Brain Pickings, a website which curates interesting books and info, recently featured a children’s book: The Little Golden Book of Words, first published in 1948.
It’s no longer available, unless you can find an old copy on eBay or a similar site.
But it’s precious.
It is beautifully designed and written and drawn, first of all. Here’s the “things to do” page, very straightforward:
Then it becomes a little more obscure. Here’s how to tell the time of day:
Hmm. Maybe a little rural.
Best of all: here are the days of the week.
Can you imagine explaining this to a modern child? And here’s a better question: do you, the reader, understand what these drawings mean?
There was a time when these were universally understood. Monday was washday, Tuesday ironing day, et cetera. And, best of all, Sunday we all trooped off to church. (And that looks like a very Protestant group to me, somehow.)
It all seems very quaint now. The assumptions we made! And the ideas we had!
It makes you wonder: what assumptions are we making right now, that will seem silly and irrelevant fifty or sixty years from now?
Time will tell.
