Amos Bronson Alcott, people advised her not to go through with the marriage because Bronson didn’t seem like a very practical man and nobody really expected that he would amount to much. However, Abba genuinely loved him and understood him. They shared similar ideals, including Abolitionism and the practice of service and charity to others, although they didn’t agree about everything. Bronson was a scholarly man who worked as a teacher, although he struggled to get an education himself when he was young because he was born to a family of poor farmers. As a young man, he had worked as a traveling salesman and had seen much of life across the country. He was good at talking to people and was very good at speaking to children, which led him to eventually settle down to teaching.

The Alcott family was happy where Bronson Alcott was teaching in Germantown, but the death of his school’s patron was a heavy blow. Without his patron’s backing, the school didn’t last, so the Alcott family left Germantown and moved to Boston. Little Louisa enjoyed the busy city of Boston, but the book also describes a harrowing situation in which she almost drowned after falling into Frog Pond. This incident was a traumatic memory for Louisa, but it wasn’t just the trauma that left a mark on her. The person who rescued her from drowning was a black boy. (The book uses the word “Negro.”) Louisa never knew the boy’s name, but her gratitude toward her rescuer influenced her feelings toward black people for the better at a time when the country was heading toward Civil War over the issue of slavery.

The Alcott family had ties to some important people. Her father was friends with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Elizabeth Peabody, who was instrumental in the development of kindergarten education in the United States, worked at his school in Boston. Her mother’s elderly aunt, known as the formidable Aunt Hancock, had been the wife of the famous John Hancock. However, in spite of connections, Bronson met with opposition to his teaching when parents of the students learned that he was an Abolitionist. A friend of his, William Lloyd Garrison, was almost lynched by an angry mob for airing his views about ending slavery. When Bronson admitted a black boy as a student to his school, it was the last straw, and many parents withdrew their children. Louisa later remembered discovering that her parents helped to hide runaway slaves when she was young, but it isn’t clear at which of their homes they were doing this.

After his school in Boston closed, he moved the family to Concord. He didn’t have the heart to open another school, so he supported this family through farming. They were poor and lived very simply, but they enjoyed living in the countryside. However, her father did maintain some scholarly contacts and was involved with the Transcendentalist movement. In 1843, the family moved yet again to join a community of Transcendentalists, experimenting with a more isolated lifestyle. (A footnote in the book, added decades after the original writing, compares it to the communes of the 1960s and 1970s.) However, the community was not a success. When one of the leaders of the community suggested that Bronson give up his wife and daughters to live in the style of Shakers, Bronson discussed the situation with his family, and they all came to the conclusion that this community was asking too much. Giving up on his experimental lifestyle was difficult for Bronson, but Abba’s brother understood the situation and helped the family move to a new home. Eventually, the family resettled in Concord.

Compared to her sisters, Louisa was a boisterous and temperamental child. She loved running wild in the countryside, and her curiosity and impulsiveness sometimes got her into scrapes. She wasn’t as good at housework as her older sister, Anna. However, she was always imaginative. When the family returned to Concord, Louisa was able to have a room to herself for the first time, and she used her new privacy for writing stories. She created plays for her and her sisters to perform.

As she grew up, Louisa became increasingly aware of her family’s poverty and her father’s lack of understanding for the ways of the world. Her mother was frequently worn out from trying to make do and take care of the four girls in the family. She began making plans early that she would find a way to provide for her parents and her sisters when she got older.

At Concord, her family continued their friendships with Thoreau and Emerson, and Ralph Waldo Emerson allowed Louisa to read books from his library, She developed a kind of hero-worship of him as a teenager. The Alcott girls also attended a regular school for the first time. Louisa often felt awkward because she was taller than the other girls at school, but she was also very athletic. She frequently wished that she had been born a boy instead of a girl.

At age 16, Louisa began her professional life, giving lessons to Emerson’s children. She was a good teacher, although as an active person, she found quiet study and teaching for extended periods difficult. Her mind often wandered to ideas for romantic stories, and she wrote a collection of little stories for Ellen Emerson. However, the family was badly in need of money, and they had to leave Concord and return to Boston, where they would live with her mother’s brother.

