Open House for Butterflies has arrived

 

Apparently a vintage 1960 version available online from a non-local seller, listed at about twice the price of the 1982 version I acquired. Mine looks the same but without a black binding as this one has.

- Kralik?

- Yes, sir?

- Now that you're the boss, if you want to give yourself a raise...

- Well, I'll talk it over with myself, and if I don't want too much money. I'll give it to myself. 

From The Shop Around the Corner (1940) 

As I mentioned, I am constantly "gamefying" my own life, making up playful rules as I go along and amending them as I need to, often awarding myself points or deducting according to some scale that seems arbitrary but makes sense to me. If you ever saw the movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (itself based on a famous children's story), you might get the idea. 

A couple weeks ago when I decided to start building a collection of classic children's books, I decided the rules would be that I would have to find each book in person. I would not allow myself to purchase any books online. I also decided to make my first acquisition a classic picture book Open House for Butterflies, based on a random suggestion I encountered online, and buttressed by the coincidence of having rediscovered in the garage a long-lost item I call my "butterfly hat", which was created for me by my young nieces years ago.

The book was published in 1960, written by Ruth Krauss and with pictures by the great Maurice Sendak. So as I have written here previously, I went looking for it and I quickly realized that children's books published in 1960 are not easy to find. Modern children's books are, well, of a different category than ones published when I was young.

But I did find a copy for sale online on AbeBooks, one of the more famous second hand book outlets on the web. But my self-appointed rules prohibited the easy solution. That is, they did prohibit it until I noticed something about the copy for sale. It was in Phoenix! It was being offered for sale by a place called the Book Drop, which had an address west of downtown in an industrial area. I had never heard of this place. I thought it was a used book store and I immediately made plans to visit it and acquire the copy of the book as soon as possible. 

It's not a casual thing to do, to get down there. In fact, it is about thirty-file miles from where I type this. That's not something I do every day. Nevertheless I thought: I've got to get there because it is exactly what I am looking for, and apparently it is the only copy of this book available in the entire valley of five million people, including all of the county and city public libraries.

Then upon further examination, I realized that the Book Drop is not a book store that one can visit and purchase items. It's literal a warehouse where one can drop off unwanted books.  They sell books but only online.

They actually have a noble mission of "saving books from landfills", and receive many donations from libraries and thrift stores. It made me happy to hear about their mission, but I was disappointed that I couldn't purchase it in person. Here's their website.

Disappointed, I decided to make an appeal. So I convened my internal rules committee, and I decided, upon reflection and consultation with myself, to adopt the following amendment to the rules: "if a particular book is available in the local region but is purchasable only via the Internet, then such purchases are acceptable and allowed." Having obtained a favorable ruling on my appeal, I immediately purchased the book.

It took a couple days for my purchase to arrive by mail. It was smaller and thinner than I expected. From meta-information on the sales tag, I appears to be a reissue of the original work printed in 1982 as part of the "Carrot Seed Classics", which are described as "new, special-format editions of favorite picture books for every child to grow with and treasure." So it was not an original edition, but that was fine by me, at least for the time being.

Before opening the book, I savored the feeling of the smooth slender hardback cover in my hands. Then I opened it and eagerly began reading it. The text consists of a series of sentences as one might expect, each one in the form of advice to children, or commentary on some preference a child might express. Many of the pieces of advice consist of "good things to know". On the first page one finds "A screaming song is a good thing to know if you need to scream." Unlike contemporary children's books, which often strike me as sanitized and dumbed down, it contains a healthier spectrum of life circumstances.  "The minute you meet some people, you know you will hate their mothers."

I found myself laughing out loud with delight on several occasions for these bits of text that would certainly be prohibited from the saccharine of today's feelings-centered ideologies. Once again I found myself thanking God for having been born into that world instead of the current one. Everything in the book struck me as healthy in a grounded and realistic way that one could carry with one even into one's adult life.

Of course I recognized the illustrations by Sendak immediately. They were black and white line drawings, multiple ones per page. They were simple and direct, in contrast the lush color ones of his more famous later work. 

One thing that was apparent was why the book is no longer circulating as it once did. It is not only unrestrained frankness of the text that I mentioned that is out of fashion. The book struck me as not politically correct, as they used to say. In this age, that is enough to doom any book from being offerred for sale. There is mention of making an "Indian hat," for example. That sentence alone would get it banned from most current libraries as being offensive.

I felt as if I found a treasure, in a personal sense. I could easily imagine reading this to my twin nieces when they were young girls, and them enjoying it, maybe while wearing my butterfly hat. Good memories. A great second acquisition for my collection.