At one of the book sales held this year at the Lorain Public Library, I picked up a couple of vintage issues of Children’s Digest. It was published monthly by Parents’ Magazine Press, Inc., a subsidiary of the publishers of Parents’ Magazine.
Above you see the cover of the December 1958 issue, which cost a whopping 25 cents.
It was quite an ambitious little magazine. According to its Wiki entry, the magazine was published from October 1950 to May/June 2009 and was conceived as sort of a Reader’s Digest for children, reprinting the best material from other sources.
As described in an ad that ran in the December issue, it was “124 gaily illustrated pages with a wealth of wonderful stories to be enjoyed again and again. Dickens, Stevenson, Kipling, PLUS best new stories by modern authors. Each monthly issue is full of exciting fun – games, things to do, pictures in color. Good comics, science features, jokes and riddles. Printed on green-tinted “eye-ease” paper.”
A Christmas-themed rebus was featured.
This page (below) was aimed at those kids interested in science.
(In case you’re wondering what the answer is, here it is as it appeared in the magazine: “It is not possible for a star to be inside a crescent moon. The crescent is simply an edge of the moon illuminated by the sun. The rest of the round moon is still there, only it is dark and you cannot see it against the dark sky. To be inside the crescent, a star would have to be between the moon and the earth, but no star is that close to us.”
For stories, this issue had some good ones. Our pal Paul Bunyan is featured in a winter-themed tale.
And Leo Tolstoy, the author of War and Peace penned this nifty story. (Hmm, maybe it’s not a good time in this country to be promoting something Russian.)
But the story is a good one (you can read it here), and stresses the importance of working hard to get ahead, comrade.
If Communist fairy tales aren’t your thing, there was also a classic story from the Brothers Grimm.
For me, though, the best thing in the magazine was the reprint of Babar and Father Christmas by Jean De Brunhoff. We had one or two books about the famous, cultured pachyderm when I was a kid and it was nice to revisit an old storybook friend.
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I’ve mentioned a few times on this blog how I work for a printing and direct mail company. It was interesting to look at this book from a printing perspective.
The ‘eye-ease' paper seemed kind of low-quality. I’ve never seen so many particles and bits of ’stuff’ in paper before.
I got a kick out of the two-color illustrations throughout the issue. Back in those days, the art had to be separated by hand using overlays, giving the finished product a rough, offbeat charm. We were still doing it that way back in the early 1980s when I started at the company.
From a mailing perspective, the business reply card bound in the magazine was pretty outrageous compared to what we are used to seeing now. No zip codes yet at the time when this issue came out; they were still a few years away.
Children's Digest was one of the magazines my mother ordered for me when I was little, along with "Humpty Dumpty", and "Highlights for Children". I looked forward to them every month, and learned a lot.
ReplyDeleteUnlike Alan, my parents must have decided I was not worth acculturating, so they spared me the kids' magazines. That's OK, Leo Tolstoy would have been a tough sell to me back then. (Or now.)
ReplyDeleteLooks like the mag was run on cheapo newsprint. They spent money on artwork, but cut back on production costs and used public-domain stories.
Gee, I only saw "Highlights" at the dentist, Alan! (Always thought the all-wooden Timbertoes family was a little creepy, probably because they were not only easily breakable, but combustible too.)
ReplyDeleteMy mother ordered "Highlights for Children" too. I especially liked "Goofus and Gallant" which depicted the actions of a "bad" kid versus the "good" kid.
ReplyDelete"Highlights" also had a bear family cartoon feature that was slightly off kilter; a society devoid of humans (not unlike the Planet of the Apes world) populated with just anthropomorphic bears walking on two feet and wearing clothes.
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