In Boston, Louisa continued teaching and found work as a governess. She also picked up other odd jobs to help support her family. One of them, a job as a live-in companion for an invalid, turned out especially badly because the job had been misrepresented and turned out to be hard labor. She was paid very little for it, too. It was during this time that her father discovered the little stories that Louisa had written for Ellen Emerson. He took one of them to a publisher he knew, and the story was published. Encouraged, Louisa and her father had the rest of the stories published in a collection called Flower Fables, Louisa’s very first book.

This did not bring her instant success as a writer, though. The family’s lives were filled with ups and downs, and they moved house multiple times. Louisa left her family to pursue an independent living for a time, although she made very little money, taking teaching jobs, sewing, and anything she could find. It was during this time that Louisa’s two younger sisters became ill with scarlet fever while the family was engaging in their usual charity work. Elizabeth had it particularly badly, and her health was never good after that. Louisa rejoined the family when they once again returned to Concord, where Elizabeth passed away. Elizabeth’s death was reflected in Louisa’s semi-autobiographical Little Women with the death of Jo’s sister Beth.

The Alcotts had been such a tight-knit family that separations of the sisters were bitterly painful, but every family experiences change over time. After Elizabeth’s death, Anna became engaged to marry John Pratt. It upset Louisa because it felt like she was losing another sister. Louisa once again set out to try to make her own living, but for a long time, it seemed like nothing would go right for her. It was difficult for her to find work, and opportunities seemed to disappear when she was about to take them. At one point, she was in such despair that she even considered suicide. Fortunately, after hearing an uplifting sermon about girls who were in her position, she renewed her determination to succeed, and she received a job offer from someone she had worked for before. Meanwhile, her father was finally starting to have some success with his educational lectures, and he even became superintendent of schools in Concord.

During all of these trials and tribulations for Louisa and the Alcott family, the country was headed toward Civil War. The Alcotts were still Abolitionists, and Louisa’s father had even been involved in a riot in Boston where a mob of citizens had tried to rescue a runaway slave who was about to be returned to the slave owner. After the war started, Louisa felt the urge to do something to help the side of the Union, so she volunteered as a nurse. Conditions were rough at the hospital where she worked, and she was put to work immediately with no training. She had some talent for nursing and a good bedside manner, having nursed Elizabeth through her final illness, but nothing could have prepared her for dealing with the war wounded. It was difficult and often heart-wrenching work, and it took a toll on her own health. After only about a month of working there, she caught typhoid, and her father was summoned to come and take her home.

Louisa eventually recovered from her illness. She felt like a failure for not being able to complete the full term she had originally promised to the hospital, but her nursing experiences helped further her writing career. The letters that she had written to her family about the people she met and her experiences at the hospital were so interesting that they had them published as “Hospital Sketches”, and they were extremely popular. So many people had friends or family who had gone away to war that they were anxious to know as much as they could about what was happening to them and others like them. The success of the “Hospital Sketches” led publishers to ask Louisa for further writings.

When Louisa recovered further, she felt restless, so she accepted a position as a nurse/companion to a friend’s daughter, who was unwell but wanted to go on a trip to Europe. Traveling as a nurse/companion didn’t give Louisa all of the freedom she would have liked to see and do everything she wanted, but she did get to see many things in Europe. She was able to visit the home of the German philosopher Goethe, and she attended a public reading by Charles Dickens. During their travels, she also met the young man who would be the inspiration for Laurie in Little Women.

She started writing Little Women after she returned home from Europe, at the suggestion of her publisher, who thought that she should write books for girls. When her publisher read it, he wasn’t sure that it would be successful at first because its tone was different from the popular children’s books for girls at the time. He tested it out by giving copies to his niece and some other girls who were about the same age, and they all loved it, so he went ahead and published it. It was so successful that it provided Louisa and her parents with financial stability for the first time, and readers wanted more! Much of the story was based on Louisa’s own life with her sisters and on people they knew, but she changed some parts for the sake of the story. Since the real Louisa never married, she made up a fictional husband for her story counterpart, Jo. In the story, Jo marries a German professor, and in the sequel, she and her husband start a school for boys based on Louisa’s father’s theories about the ideal school. Many of her father’s theories about education were very progressive for the time, and since he never got the chance to try all of them, Jo and her husband did in the story.

