Absolute beginners

“DO you not know that there is a Monster at the end of this book??? Oh, I am so scared of Monsters!!!” “Will you help me plant this grain of wheat? ‘Not I!’ said the goose.”

While I waited as a kid for the afternoon cartoons to begin -- how different from the relentless 24-hour barrage today -- I enjoyed the company of my Little Golden Books, their trademark spines gleaming in a pile on the rug, as the lovable Muppet Grover begged me not to turn the page (the first, desperate quote is his) or the industrious little red hen found no barnyard animals to help her bake a loaf of bread -- oh, but they were willing to eat it, those gluttons! Leonard S. Marcus’ plunge into the wonders of Golden Books in “Golden Legacy” (Golden Books: 246 pp., $40) covers their origins in the 1940s, the innovative marketing that put them in highly visible places, like supermarkets, and the unexpected subject areas, like the age of the dinosaurs. Along the way, the series was helped by associations with Walt Disney and Jim Henson’s Muppets. Did you know that top artists of the day (Richard Scarry, Feodor Rojankovsky) were on the Golden payroll? The book designs thankfully haven’t changed, a stubborn insistence on continuity that means parents like me can share with our children the versions we enjoyed as young ‘uns. “Golden Legacy” describes the detailed production process that goes into every volume, reminding us of the loving care that children’s publishing demands; after all, a lifetime of reading depends on those first impressions.

-- Nick Owchar