What a lovely treasure!

Hello bookworm friends! I made an exciting book discovery this morning!

I just love it when that happens! Often it is a book that I have long forgotten about, perhaps one I used to read to the children when they were inky-winky munchkins – or it could be an old book of mine that I forgot I still had and was excited to get to read again.

Now that my children are older, however, they will every now and then have a book in their own collections that I don’t know about. When they were little, I knew every single book of theirs, often by heart. I spent countless hours cleaning up and reorganizing their book shelves, as well as reading to them. You will often come into this house nowadays, however, and find all five of us with our noses in our own books.

What also comes into play here is the Annual Richardson Independent School District book fair at Valley View Mall. Every year, thousands upon thousands of books are sold and the proceeds pay for scholarships for a handful of lucky seniors, and also teachers. Let me tell you, the Roberson crowd eats this UP! We will go and all meander about, looking and looking and looking at the unbelievable amount of books. A few times, we have been lucky to catch the ‘bag sale’ – $10 for all the books you can stuff into a paper grocery bag! Yeehaaawww!! And well, when that happens, I just don’t get to see all that the children come home with. (I started that sentence with ‘and’ and ended it with a preposition! I hope there are no grammar police hiding behind any of these billboards! eek!) Anyway, we all come home with our own bags and find a spot on the floor somewhere to dump our loot and paw all over our new treasures!

I try to go around and see all of the books the children have come home with, as, after all, children’s books are one of my biggest weaknesses, but, I just miss some of them in all the hullaballoo.

Eventually we find some place to put our beloved stockpiles, and then we go on about our business.

Fast forward to August, we have moved to Alabama, we don’t have as much storage space in this house, so we are still living with boxes. Fun. I am going from room to room trying to get my little creatures out of their beds to get ready for school. Lined up in the hallway are some boxes whose contents have already been pillaged, so their lids are askew. I happen to lean over one and take a peak, and I see some of the boys’ books. I delve a bit further, seeing books I am already quite familiar with, until….there it is….

A really cool book that I am sure I’ve never laid eyes upon! “Whose is this? Where’d this come from? This is so cool!”

“Huh, Mom? Wha?,” sleepy voices murmur.

“This book! Whose is it?” Silence. I swipe it and off I go to my desk to sit and wonder at this great book whose acquaintance I’ve until now been deprived of.
The book is called, The Kingfisher Treasury of Giant and Monster Stories, chosen by Jane Olliver and illustrated by Annabel Spenceley. There are fourteen stories, some of which are familiar, and the rest which are not so everyday. The illustrations are black and white and very whimsical and sort of have the text wrapped around them in some places…which I think adds to their whimsy.

It is just all in all a really neat book. And was such a lovely treasure to start my day with this morning.

My daughter eventually came into the kitchen and told me that it was my son’s and he got it from the RISD book fair and I realized, “oh, ok, that makes sense” as so many of those books get missed by my prying-mother-bookworm eyes.

If you are in the Dallas area in February, you really should check out the RISD bookfair – it is quite a treasure itself! People come from all over the country to shop for books each year. Remember – Valley View Mall, you could just keep an eye out for it on the RISD website: www.risd.org

I was also so excited that with this post, I could finally use one of my Amazon links I’ve yet to use. And then I discovered the link for this wonderful book has no graphic with it! What? The cover is great, too – that’s nuts!

Well, here it is:

GO READ A BOOK!