Even though she never fully recovered her health after having typhoid, she continued to write books for children, and she visited schools to speak to children. The book explains how these other books were also inspired by aspects of Louisa’s life. She and her youngest sister, May, took another trip to Europe together. May always had a talent for art, and Louisa funded her further travels and studies in Europe. May eventually married, but sadly, she died not long after the birth of her only child, a daughter named after Louisa. In accordance with her wishes, May’s infant daughter was brought to Louisa to raise, and Louisa treated her like her own daughter, calling her Lulu as a nickname. The book ends with Louisa’s death, mentioning that she made one of Anna’s sons her heir to perpetuate her copyrights. In the back of the book, there is a chronology of events from Louisa May Alcott’s life.

The book is a Newbery Medal winner. It is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).

My Reaction

I bought my copy of this book at a Scholastic Book Fair back in the 1990s, but I didn’t notice until I was an adult that the book was originally published in the early 1930s. I think part of the reason why the author was interested in doing a biography of Louisa May Alcott at that particular time was that it was around the 100th anniversary of her birth. I appreciated how later reprintings of this book also tried to keep it up-to-date and relevant for modern readers, including the addition of the footnote in the book about communes of the 1960s and 1970s.

Something that shows how 19th century society was different from modern society is the qualifications required for certain types of jobs. In the past, there were relatively few professional and educations qualifications required for teachers and nurses. In the 21st century, both teachers and nurses are required to have college degrees and relevant certifications to apply for their jobs. Nobody in the 21st century gets those jobs without having the requisite professional credentials (with the exception of homeschooling families, where the teachers are the parents). It would be useless to apply for such careers without having all of the education and certification required. In the 19th century, it was sometimes more important to just find someone willing to do the job, whether they had any particular qualifications to do it or not. Where the need was sufficiently great, like in the hospitals tending to the war wounded, they would take almost anyone who showed up and was willing to take the job with the hardships and blood involved. (There is one episode where Louisa witnesses an applicant being turned down because, while this person wanted to help the war effort, they didn’t have the stomach or stamina for the demands of the job. Next to that, medical knowledge was less important.) I explained dame schools when I reviewed Going to School in 1776, and the concept still applied in the mid-19th century. Dame schools were informal schools set up by people, often women, who were simply willing to take on the job of teaching local children. They got the jobs chiefly because they were the people who were willing to do them in the area. The quality of education these informal teachers could provide varied drastically, depending on the individual teacher. Some of them were actually well-read individuals with a gift for teaching (this is what Louisa and her father were like, in spite of their relative lack of formal education), while others provided little more than day care while the children’s parents worked. In the section of this book that explains Bronson Alcott’s history, there is some discussion of how education levels and quality varied across the country in the mid-1800s.

Parts of this book and the lives of the Alcott family also offer a different perspective on what it means to be successful in life. Through most of their lives, the family has little money, and Louisa and her father often struggle to find jobs and get recognition for their work. Louisa May Alcott is famous now, but early in her life, she felt like a failure. She struggled to find and keep jobs and had health problems that interfered with her ability to find and keep work. In the end, it wasn’t having money that made her famous but her talent and perseverance. There were times when she wanted to give up, and she even felt suicidal at one point, but she kept going in spite of everything. Even her father eventually managed to carve out a career for himself that suited his real talents. Their early problems didn’t mean that they were worthless or incapable. Their talents were just unusual, and they needed time to find their proper niche in life, the right circumstances to demonstrate what they could do, and the right people to recognize and appreciate their abilities.

Posted on by TracyC

Native Americans

Native Americans by Jay Miller, 1993.

This book is part of the New True Books series, a series of nonfiction picture books on a variety of topics. This particular book gives an overview of the history and culture of Native Americans.

The book starts with some basic definitions and broad explanations of certain aspects of Native American culture, beginning with the explanation of why Native Americans are sometimes called “Indians.” The book notes that each tribe of Native Americans also has a name for itself. Each tribe has had its own culture, which it thought was better than other tribes’ cultures, but throughout history, tribes have interacted and traded with each other. One factor that made Native American cultures different from each other was whether tribes relied mainly on farming or hunting and gathering for food.

The book refers to hunter-gatherers as “caretakers”, a term that I can’t recall seeing before for hunter-gatherers. The reason why they use the term “caretakers” is they say that hunter-gatherers took care of their environments and only took the plants and animals they needed for survival, not wasting anything.

