My Book House, edited by Olive Beaupré Miller, 12 volumes, 1937; For My Book House, A Parents’ Guide Book, 1948.
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For those of us who are readers, what we read as children is at the core of who we are and the paths we’ve taken.
I have a dim memory of going as a child to second hand bookstores with my father and mother in Washington state searching for books to take with us to the wilds of northern British Columbia. This was in the early 1960s. I was 9 or 10 years old.
Their finds included all the volumes of the famed 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, literature such as Ernest Thompson Seton’s Wild Animals I Have Known, Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage, T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, and the 12-volume set of My Book House, by Olive Beaupré Miller, 1937 edition. It must have been my mother who insisted on completing the set with the 1948 parents’ guide, since the older grouping didn’t have it.
Inside the front cover of Volume 10
Sixty years on, I still have the My Book House volumes. It is amazing to hold them – the illustrations are so evocative and bittersweet. A reminder of a completely different time and place.
The volumes are slender blue books, in this fourth edition, numbered 1 to 12. They very roughly correspond to grade levels in their contents, although the first volume is oriented to much younger children, to be read to them. Miller was an ardent believer in education for the young, and began these books, originally in a six-volume set in the 1920s, when she found that nobody was providing the graded stories, poems and illustrations she thought important for her daughter and other children.
Books to grow with
The books were meant to “grow” along with their intended audience. Early volumes contained nursery rhymes and simple stories and later volumes drew upon Chaucer, Shakespeare and Swift among many other classic writings which Miller adapted. Sometimes, she wrote the stories herself. Not only were fables, stories and poetry intended to be read by children, but also to be read by parents to them. And the illustrations! The illustrations by well known artists including a book cover by N.C. Wyeth do a wonderful job of creating imaginative space for the stories to dwell in.
Miller set up a company with her husband to publish these books in Winnetka, Illinois and the first one, In The Nursery, was issued in 1920. The first six-volume sets were often, as a promotion, enclosed in a small wooden house. The six were eventually split into 12 thinner books for the benefit of small hands. An interesting aspect of her publishing company was its staffing predominantly by women, including the sales force. This was most unusual at a time when women were deemed best suited to staying at home.
The last edition was published in 1971. Miller had continued to revise her books until her retirement in 1962. She died in Arizona in 1968.
A father’s Grand Adventure
Not only do these books connect me to my childhood and the northern log cabin I grew up in, but in an indirect way to my father. He died of a stroke a couple of years after he moved his wife and three sons to the pioneering life he imagined and hungered for in the north. He was only in his mid 40s. He fought in the Second World War in the Pacific, including Iwo Jima, went to university where he met my mother, and dropped out with her to start a family. He worked for years as an architectural draftsman and trouble-shooting machinist, before embarking, his family in tow, on his Grand Adventure.
These books were part of his design for his family (along with serious advice from my mother, without doubt) as he took us to the Bulkley Valley in British Columbia to live on a section of land without electricity, phones or indoor plumbing. He changed all our lives, and our futures, in a fundamental way and for the better. We boys were given, on the outside, the gift of wild spaces, and our interiors were furnished by My Book House and all the other books that made the inside of our small cabin seem like a library. Even my mother, who at first regretted our departure from the States and its amenities, came to love where we made our home.
So these books mean a lot to me. I’d like to give just a sampling of their content.
Volume 5, Over the Hills, contained stories about Abraham Lincoln, Jack and the Beanstalk, the boyhood of Robert Fulton, and Wilbur and Orville Wright, among others, drawn from many classic sources.
I think my favorite from this volume though was “Casey Jones, A Song of the Railroad Men.” It goes: “Fireman says, ‘Casey, you’re running too fast. You ran the block signal, last station you passed.’…” Then later: “He turned to his fireman said, ‘Boy, you’d better jump. ‘Cause there’s two locomotives that are going to bump!'”
Volume 8, Flying Sails, featured for me “Gulliver’s Travels to Lilliput” adapted from Jonathan Swift. The accompanying illustrations are marvelous, of Gulliver tied down by many tiny figures. This volume also included a couple of stories from the Arabian Nights, “The Adventures of General Tom Thumb,” and Shakespeare’s “The Tempest.”
In Volume 10, From the Tower Window, we have the story of the Children’s Crusade, “The Home-Coming of Odysseus,” legends of the Round Table, the Spanish tale of “The Cid” and what moved me, for some reason, as a teenager, the tragic “Song of Roland.”
In this last, retold from the Chanson de Roland, Roland heroically blows his horn, Oliphant, at the end of a great battle to call for relief for his men and himself, only to finally die.
In demand for homeschooling
In an interesting twist to the saga of the long out-of-print My Book House, the volumes, in all their many versions, are in demand as part of the homeschooling movement. The set, as the Parents’ Guide points out, has 2752 pages of graded selections from over fifty different countries with two thousand illustrations, many in full color. They are a valuable resource for any family, homeschooling or not.
Homeschooling as a movement began in the 1970s as a rebellion against the rote regimented learning of the standard classroom, and has spread in many different directions, from the free school perspective to the evangelical. But to me, My Book House is ideal as an underpinning for any youngster’s education. I’m grateful that it was part of mine.
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References:
For more information on My Book House, here are some sites of note:
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