Scholastic Fest: #24, Doctor Dolittle Tales

(Note: This series started yesterday with this post.)

• Title: Doctor Dolittle Tales
• Author/illustrator: Hugh Lofting (1886-1947)
• Publisher: Scholastic Book Services
• Year: Third printing, August 1968
• Excerpt:

  "He was very fond of animals and kept many kinds of pets. Besides the goldfish in the pond at the bottom of his garden, he had rabbits in the pantry, white mice in his piano, a squirrel in the linen closet, and a hedgehog in the cellar. He had a cow with a calf too, and an old lame horse — twenty-five years of age — and chickens, and pigeons, and two lambs, and many other animals. But his favorite pets were Dab-Dab the duck, Jip the dog, Gub-Gub the baby pig, Polynesia the parrot, and the owl Too-Too."
  

• Notes: This 144-page book has numerous copyrights, the most recent of which is in 1968 by Christopher Lofting, who was Hugh Lofting's son and the executor of his literary estate. It would seem that this book features a selection and/or abridgement of Doctor Dolittle stories from other books, as Doctor Dolittle Tales is not the title of any of the 12 books in the primary Dolittle oeuvre. ... Chapter titles include "Puddleby," "More Money Troubles," "Polynesia," "The Purple Bird of Paradise," "Hawk's Head Mountain," "The Coronation of King Jong," and "Shellfish Language at Last." ... The back cover promotes the 1967 movie Doctor Dolittle, featuring Rex Harrison, Richard Attenborough and Peter Bull, among others.

Happy October, which is the month for Ghostly Fun

I didn't want to let the first day of October, the best month of the year, end without a reference to Halloweeny things.

As a bonus, this post ties in perfectly with the Scholastic Book Club series that began earlier today.

Pictured is the cover illustration for Ghostly Fun, which was written by Ann McGovern and published in 1970 by Scholastic Book Services.

It's a book of goofy games, jokes, riddles and puzzles. The kind of wonderfully punny jokes my daughter loves. There are sections titled Ghostly Giggles, Funtastic Fortunes and The Disappearing Demon Game. "You'll laugh your head off," states the text on the back cover. "Hours of grisly fun for all boy-demons and girl-ghouls."

An Amazon reviewer named David wrote the following about this Scholastic book in 2007: "I read it every day in the 1st grade and recently purchased it again. It brings back all the fun of being a little kid who liked to play ghosts and haunted house!"

***
For grown-ups, here are some other fun and spooky links and items I've come across recently:

• Author J.W. Ocker is well into his 2014 Halloween blogging, a yearly tradition. His must-read posts so far on Odd Things I've Seen include The Witch Grave of Yazoo City, St. Louis Exorcist Sites and Elmwood Cemetery in Memphis.
• Nine Of The Most Terrifying Two-Sentence Horror Stories Ever Told (Do not read right before bed.)
• Looking for something different when it comes to longer ghost stories? Check out Tartarus Press of Yorkshire, England. It publishes works by both modern authors and classic ghost-story and weird-fiction writers such as Arthur Machen, Hugh Walpole and Oliver Onions. They also have a twice-a-year journal devoted to supernatural fiction called Wormwood.
• Even more spooky book choices, focusing on the past: Varney the Vampire; or, The Feast of Blood, written by James Malcolm Rymer and newly edited and annotated by Curt Herr; Written with My Left Hand, by Nugent Barker; and The Night Season: Lost Tales from the Golden Age of Macabre, edited by Duane Parsons.

Scholastic Fest: #25, Frog and Toad Are Friends

As I explained a couple of days ago, I spent some time this year, for nostalgia's sake, acquiring vintage Scholastic books, the kind you got through the Scholastic Book Club. Starting today, I'm going to count down, in reverse order like the late Casey Kasem, my Top 25 favorite covers. I'll have a new post at 1 p.m. (EDT) each day. (I still be blogging about ephemera this month, of course. Consider this a bonus feature.)

Here's #25...

• Title: Frog and Toad Are Friends
• Author/illustrator: Arnold Lobel (1933-1987)
• Publisher: Scholastic Book Services
• Year: First printing, December 1971
• Excerpt:

  Toad was sitting on his front porch.
  Frog came along and said,
  "What is the matter, Toad?"
  You are looking sad."
  