There are sections of the book that discuss some general aspects of Native American culture, like types of homes and tribal leaders. Of course, as the book notes, many cultural aspects varied, depending on the tribe, the environment where they lived, and whether they were mainly farmers or “caretakers.”

The book also has sections about the Native America tribes of various regions of North America, like the Northeast, the Southeast, the Southwest, the Northwest Coast, and the Plains.

The book ends with a brief section called Changes, which explains how Native American cultures were impacted by the arrival of Europeans in North America.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

Posted on by TracyC · 1 Comment

Castles

Castles by Stephanie Turnbull, illustrated by Colin King, 2003.

This nonfiction picture book for kids is part of the Usborne Beginners series, originally published in Britain. There are other books about castles, knights, and life in the Middle Ages from Usborne, but this book in particular, like others in its series, is a simplified version meant for beginning readers. The book is recommended for ages 4 and up.

The book explains different types of castles and the parts of a castle. It also offers details about daily life for people who lived in castles, including hunting, food and feasts, and things they would do for fun.

There are also pages about knights, the armor they wore, jousts, and attacking and defending a castle.

The book ends by explaining why castles from the Middle Ages are in ruins today.

In the back of the book, there is a glossary of terms and a link to the Usborne site’s page of quicklinks, which still works and has links to child-friendly informational sites on various topics, organized first by topic and then by related book. Both the book and the website offer Internet safety tips for kids and parents.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).

Posted on by TracyC

What Were Castles For?

What Were Castles For? by Phil Roxbee Cox, illustrated by Sue Stitt and Annabel Spenceley, 1994.

This nonfiction picture book for kids is part of the Usborne Starting Point History series, originally published in Britain.

I love books about daily life in the past, and this book explains the lives of people who lived in castles during the Middle Ages by answering questions about what castles were for and what people in castles did. Each page of the book is organized around sections answering specific questions.

First, the book describes the basic purpose of castles and different types of castles that have existed and how they were built. The, it shows different parts of a castle and what people did in different parts. One of my favorite parts is where they show what is in a castle’s keep, which is where the lord of the castle and his family lived. The book uses cutaway pictures to show what is inside buildings, and the detailed pictures show the different activities of the people.

Among the activities of the nobles who lived in castles, the book explains how they would hunt and hold feasts and jousts.

Knights and warfare were central to the purpose of a castle, which was to provide a defensible fortress for the noble families who lived in them and their supporters. The book explains how boys from noble families were raised and educated to be knights. There are also pages showing weapons and the siege of a castle.

One of the things I liked about this book is that, while it is mainly about castles and the people who lived in them, it also shows how people lived outside of castles in small villages, towns, and monasteries. While castles are iconic of the Middle Ages, seeing how people lived in these other places gives a more expanded view of life in Medieval times.

The pictures really make the book! Every picture from the cutaway castle views to the scenes of villages and towns or jousts and hunts, show many people and small details. There are little descriptions labeling the people and details, most giving extra historical information, but some just for fun so readers can notice humorous details, like the monk being chased by bees at the monastery, the chicken escaping along the castle wall, the sister who is happy that her brother is going off to learn to be a knight, and the page who is learning archery but hasn’t made the target yet (his last failed shot falls short of the target, but it’s labeled as the best he’s done so far).

In the back of the book, there is a section with the legend of Richard the Lionheart and his minstrel and a map marked with famous castles around the world.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies, including one in French).

Posted on by TracyC

Knights & Castles

The Usborne Time Traveller Book of Knights and Castles by Judy Hindley, illustrated by Toni Goffe, 1976, 1993.

This nonfiction picture book for kids is part of the Usborne Time Traveller Books series, originally published in Britain.

The contents are framed as a time back in time to the Middle Ages, specifically 1240 AD, to see how people would have lived in Medieval times and what castles were like when people actually lived in them. Readers follow a specific set of Medieval characters as they go about their lives.

Our trip back in time begins with a road journey to a castle. Readers see how people in the Middle Ages traveled. The journey page also explains how the Romans built the roads Medieval people used centuries earlier, which is a good historical segue because the period that we call the “Middle Ages” begins with the fall of the Roman Empire and the withdrawal of Roman forces from the furthest parts of its empire. On some pages of the book, there are extra panels at the bottom of the page with additional information, and the first set explains how we know what people would find if they were able to travel back in time to the Middle Ages, explaining how historians have gleaned information from Medieval writings and pictures and from studying physical objects, like buildings and tools.

