Children's books

When I was little, we had tons of children's books!  Little Golden Books were the best.  They had stories like The Pokey Little Puppy and a tugboat or dump truck as an animate character.  We also had Rand McNally Elf books and Tell a Tale books and Wonder Books.  I remember stuff like Random House children's versions of The Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland.  They already had some "product placement" books promoting Band-Aids or the Good Humor Man.

One of the stories we had was Bertram and the Ticklish Rhinoceros, about a kid called Bertram who had to deal with a wild rhino following him home and wrecking things. Near the end there's the line "Bertram's father slapped him good," meaning that he slapped the rhino, but I thought it meant that he slapped Bertram!

At school we ordered SBS books.  I got stuff like Erich Kastner's Emil and the Detectives, about some German kids catching a bank robber, or the novelization of the Disney comedy A $1,000,000 Duck, or a book about the variety show comedian Flip Wilson.  Several times at the end of the year they'd run out of one of the books I'd ordered and send me a completely different one instead.

And we borrowed lots of children's books from the library.  I read most of the Dr. Suess books, as well as stuff like Edward Ardizzone's books about Tim, a boy who went to sea, or the Scottish boy Wee Gillis.  I could go on forever...

One thing I should mention is that I don't care for children's books that show animals wearing human clothes!