My Book House

I have all 12 volumes since my mother had them as a child.  She gave me the books many years ago (before I was married and had children)  and I had no idea of the treasure I had until I had children and decided to home school. The illustrations are beautiful and my 4 year old has enjoyed nursery rhymes, poems and stories from the first couple of volumes.  I feel blessed to have a set in our home schooling library.  HTH!

Carolyn

I recommend them, too. I have some passed down to me from my grandmother from 1925. I also found 11 or the 12 at my library for sale ($7.00) from 1971. You won’t need to buy a bunch of other books if you just have these; the 6 vol. or 12 vol., it doesn’t matter. You can get them for a great price as a set or bought individually at Amazon.

If you can find some copyrighted before the ’60’s, that’d be really good; to me there’s a difference in illustrative quality after that (the ’71 version still has the original illustrators, it just has that 70’s look that I”m not too crazy about-but at $7.00, who can be that choosey?). The new ones are compleltely different; they’ve made the illustrations cartoonish instead of like artwork as they originally were- See here.

Here’s info on them from Valerie’s Books.http://www.valerieslivingbooks.info/mbh.htm

HTHm Rachel

My set are from 1958 and I love the illustrations, real keepers that is for sure. Linda

my set is also from the 1950’s and is beautiful!  Love the gradiating shades of blues and greens!  I owned this set (it was missing a couple of volumes) and a brand-spanking new looking one from like 1971, but like Rachel said, it had that retro 70’s cover, honestly can’t remember what the illustrations looked like, it didn’t have that “inviting” look to me.  So I sold it.  I just love the feel and look of my older set, so yep, I sold the complete newer set and kept my incomplete but beautiful older 1950s set.  Guess I’m quirky that way.  Nothing like holdling an old, beautiful book.  😉

 Eventually I would love to buy a complete new set (where all the volumns match, if I buy missing volumes they may not be in the same condition, there may be more/less fading, etc).  But in the meantime I’m quite happy with what I have.

Ginnie

I also own the Picturesque Tale of Progress, but sadly we haven’t used it yet, so I can’t give a comment. It does look lovely on my shelf, but that seems a bit of a waste.