Greek Child's Play

Published in 1945 by Little Brown & Company, Adventures with the Gods by Catharine Sellew and illustrated by George and Doris Hauman is a charming primer created for young children. It contains sixteen stories featuring the heroes of Greek mythology as well as the gods and goddesses of Mount Olympus. The book even includes a handy index of all the characters' names and how to pronounce them. This delightful collection of stories provides an accessible introduction to the fascinating world of Greek mythology, making it an enchanting read for both children and adults.

Catharine Sellew, an American author, has a talent for turning ancient myths and legends into children's stories. Written using simple language and ideas, her stories create an almost fairytale-like experience for readers. It's no surprise that her works are captivating and beloved by many.

George and Doris Hauman were a married couple and American children’s book illustrators. They are perhaps most well-known for illustrating the popular 1954 edition of The Little Engine That Could. The couple decided to collaborate on projects because they had so many customers in common. They also used a joint signature for all of their illustrations.

View other Classics posts.

View our other posts on children's books.

-Melissa, Special Collections Classics Intern

the kids are having a bad day

(from hello sunshine)

⤵️THIS POST📩 IS FOR 👻FREAKS👻 ONLY

NON 🤡 FREAKS 📵👎DNI 🙅🏻‍♀️ 😤

@jeffrey-combs-smash-or-pass a new destination on the roadmap of pain 😔

Emily Dickinson, Could mortal Lip divine, [ca. 1877] [Emily Dickinson Archive. Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA]

Bibl.: The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, Edited by Thomas H. Johnson, Little, Brown and Company, Boston, MA, and Toronto, 1960, p. 602; Emily Dickinson's Poems. As She Preserved Them, Edited by Cristanne Miller, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, and London, 2016, p. 609

Could mortal Lip divine (J1409, F1456A) Could mortal Lip divine The elemental Freight Of it's a delivered Syllable – 'Twould crumble with the weight – The Prey of Unknown Zones – The Pillage of the Sea The Tabernacles of the Minds That told the Truth to me –

*Please don't repost outside tumblr*

why does everything i get really into always end up being so god damn niche. by the year 2035 i am going to be blogging exclusively about the interpersonal relationships between the pillbugs and snails hiding underneath the bricks lining the flowerbeds in my parent's garden.

I don't read a ton of books about science or scientists, but Katie Spalding's book, Edison's Ghosts: The Untold Weirdness of History's Greatest Geniuses (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO), which was released in May, is easily one of the most entertaining books I've read in the past couple of years.

When you're sitting down to read a book by someone with a PhD in mathematics, you don't expect it to be fun from cover-to-cover, let alone flat-out funny. In fact -- and I know that the fine folks at Hachette won't be able to use this in a blurb -- but Dr. Spalding's book is fucking hilarious! And that description is especially fitting because Katie Spalding had to have set some sort of record for creative profanity in a book primarily about science and scientists, an achievement that only makes Edison's Ghosts more entertaining by the chapter.

Speaking of chapters, I can't do justice to Dr. Spalding or Edison's Ghosts -- which was published in Harding's native UK under the even better title of The Limits of Genius: How Some of the World's Greatest Minds Were Surprisingly Stupid -- with a couple of quick paragraphs, so I'm just going to share some of the actual titles of the chapters of the book from the table of contents so you can get a hint of how amazing this book truly is:

1. The Mathematical Cult Leader Pythagoras, and His Incredibly Stupid Death 2. Confucius Was an Ugly Nerd with Low Self-Esteem 3. Never, Ever Hire Leonardo da Vinci 4. Galileo Utterly Fails to Read the Room 6. When René Descartes Got Baked 10. Émilie du Châtelet Cares Not for Your Social Mores, and She Will Fight You in Her Underwear to Prove It 13. Lord Byron, the Patron Saint of Fuckboys 16. John Couch Adams Ignores His Mail, Loses Neptune 18. Charles Darwin: Glutton; Worm Dad; Murderer? 20. Sigmund Freud Used Cocaine So Much He Thought Numbers Wanted to Kill Him 21. Arthur Conan Doyle Gets Pranked So Hard He Claims Fairies Exist 23. Real-Life Supervillain Nikola Tesla Takes the Term 'Pigeon Fancying' a Bit Too Literally 24. Marie Curie Defies All the Odds to Accidentally Poison Both Herself and Thousands of Strangers 25. Albert Einstein: Public Nuisance, Love Rat 29. Yukio Mishima and the Shortest, Gayest Fascist Coup in History 30. NASA Forgets about Women, Toilets and the Metric System

And those are just SOME of the actual chapter titles. If you don't want to read Edison's Ghosts: The Untold Weirdness of History's Greatest Geniuses after that taste, you're as big of an idiot as many of history's geniuses, as Katie Spalding so colorfully reveals in this brilliant book, available now from Hachette Book Group's Little, Brown and Company

Weekly preview. A lot of graphic novels!

Weekly preview. A lot of graphic novels! See what's coming to GPTV! #comics #comicbooks #graphicnovel

There are a lot of comics coming out every week to be covered. Check out some of what we’ll be reviewing and this is only the beginning! This week’s reviews include: All is Nat Lost (Scholastic) Absolute Zeros (Little Brown and Company) The Baker and the Bard (Feiwel and Friends) Feeding Ghosts (Farrar Straus and Giroux) Forsynthia: Rise of the Cupcakes (Paw Prints Publishing) Making…

View On WordPress

I love deciding "HECK it! we ball!" and coming up with concept for designs via drawing SCRATCH. No more struggling to come up with each design on another canvas...draw em in a silly line up in the least amount of quality possible!

