Too Many Mittens, by Florence and Louis Slobodkin (Vanguard Press, 1958)

Known best as an illustrator of New Yorker cartoons and James Thurber's classic 1943 children's book Many Moons, Caldecott-award winner Louis Slobodkin collaborated with his wife to tell this charming personal story based on their twin grandsons. The illustrations have a great midcentury quality, and I love how the font for the book's title is made up of mittens:

The book tells the story of twin boys in the bitter cold of Michigan who lose one of their mittens, and the neighborhood (with its various merchants and deliverymen) comes to the rescue by finding that single lost mitten all over town.

The boys' clothesline becomes a repository for lost mittens, and any time someone in the neighborhood loses a mitten, they stop by the boys' house to pick one up. They even put out a sign:

By springtime, there is only one mitten left: the original missing red mitten!

I love this book because it provides a little glimpse of "community" half a century ago.

 

Previous Book: City in Winter

This blog seeks to share excerpted content from out-of-print children's books. If you are the copyright holder of any of these books and are unhappy with this usage, please contact me immediately and I will rectify it.

Eleanor Schick's City in Winter

I am a huge fan of Eleanor Schick's book City in Summer. There's something about her style of illustration that represents her era so well (the characters are often racially ambiguous). For obvious reasons, I collect any book I can find about kids growing up in a city, and Schick's books display such simple, warmhearted moments of city life I wish there were a dozen more of them (we do have Schick's City Sun, City Green, and Jeanie Goes Riding). The book I'm sharing excerpts from today is City in Winter. While Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats is still published, this lovely book (originally published in 1970) has long been out of print.

 

Previous Book

This blog seeks to share excerpted content from out-of-print children's books. If you are the copyright holder of any of these books and are unhappy with this usage, please contact me immediately and I will rectify it.

Thomas Minehan, The Lonesome Road (The Way of Life of a Hobo)

One my most treasured books is an autographed first edition of Thomas Minehan's Boy and Girl Tramps in America (1934), in which I found a letter from the author to the book's original owner about their shared interest in hobo culture. Minehan was a depression-era educator and ethnographer who actually traveled with hobos, taking particular interest in the lives of young tramps. This book, Lonesome Road (1941), may be the only children's book ever written about the actual lives of depression-era hobos. It's a narrative incorporating many of the conclusions of Minehan's larger work through the story of a kid named Joe who gives hobo life a try, but then abandons it after his friend Bill loses his toes and Joe realizes that if he keeps heading down that road he's only going to end up "a bum." I love the WPA-style illustrations in this book, and Minehan's informed text makes this book worth hunting down:

As far as I know, there were no other books published in the "Way of Life" series, which is too bad. This one is really good.