When readers arrive at the castle, the book explains different parts of the castle and how they were used for defense.

I particular like the cutaway pictures of the interior of the keep because I enjoy the details of people’s living quarters and daily life in the past. There is a page that shows the morning routine of the castle and how people would get dressed for the day. There are also pages about hunts, feasts, a visit to a building site, and a trip to town.

There are a couple pages about knights and how a boy would train to be a knight. There are also pages about jousts, the Crusades, and attacking and defending a castle.

The pictures are cartoon-like, but they are busy and full of details for readers to study, accompanied by notes that offer more information and historical background.

At the end of the book, there is a map showing locations of famous European castles.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).

Posted on by TracyC

Seashells for Katie and Andy

Seashells for Katie and Andy by Solveig Paulson Russell, illustrated by Marjorie Cooper, 1973.

This is a cute little picture book that presents information about seashells in story form.

Katie and Andy are at the beach with their grandmother. As the children collect seashells, their grandmother tells them what kind of shells they are and a little about them.

The shells included in the book are: coquina shells, cowrie shells, triton shells, conch shells, lace murex, olive shells, scallop shells, and limpets.

Toward the end of the book, the kids ask their grandmother if they can find shells anywhere else besides the beach, and she tells them about snail shells.

The grandmother also tells the children about different uses people have for seashells. She talks about how they can be used for jewelry, vases, and decorations of different kinds. She also mentions that they can be broken up and used in roads, but the children don’t like the idea of breaking shells.

My Reaction

This book is nostalgic for me because my own grandmother was an amateur naturalist, and she used to give us gifts of seashells that she found in her own travels. Some of the shells in my old collection still have labels with the names of the shells in my grandmother’s handwriting.

In the beginning of the book, there is a note to parents and teachers from the National College of Education in Evanston, Illinois about how the information in the book is educationally sound. I don’t have anything to criticize about the information in the book except one instance where the grandmother talks about “Indians” making necklaces from a certain type of shell. I’m pretty sure from context that they mean American Indians and not people from India, but I think that “American Indians” or “Native Americans” would be better terms to use for the sake of clarity.

They never say exactly where the beach in the story is, which would make a difference in the types of shells that the characters might find. Most of the shells covered in the book have a pretty broad worldwide distribution, but I suspect from the selection of shells given that the characters are probably in the Southeastern United States.

Posted on by TracyC · 5 Comments

Klutz Kids Travel

Kids Travel: A Backseat Survival Kit from Klutz Press, 1994.

This was one of the Klutz Press activity books that I had as a kid! I used to take it on the long road trips we would take across the country during the summer. The reason why this book is called a “kit” is that it came with a pouch with some extra equipment that could be used for the activities in the book and a special activity pad on a clipboard in the back. I don’t have my activity pad anymore, but it had pencil and paper games and puzzles, like mazes, connect-the-dots pictures, and grids for a Battleship style game that they called Lost on Earth, where you would attempt to find famous missing people or things instead of finding your opponent’s battleships.

The Lost on Earth games are especially funny when you know the references for who the missing people or what the missing things are, like who Amelia Earhart or D.B. Cooper is/was. When I was a kid, I didn’t know about D.B. Cooper (this YouTube video from Buzzfeed Unsolved explains), but I think one of the missing people on the activity pad grids was Jimmy Hoffa, and I knew that name (Buzzfeed Unsolved also covered that). The great thing about these references is that, if you’re playing this game with a kid who hasn’t heard of some of these people or things, just explaining who or what they are is activity by itself.

The pouch contained a set of markers for drawing and doing the activities on the activity pad, embroidery thread in different colors for making friendship bracelets and hair wraps, a loop of colorful string for making string figures, a small sheet for the Grown Up Pop Quiz, and some gummy playing pieces and dice for playing Parchesi (a board was included on one of the pages in the book). The gummy pieces would stick to the page, but not so tight that you couldn’t get them off. I think I saw a later edition of this book that used a different style of playing pieces, but I’m not sure now. The gummy pieces do gradually lose their ability to stick over time.

