My Book House: The Backstory

This blog is named for the My Book House set of chidren's books. These books were first published in the 1920's and were edited by Olive Beaupre Miller. I have added a link to Ms. Miller's biographical information from Smith College, her alma mater, which holds her papers in its Sophia Smith collection.

There was a 1937 twelve-volume set of My Book House at my grandmother's house that belonged to my father and his brother. As a preschooler, whenever I visited my grandmother, she would take a volume from the old glass front bookcase in her room and read it to me. When I was in first grade, I was finally big enough to "picture walk" and read through the books on my own.

The first volume, In The Nursery, which is for infants and toddlers, has full color illustrations and is filled with a wonderful selection of Mother Goose rhymes along with nursery rhymes from all around the world and a wonderful selection of poems for children. The second volume, Story Time, has some color illustrations, and has poems and classic folktale, stories, fables from around the world.

The succeeding volumes are lavishly illustrated with beautiful three-tone blue, sepia, and orange illustrations of magical gardens and heroes and fairies and are filled with stories and poems. The reading level becomes progressively more difficult in each volume as the set was designed to provide a basic library of reading material for a child from birth to adulthood. Later volumes have stories by classic authors such as Dickens and Shakespeare.

One of my favorite stories in My Book House is the poem, "Verses on Kingsley's Water Babies", which appears in Volume 3, Up On Pair of Stairs. The author is uncredited and may have been Ms. Miller, herself, as she is frequently named as the composer of many of the poems in the books. The illustrations were a major attraction. Mariel Wilhoite's pictures of the dirty chimney sweep's transformation into a naked, gilled water baby, who rides buoys, swims underwater, and talks to the huge king of the salmon totally fascinated me as a young child probably in part because my grandmother lived at the beach.

I think, perhaps, it is a testament to the power of good children's literature and illustrations, that I still enjoy reading this poem and best of all looking at the illustrations more than forty years later. I have most of that original My Book House set. I filled in the gaps with copies purchased on E-Bay. I still enjoy looking at these books and sharing the stories and poems with my own children.

Olive Beaupre Miller was ahead of her time. She selected what she believed was the best literature for children from sources from all around the world. Her selections are still remarkably current and mostly free of culturally insensitive material. Many of the children's illustrators, whose work appears in My Book House, are among the world's most famous, including Randolph Caldecott, William Blake, and N.C. Wyeth. She was even a proponent of sex education for children in the 1930's.

So here's to the memory of Olive Beaupre Miller! When I began to look for the missing volumes of My Book House on E-bay in 1999, I researched online and could find very little information about the books and nothing about Ms. Miller. When I started this blog, I found several sites with information including the Smith College site. I am glad to know that I can now google Ms. Miller and get a hit. I can't find an entry for her on Wikipedia yet, but I'll keep checking.