Best in Children's Books, Volume 18b

Abstract

See my comments on Volume 18a. This copy has no dust jacket and has stronger coloring in its illustrations. Its last story is Let's Go to Israel (156). I presume that this is a later printing of the same book, perhaps after the Belgian Congo became independent and changed its name to Congo on June 30, 1960. (This name was changed to Zaire in 1971.) One strong clue is that Volumes 7 through 22 use the formula Let's Visit in the titles of their last pieces. Starting with Volume 27, a standard title formula is Let's Go to. So I place the edition offering Let's Go to Israel as printed at the same time as these later editions and see it as a revised version of a putatively earlier edition featuring Let's Visit the Belgian Congo. Dee Jones' Index of the series (University of Southern Mississipipi, 1997) knows only this (later) version featuring Israel rather than the Belgian Congo. From what I can gather from this careful index, the series never got back to Congo or Zaire. Not everything was fixed to accommodate the change: If we are not visiting the Congo, what is the black man with a bow doing on the spine? I cannot find any other story in the volume that has the least reference to a black warrior!