The activities in the book are meant to be done in a car. In the front of the book, there’s a section where you can record which license plates you’ve seen from different states in the US. (A common car activity on US road trips because there are 50 states, and they all have different styles of license plates. In theory, you could see examples of plates from all 50 states in a single, long car trip, but I never did. I’ve seen most of the states during a single trip, but I’ve never been table to check off all of them during a single trip.) There are also rules for playing many classic car games, mostly games that involve talking or hand motions or can be played on paper, like Twenty Questions, Paper, Rock, Scissors, and Hangman. It also describes popular car trip rituals, like holding your breath while passing a graveyard, lifting your feet while going over a bridge, or ducking your head while going under a bridge.

However, even though most of the activities are meant for car trips, many of them would be good for airplane trips as well. When I was a kid, airplanes were quieter, and it was much easier to talk to the person in the seat next to yours than it is now, so the talking games are still better for car trips. However, making friendship bracelets are ok for planes and trains as well as in a car. There are also activities for folding a dollar bill and making a paper fortune teller, making string figures, drawing superheroes, writing things in secret codes, reading palms, and learning some basic sign language.

What I’ve always liked best about this book is the variety of activities. There’s something for everyone in this book, and I’m still amused by some of the games and activities. If there’s an activity that the reader doesn’t like or that won’t work for the current location, there are plenty of others to move on to. Many of the activities in the book are either mentioned in other Klutz books or have entire Klutz books dedicated to them. Also, every part of this book is meant to be used for something. There is a finger maze around the title and copyright page, and when you remove the activity pad in the back, there is a board behind it to use for a game called Penny Hoops, which involves flicking pennies onto target areas on the board to earn points.

Sadly, I don’t think this book and activity kit are being sold new anymore, although there are some copies being sold used (I think most of the used books don’t come with the extra items in the original kit), and the book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

Posted on by TracyC

50 Card Games for Children

50 Card Games for Children by Vernon Quinn, 1933, 1946.

I love games of all kinds, and I was fascinated by this vintage children’s book about card games! Along with the card games, there is also a section in the book with card tricks. The vintage pictures in the book are also nice.

If you’re curious about what kind of card games children were playing during the Great Depression and around the time of WWII, this book offers some interesting insights! There were many games in the book that were already familiar to me, but there were some others that I had never heard of before.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

Sections in the Book:

Card Games that Are Fun to Play

That struck me as an odd title for the very first section of the book, like whatever follows is going to be games that are not fun to play, but basically, this section contains multiplayer card games specifically aimed at children. It becomes clear when you study not only the contents but the titles of the other sections, which are about solitaire games, card tricks, and a section about popular card games that adults play.

I recognized a number of popular children’s card games in this section, like I Doubt It, War, Concentration, Hearts, Old Maid, and “Go Fishing” (which is what they call it instead of Go Fish, which is what I’ve always heard it called). There were some other games that I didn’t recognize, like The Earl of Coventry, Rolling Stone, Frogs in the Pond, and My Ship Sails.

Twelve Games of Solitaire

I was familiar with Klondike, Canfield, Pyramid, and Around the Clock (which I always called Clock Solitaire). I had never heard of Pirate Gold, Spread Eagle, Lazy Boy, or Down the Stairs before.

Twelve Card Tricks

These are magic tricks with cards. Some of them sound a bit complex when you’re reading the descriptions, but I think they would be more clean when actually trying them with a deck of cards.

Some Games That Grown-Ups Play

The games in this section are Rummy, Casino, Seven-Up (also known as High-Low-Jack), High Five, Cooncan, and Five Hundred. Actually, I have seen Rummy decks specifically for children, usually Animal Rummy, but that’s still a Rummy version, so that game isn’t just for adults.

An Easy Lesson in Contract Bridge

I never thought of Bridge as being easy because I’ve always been intimidated by the concept of bidding. I understand trick-taking games like Whist, but I haven’t wanted to try Bridge because of the bidding. Actually, I think this basic description for children is a good tutorial for people like me, who find the bidding concepts confusing.

Posted on by TracyC

The Lettering Book

The Lettering Book by Noelene Morris, 1984.