  "Yes," said Toad.
  "This is my sad time of the day,
  It is the time
  when I wait for the mail to come.
  It always makes me very unhappy."
  
  "Why is that?" asked Frog.
  
  "Because I never get any mail,"
  said Toad.

• Notes: Lobel's Frog and Toad books are among the most well-known and beloved children's books of the second half of the 20th century. There were four books in all, published between 1970 and 1979. This first one, Frog and Toad Are Friends, earned a Caldecott Honor award (essentially a runner-up to the Randolph Caldecott Medal). All of the books remain in print in various formats and remain top sellers. How many of you received your first book in this series through the Scholastic Book Club? How many of you still have that copy? ... Additional reading: This excellent June 2012 blog post on the School Library Journal website discusses Frog and Toad Are Friends and its origins.

Fanzine flashback #3: 1963's "Pot Pourri" by John Berry

Previously on "Fanzine flashback"
Fanzine flashback #1: 1964's "Con" by Christopher Priest
Fanzine flashback #2: 1964's "Hobgoblin" by Terry Carr

Flashback #1 also includes, toward the bottom, a list of all the vintage fanzines that I plan to feature in this fledgling series.

And now for the third installment...

Fanzine flashback #3: At a glance

Title: Pot Pourri
Issue: No. 30
Date: July 1963
Primary theme: Humorous fiction
Pages: 20
Size: 8 inches by 10 inches
Binding: Four staples
Editor: John Berry
Editor's location: Number 31, Campbell Park Avenue, Belmont, Belfast 4, Northern Ireland
Cover artwork: Arthur "ATom" Thomson (1927-1990)

Background: About John Berry

Although Berry wasn't as famous as the first two fanzine editors featured here (Christopher Priest and Terry Carr), he was quite well-known on the zine scene during the 1950s and 1960s.

Fancyclopedia 3 states that "John E. Berry discovered fandom while serving as an English policeman in Belfast."¹ Berry published numerous fanzines, including The Loneliness of the Long Distance Goat Herder. In 1960, he won the Skyrack poll for best fan writer.

With regard to Pot Pourri, there were 52 issues published between 1958 and 1968. ZineWiki² has a short history of the fanzine that contains this anecdote:

John Berry specialized in humourous fan writing. He recounts in Relapse giving Walt Willis the first issue: "When I gave Willis my first issue he observed, with raised eyebrows and slightly flared nostrils ... 'Er, John, this is rather a mundane title.' This was a truly wonderful moment for me, but I successfully concealed my emotion. You see, Irish Fandom in the fifties and early sixties was the epicentre of magnificent puns and verbal activity, pure spontaneous wit, and Walt Willis was the guiding genius. But he’d missed this one! Northern Ireland has always been religiously orientated ... the title is pronounced ‘po-poor-ee’ (according to my dictionary, anyway). The 'T' is silent. Hence, my title was a pun on 'Popery'! Even James White, a Roman Catholic, missed it – or did he? Maybe they collectively chose to ignore my unsubtle word-play, feeling sorry for my effort, an Englishman becoming involved in Irish religious affairs on an international scale."

Berry died of cancer in 2011, according to Fancyclopedia 3.

About this issue

Pot Pourri #30 contains a single tale, on 16 single-spaced typed pages, titled "The Return of the Goon." The humorous tale is a James Bond parody featuring fanzine-related plot points and a protagonist who uses a "plonker" (toy gun that shoots suction-cup arrows) as his weapon of choice.

The story, with its silly mix of James Bond espionage and womanizing and its absurd clues from the world of fanzines, isn't half bad. In addition to plonker, here are some other neat words and phrases Berry employs:

• trilby — a narrow-brimmed hat
• hobnail boots — boots with nails inserted into the soles to increase durability
• egoboo — a sci-fi fandom/fanzine word that means "ego boost." [As in: "All of those Supreme Court justices emailing me about how much they enjoy Papergreat was a huge egoboo."]

