Tag Archive: 0children's literature

Sometimes, as a bookseller, you come across a book you just can’t find anywhere.  You check the title, make sure you’re spelling it right, and still the online databases are silent.  But to find two copies of that otherwise apparently unknown book?  Well… It took a bit of sleuthing to work out exactly what the […]

Later this week I shall be in Edinburgh, for the Edinburgh book fair.  In fact, as last year, I shall be travelling up there on World Book Day, a day which is all about getting children reading.  So, what better for this week’s post than a collection of fourteen children’s books, by the Russian son of […]

Ever since my university days, when I studied German and Russian, I’ve been interested in connections between the German- and Russian-speaking worlds.  So it was a particularly nice surprise when I came across this book recently: You can just make out in the picture that a new engraved title-page has been pasted over an earlier letterpress […]

Last month, over at The New Antiquarian, I wrote about uncut books: I love them, but not collating them.  But here’s something I had recently which made ‘collating’ (i.e. checking to see if it’s all there) rather more fun: Published c.1860 by John Betts in London, it’s ‘a sheet of 22 coloured illustrations, dissected as a puzzle, […]

Something for Children’s Book Week: Magic Tricks.  By the six-year-old Samuel Hopkins (Moscow, 1911), published as a supplement to Svetliachok (“The Little Glow-worm”), a pre-Revolutionary children’s magazine aimed at 4–8-year-olds.  It recounts the conjuring abilities of a six-year-old English boy, Samuel Hopkins, with illustrated descriptions of some of his tricks so that the young reader might ‘pleasantly […]

I’m always drawn to books for teaching children to read.  This one seems apt this week, with its being so hot: Calo et Lili apprennent à lire, a book specially designed for use in the French territories of the Pacific, published in Nouméa (the capital of the Melanesian island of New Caledonia) in 1962. Aside from the illustrations, by […]