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Showing posts from March, 2015

Beverly Cleary and Kim Gordon (I don't know that those two names have ever been in the same sentence)

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I'm taking a few minutes to get this out there while I'm thinking of it, so it may not be a perfectly formed post. At work, I'm processing books in our library's technical services department when I come across the early 1990s reprints of Beverly Cleary's Ribsy . The illustrations are not the classic Louis Darling ones that I remember from my youth in the '70s, they are--at least in my judgment--inferior "modernized" illustrations. 1950s Louis Darling illustration from a Beverly Cleary book Part of the charm of the old Beverly Cleary books was that they were from the fifties, and the characters portrayed in the illustrations dressed differently from the Pro-Keds and cut-off jeans of my 1970s youth. I liked the exoticness of it all. It was an artifact from the past, yet the stories still had a universality that applied to my life in 1970s Detroit as much as 1950s Portland, Oregon (where the Beezus & Ramona and Henry Huggins books were set...