I'll leave you with this short excerpt from "The Return of the Goon":

"When the house was empty, I couldn't restrain the temptation any longer. I went to the Lumber Room, took off my smoking jacket and purple corduroys, and put on the G.D.A. outfit. I looked at my reflection in the mirror. Yes ... the whole vista came before my eyes ... the reflection in the mirror changed ... I saw myself as I had been years before, a dashing defective³ ... plonker in hand .... hmm ... I wondered ... where exactly was the plonker? I searched feverishly through the remains of the rubbish in the trunk ... yes, there it was, red with rust. I recalled I had oiled it, but with the passing decade...

"I fitted a plonker in the barrel ... put the plonker in the specially prepared inside pocket of the trench coat, then backed away from the mirror. I had to test my draw ... once a lightening draw, enabling me, at my peak, to shoot off five plonkers before the first one splatted home. Always with dead accuracy."

Footnotes
1. Fancyclopedia 3 also states in the John Berry entry that he "was known for playing ghoodminton with an exceedingly physical and violent style." And what was Ghoodminton? It "was a fannish equivalent of badminton; the only place you could play it was in the attic of Oblique House, the [Walt] Willis home at 170 Upper Newtownards Road in Belfast. The net was stretched between a printing press and a chair; a decrepit shuttlecock and two squares of cardboard were only equipment there was only one enforced regulation for the game: you couldn't throw heavy objects at your opponent."
2. ZineWiki is "an open-source encyclopedia devoted to zines and independent media. It covers the history, production, distribution and culture of the small press." It was created by Alan Lastufka and Kate Sandler in 2006.
3. I'm not sure if that word was supposed to be "detective."

On deck: A Very Scholastic October

Back in March, I wrote about an odd sketch that I had found tucked away inside a 1968 paperback edition of Encyclopedia Brown Solves Them All from Scholastic Book Services.

The vintage Scholastic book set off a bit of nostalgia for me. These were some of the books that I grew up with. We'd get the Scholastic Book Club brochure and order form once a month in our language arts classroom and then anxiously await the arrival of our books, and sometimes the new issue of Dynamite, a few weeks later. It was Amazon before Amazon. And long before drone delivery.

Anyway ... while I was working on that post in March, I tweeted about my fondness/weakness for old Scholastic books.

I'm teetering on the edge of falling down the rabbit hole of obsession with 1970s @Scholastic books. Do NOT need another thing to collect.

— Chris Otto (@Papergreat) March 19, 2014

Scholastic's Twitter account promptly encouraged my descent into obsession.

@Papergreat We'd LOVE to see a photo of your collection if you're willing to share!

— Scholastic (@Scholastic) March 19, 2014

So, over the course of the spring and summer, I acquired Scholastic books here and there, on the cheap, at bookstores and used-book sales. They're not that hard to come across, but I did get the sense that the pre-1980 volumes are becoming a bit more scarce.

As you can see in the photo at the top of this post (featuring guest star Mitts), I have built a respectable collection of nearly 40 Scholastic books.

(I'm far from the only one with this interest. There is, for example, this fabulous collection on Flickr.)

To celebrate and share my fledgling pile, I'm going to count down my Top 25 favorite covers starting on October 1. I'll put up a new cover at 1 p.m. (EDT) each day. Also, at some point, I'm going to write about the most garish and hilarious Scholastic covers I came across in my scouting. Because they can't all be winners.

So come back to Papergreat every afternoon in October, and share your memories of the Scholastic Book Club and all of your favorite childhood books.

P.S. — And no, I'm not doing this series to fill the dark void left by the Philadelphia Phillies missing the playoffs for the third straight October. ... OK, maybe I am.

"It's Time To Renew," according to this anthropomorphic alarm clock

Ahh, the joys of anthropomorphic illustrations.¹ This alarming clock is featured on a slightly pinkish old card from the mailing department of The Patriot. The cursive text states:

"In sending you this little greeting — anticipating renewal — please accept our appreciation of past courtesies. It has been a great pleasure to have your name on the mailing lists, and we sincerely enjoy the privilege. Again, we thank you!"

People were so polite in the past!

This card, 5¾ inches wide, is as thick as an ink blotter, but I don't think it was intended as such.

