My Daddy Don't Go to Work, by Madeena Spray Nolan (1978)

This one jumped out at me right away, not from some abandoned library here in Detroit but from the shelf of a tiny used bookstore in tiny Northport, Michigan. This book is clearly intended for children dealing with a parent's unemployment, but I can't help out but enjoy and appreciate its positive portrayal of fatherhood and the difficulty of dealing with the challenges to masculinity that are a part of a nontraditional situation (both fairly unusual topics for a book written more than thirty-five years ago).

 
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Terrifying Nixon-Era Children's Books: The House Biter by William D. Sheldon (ill. Dan Dickas) (1966)

Published in 1966, just as Johnson's Great Society was really getting started, The House Biter seems to have been inspired by the (probably understandable) fear children might have of the giant construction equipment then dotting the urban landscape, particularly those huge excavators with giant grapples for tearing down historic architecture so that cheap, modern, and totally disposable buildings could be thrown up in its wake. Like Bam Zam Boom, this book is a window into that strange, pre-preservation era when it just made sense to everyone that old stuff should just get knocked down. Today it seems somewhat strange to see that mentality articulated so bluntly in a book meant for children.

In this book, the machine calls itself "the house biter," because that's not nearly as scary as "hydraulic excavator," right?

He bites houses of any size, really. Including houses the size of your house. . .

See, nowhere is safe. Not even school.

That's all he does, really.

I like the way that woman is staring dreamily at the house biter. She can't wait for that historic home next door to be demolished!

I'll bet the new school is going to be really lovely, too, with none of that annoying old stonework or that leaky, 60-year-old roof. . .

 
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Another Selection from our Collection of Terrifying Reagan-Era Children's Books: Goodbye Rune (1986)

Here we have what is perhaps the saddest children's book we own. I pity the poor parent who buys this thinking Goodbye Rune is another stupid Goodnight Moon knockoff. It starts out pleasant enough, with two children romping across the Scandinavian fields together. . .

. . .and hold each other ever so tenderly. . .

Goodbye Rune was originally published in Norway as Farvel, Rune. In America, when we farm out the task of talking to our kids about difficult subjects like sex or death to a book, we're usually more inclined to euphemism and stories about anthropomorphic leaves or kindly honey badgers or the unreadable text of Judith Vigna. In Norway or Denmark or wherever the hell, I guess you give your child a book with haunting illustrations of bloating corpses floating in the fjord.

I do feel like I understand Lars von Trier a little bit better now.

The paintings are all really beautiful, though wouldn't you say there's a terrifying (though not-wholly inappropriate) anxiety in those brush strokes? I've never before seen a children's book that looked like it was illustrated by Edvard Munch.

And you thought the book about the boy who wanted to keep his grandpa's corpse in his closet was grim.

Then, as if things weren't bleak enough, as soon as poor Rune's tiny white coffin is placed in the earth, here comes the harsh Norwegian winter (where even the aurora borealis is colorless).

The saddest thing about finding this book at the thrift store was thinking about why someone ever bought it in the first place.

 

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