I remember buying this book at a Scholastic book fair back in the early 1990s, and for a while afterward, I went through a phase where I kept trying to invent different types of decorative writing. I kept them in a notebook, and most look a bit silly, like the one where the letters were made of ice cream cones and the one where the letters were weird sheep with little feet, but I had fun!

The book is about types of lettering, but it’s really much more than that. The main focus is on designing a poster. The first part of the book goes into detail about planning your poster to convey your message to other people. It recommends making an outline of your information before beginning the project and deciding what visual elements you need to include, like diagrams and pictures. There are some useful tips about research and writing, if the presentation is part of a research project.

Then the book provides examples of how to design a page, showing different possible layouts for organizing page headings, text, and images. Although this book was planned around the idea of a printed poster, I think the layout suggestions and concepts could also be used for electronic media, such as web design or PowerPoint presentations.

There are also examples for the shapes of headings and pictures and the positioning of image captions.

The book recommends using decorative markers, borders, and horizontal rules to add visual interest to the information, separate sections of a page, and make projects look more finished.

When it comes to making the lettering of the poster or page, it explains the elements that define a print style – height and width of letters, slope, line variations, pattern, color, 3D effect, and separation and spacing of letters or overlapping of letters.

A large part of the book shows examples of letters of the alphabet and numerals in different fonts. Some of them are recognizable as fonts that still used in word processing software and on the Internet.

There are also pages with examples, showing how certain styles of lettering can convey a mood or idea in headings and sample phrases.

The front and back flaps of the book fold out, and there is a chart of the parts of a page, a couple of grids like those used for planning lettering styles, and a glossary of terms used in the book.

I couldn’t find this particular book online, but a couple of related books by the same author are available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive. I think I also used to own The Lettering Book of Alphabets, probably purchased at the same time as this book, and that inspired my alphabet lettering phase. The Lettering Book Companion is a companion book to The Lettering Book, and it particularly focuses on decorative borders.

Posted on by TracyC

The Cartoon Book

The Cartoon Book by James Kemsley, 1990.

I remember buying this book at a Scholastic book fair back in the early 1990s. I didn’t draw a lot of cartoons, but I found the tips in this book to be helpful for drawing in general. The book begins with the useful advice:

“I believe that anyone can draw cartoons. All they need are a few hints to set them on the right track, self-confidence and heaps of PRACTICE, PRACTICE, PRACTICE!”

The book aims to make cartooning accessible and unintimidating to even the most basic beginners. There is a section where the author explains about the types of pens, pencils, markers, and other materials that a budding cartoonist can use, which seems overwhelming, but it ends by saying that all you really need is a pencil and a blank piece of paper. Our host is shown as a friendly cartoon pencil throughout the book.

The drawing tips begin with advice for creating character expressions, starting by focusing on the lines and shapes of the eyes. Then, it shows how to add those expressive eyes to heads. What I always liked about this book is that it says the heads can be any size or shape you want them to be. It doesn’t matter if they’re misshapen and lumpy because it’s a cartoon. It’s supposed to be fun and expressive, not perfect, which is very liberating. Even bodies can be different shapes, and they don’t have to be perfect!

Just draw a roundish shape on top of a body, give it expressive eyes, and add an expressive mouth that works with the eyes to show the character’s mood, and there you go!

From there, the book gives brief tips about adding clothes to the body and drawing hands, arms, and legs to show motion. It also briefly shows how to draw animals and animals that are like humans and how to add expressions to inanimate objects and make them characters.

One of the tips that I’ve appreciated is the advice that it’s okay to hide things that you can’t draw well until you’ve learned to draw them better. For example, if you don’t draw hands well, you can just have characters hold their hands behind their backs. There are also tips for fixing mistakes along the way.

The book also explains how to plan and plot a comic strip. It discusses considering your audience, choosing the types of characters you want to use and giving them personalities, and developing your presentation style with different types of panel borders and speech balloons. It also explains the cliches that cartoonists use, certain common visual signals that cartoonists use to express certain types of speech or events or show movement. The light bulbs over a character’s head when they have an idea is an example of a cartoonist cliche.

The author of this book, James Kemsley, was an Australian cartoonist particularly known for his work on the long-running Ginger Meggs comic strip. I wasn’t familiar with Ginger Meggs when I was a kid because it didn’t appear in newspapers in my area, but I found it interesting to read about when I was looking into the background of this book’s author.