I'm assuming, since we're in southcentral Pennsylvania here, that The Patriot refers to The Patriot-News of Harrisburg. The Patriot, founded in 1854, was the morning paper for many decades in Harrisburg before it was merged with The Evening News in 1996 to create The Patriot-News.

The Patriot-News, which was awarded the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting for its work covering the Jerry Sandusky child-sex-abuse case, is now published just three days a week, on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. I don't know what kind of renewal notices that its current circulation department mails out, but I doubt that they feature a smiling alarm clock with hands and eyes.

Footnote
1. Other Papergreat posts featuring anthropomorphism:

• Vintage, punny get-well-soon card
• Freaky illustrations found within "The Story of Soil"
• Five groovy ads from the 1933 Furst-McNess cookbook
• 1960s Russian С Новым годом postcard ("Happy New Year!")
• Slightly creepy vintage Valentine's Day postcard
• Potentially unnecessary bonus image of a blender with a face
• Peachy little corned beef loaves and healthful cheese dishes
• Everything's better with anthropomorphism (1949's Plant Maintenance Manual)

Sunday Night Smile: Old lady and three puppies

This woman was a good sport, agreeing to hold three white puppies for a Polaroid snapshot many decades ago. Unfortunately, there is no information on the photograph telling us who she is or when this was taken.

I'm not a dog expert. Any guesses as to what kind of dogs these are?

1908 postcard: "TOO BUSY TO WRITE."

This card was postmarked on September 27, 1908, in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and it was published by Bamforth & Co.¹ of tiny Holmfirth, England, and New York. It was mailed to a Mr. Frank Eben of 926 Pear Street in Reading, Pennsylvania.²

The short message, in cursive writing, on the front of the postcard wraps around the edges in an odd way. But I believe I have determined the correct order and that it states:

"think you two very selfish, but certainly will look for you again (?)"

And so we're left to guess as to the meaning of that short note. Was the postcard writer "stood up" by the Ebens? And how do "TOO BUSY TO WRITE" and the image of the couple under the umbrella at the seashore fit into all of this? Maybe I'm thinking about it too hard.

Were people just as busy 100 years ago as they are now?³

Somewhat along these lines, my wife wrote a Facebook post this past summer in which she lamented, in part:

"Today's semi-random, definitely rambling thought: Many people lament the death of the handwritten letter, and I certainly miss those. (For a while, I was trying to send one handwritten card/letter a month, and I'd like to do that again.) But as technology progresses, I'm left lamenting the death of the long email, too. I remember in high school, exchanging these ridiculous lists of random thoughts with friends; we'd even number them, and you'd have, like, a 57-point treatise ... in your email in which point 39 was 'This point intentionally left blank.' Today, I got a nice email from my only sister NOT on Facebook, and it made me super-aware that there's just something different about the stream-of-consciousness, person-to-person, long-form communication that, though much less frequent than Facebook comments or text messages, seems more valuable somehow. Not sure why. Maybe because I can save emails and reread them when I need a pick-me-up? Maybe because it makes me feel valuable that someone spent their time actually writing out words in sentences with punctuation, not for a blog post or Facebook status for everyone, but JUST for me? I don't know, maybe it's just because I like words and always feel like I have way too many of them I'm trying to spit out."

And that ties in, too, with a post I wrote about a year and a half ago titled "Connecting with the world via postcards in 2013."

Long letters. Short postcards. Long phone calls. Greeting cards with just a name. Long emails. Short Facebook posts. Postcards with tiny writing and long messages. Texts. Tweets. Short emails. Emoji. GIFs. Yo.

Sometimes I don't think we realize how rapidly the ways in which we communicate with each other are changing. And I doubt we stop to even consider whether we should be retaining the "old" forms of communication that are most meaningful.

Footnotes
1. Bamforth & Co. was well-known for its seaside postcards, magic lantern slides, and short films, made between 1898 and 1915. Their film titles included Catching The Milk Thief, Winky Diddles The Hawker, Cod-Fish And Aloes, The Green-Eyed Monster and Have Some More Meat?
2. In a June 6, 2013, post (in the midst of the Postcard Blogathon), I featured separate postcards addressed to Frank and Emma Eben of Reading.
3. Brigid Schulte has a new book titled Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time, which sounds like an interesting read ... if I had the time.