The Children's Own Readers: Book Three
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Authors
Cusack, Alice M.
Day, Maurice
Pennell, Mary E.
Sichel, Harold
Issue Date
1936
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Book, Whole
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Abstract
This book is a reprinting of the 1929 original by the same authors and publishers. What has changed? The thirty-seven original stories have grown to forty-one. A curious Note of Thanks at the beginning there had declared Five thousand children read sixty stories and decided which ones they liked best. This book contains the thirty-seven stories which received the most votes. Now we read the same, but instead of thirty-seven we read forty-one. It would be fun to know the facts behind these assertions. Did the editors go back and add the four next vote-getting stories? Did they try five thousand new students? The cover's picture has changed from marching bears in green and orange to a Dutch boy with geese in blue and white. Though many of the plates are the same, the book's format is slightly smaller. That is, margins have been reduced. No fables have been cut or added. Four substitutions of a new item for an old have been made so cleverly that the page totals of the book still match through the first thirty-seven items. Two items remain the same but have new titles; Earning a Holiday has become Getting Ready for a Holiday (263), and The Flame Fiend has become Fire! Fire! (279). I notice a slight subtraction from the prose on 224. Let me borrow from my comments there about the three well-told fables. The first is AL (41) with two illustrations by Day. The second is The Wise Jackal (52) with four illustrations by Day. The last is The Monkey and the Crocodile (197), apparently with four illustrations by Sichel, since they are not signed as Day's are. This fable is told with differences from the standard version. Here it is an older crocodile, not a wife or mother, who demands a monkey's heart. The monkey and crocodile are not friends before the action of the fable. The monkey has left his heart on a fig tree; all the figs are monkey hearts!
Description
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Publisher
Ginn and Company
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Identifier
3943 (Access ID)