The Drowned Woods by Emily Lloyd-Jones

"The truth was simpler and more frightening: He did such things because he cared. A person with a knife was one thing. A person with a knife and a cause could topple kingdoms."

Year Read: 2022

Rating: 3/5

About: Mer is the last living water diviner, on the run from an ambitious and wicked prince who's bound her into slavery. When her old mentor shows up with a job that can undermine the prince's power for good, she can't help but be tempted. It's a dangerous heist that requires her particular talent to destroy the magical well that protects the king's lands. With the help of a death-cursed ironfetch, a corgi, and the princess of thieves (who also happens to be Mer's ex-girlfriend), they'll have to risk their lives to reach the well and stop more war and conquest before it even begins. I received a free e-ARC through NetGalley from the publishers at Little, Brown. Trigger warnings: character death (on-page), child/spouse death, suicide, drowning, slavery, torture/branding, severe injury, violence, poison, guilt, self-loathing.

Thoughts: I fell in love with The Bone Houses, but while there's plenty to like about this book, it doesn't fall quite as particularly into my areas of interest (no zombies, for one thing). The Drowned Woods is a more typical fantasy of kingdom politics and overthrowing the wicked ruler, and those are things I actively avoid in my reading. There's nothing wrong with them, but the genre is saturated with that story. I've read it too many times, and it was never one of my favorites to begin with. However, if you are a fan of that, there are plenty of small, delightful details that stand out about this book.

To begin with, Lloyd-Jones's writing is beautiful just on a sentence level in a way that makes me want to read all her books regardless of subject, and the Welsh mythology is always really interesting. I didn't particularly bond with any of the characters this time around, but I think that was more of a me-thing than a them-thing. Mer's history and motivations are complicated and well-drawn, and I'm usually down for a quiet, mysterious male lead who can win every fight but doesn't want to. Their development, both separately and together, is enough to drive the novel. All fantasy books should also have an animal sidekick, and while it isn't quite on the level of zombie goat, I enjoyed the corgi.

Plot-wise, it's rather meandering and slow-moving, and that's not always a bad thing. What I thought was going to be the turning point came a little earlier than expected, leaving the book not quite able to sustain the level of urgency it needed for everything that came after. I have some issues with Mer's ending as well, but that’s more of a general theme issue than a problem with this specific novel. My favorite part of the book was the little nod to The Bone Houses, which probably says enough all on its own.

Woman Writer of the Week

In my ongoing quest to discover the folk literature in Special Collections, I was excited to find a book of fairy tales that were retold as well as illustrated by women! It is always very exciting to find a twofer, and I feel these two compliment each other very well.

The book in question is Favorite Fairy Tales Told in Scotland, which contains six popular retellings by American librarian, writer, authority in children's literature, and collector of international fairy tales for children Virginia Haviland (1911-1988), with illustrations by multiple Caldecott Honor awardee Adrienne Adams (1906-2002). This first edition copy was published simultaneously in Boston and Toronto by Little, Brown & Company in 1963.

This book is from the Favorite Fairy Tales series, which consists of sixteen volumes, each focusing on fairy tales compiled from sixteen different countries, retold in “simple, faithful versions”. Part of Haviland’s reasoning behind compiling these stories was to “make them more accessible for children.” Haviland was considered a pioneer for her work in compiling these tales into dedicated books.

Adams began her career first as a freelance designer of displays, murals, textiles, and greeting cards. After marrying children’s book writer John Lonzo Anderson (1905-1993), she illustrated his book Bag of Smoke that began her career as an illustrator. She became a full-time illustrator in 1952 and illustrated more than thirty books that ranged from contemporary stories to fairy tales. The media for her colored illustrations ranged from tempera, gouache, watercolor, to crayon.

View more Women’s History Month posts.

View more posts on our Children’s Books.

- Elizabeth V., Special Collections Undergraduate Writing Intern

pt got canceled today bc of technical issues, so i spent the day deep cleaning. let me just say i did SO much that i haven't had the energy or motivation to do in MONTHS. i am so fucking proud of myself ahhhh

Franny and Zooey (1961)

J.D. Salinger

Little, Brown

Emily Dickinson, Tell all the truth but tell it slant, [ca. 1868, or 1872] [Emily Dickinson Archive. Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA]

Bibl.: The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, Edited by Thomas H. Johnson, Little, Brown and Company, Boston, MA, and Toronto, 1960, pp. 506-507; Emily Dickinson's Poems. As She Preserved Them, Edited by Cristanne Miller, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, and London, 2016, pp. 563-564

Tell all the truth but tell it slant (J1129, F1263A) Tell all the truth but tell it slant – Success in Circuit lies Too bright for our infirm Delight The Truth's superb surprise As Lightning to the Children eased With explanation kind The Truth must dazzle moderately gradually Or every man be blind –

Coming soon from Sandra Boynton!

Dinosaurs in Trucks Because Hey, Why Not?

available May 7th, 2024 from Little Brown Books for Young Readers

You like dinosaurs. Of course you do! Dinosaurs are terrific! I like them too.  You also like trucks and watching them go.  Dinos never had trucks. (As far as we know.)