Poky Puppy Turns 75
This story is about a month old now, but I wanted to comment on it nonetheless.
'The Poky Little Puppy' And His Fellow Little Golden Books Are Turning 75
Little Golden Books.
I remember having many, many of them as a kid.
The Poky Little Puppy
Scuffy the Tugboat.
The Saggy Baggy Elephant.
And.....
The Monster at the End of This Book.
(Remember who the monster was? see end of this post)
I still recall Little Goldens being given away as the Happy Meal "toy" at McDonalds.
Yeesh, that was years ago.
From the article above:
There were a lot of reasons that Golden Books became an instant success when they were first published. The most obvious one was the price — they cost just 25 cents. Up until then, children's books were found mostly in libraries or high-end book stores and were meant to be handled with care.
In the 1960s Golden Books drew criticism for their lack of racial diversity, and the creative teams behind the books worked to make them more inclusive. In the '70s, Golden Books began getting some competition from inexpensive paperbacks; by the '90s, the company went bankrupt.
REST OF THE STORY: Ownership of the books (and publishing rights) now belongs to Penguin Random House.
The trivia buff in me found this quite interesting......
First 12 Little Golden Books (1942) were:
Three Little Kittens, by Marie Simchow Stern
Bedtime Stories, illus. Gustaf Tenggren
Mother Goose, by Phyllis Fraser, illus. Gertrude E. Espenscheid
Prayers for Children, by Rachel Taft Dixon
The Little Red Hen, illus. Rudolf Freund
Nursery Songs, by Leah Gale, illus. Corinne Malvern
The Alphabet from A to Z, by Leah Gale, illus. Vivienne Blake and Richard Peck
The Poky Little Puppy, by Janette Sebring Lowrey, illus. Gustaf Tenggren
The Golden Book of Fairy Tales, by Winfield Scott Hoskins
Baby's Book of Objects
The Animals of Farmer Jones, by Leah Gale, illus. Richard Scarry
This Little Piggy and Other Counting Rhymes, by Phyllis Cerf Wagner, illus. Roberta Harris Pfafflin Petty
Note that Poky Little Puppy is on that list.
And look-- I found our household's copy:
Out for now.......
Matt
p.s. answer to monster question above: Grover from Sesame Street
