I’d just finished reading “The Boxcar Children” to my kids and I was looking for another book. Sometimes you have to dig deep into the recesses of your memory before settling on a good choice. I’d picked “The Boxcar Children” as the result of a vague memory of my 3rd or 4th grade teacher reading it to my class. I remembered being enthralled by the story of four young children making do in the wilderness and I thought my kids would like it too. The book didn’t quite live up to my memory, but my kids liked it, so I’ll call that a win.
Being immersed in that old story got me thinking about my grade school days and I recalled the circumstances of my first book purchase. Most of the days of your youth kind of blend together into an impenetrable paste, but the days that are different stand out. One such day was a book fair we had at our gymnasium where our school library was selling discarded books.
First of all the whole premise of the book fair seemed bizarre to me. Why was the library dumping books? Don’t books just stay in the library forever? I’m not sure how old I was, maybe 7 or 8, but it struck me as sad that a book should be removed from the library never to be read or checked out again. I felt an obligation to “adopt” an unwanted book and save it from oblivion. It makes me wonder how many authors are forgotten every time libraries do a purge of their old books? How many great stories are lost?
I remember pawing through the stacks of books, and eventually a cover caught my eye. It was a yellowish book with an illustration of a man with a hammer standing on a chariot being pulled by two goats. The title was “Adventures with the Giants” and I would find out that the man on the cover was Thor, God of Thunder. The price of the book was $.25, and I actually had a quarter on me, although I don’t remember carrying money to school with any great frequency.
“Adventures with the Giants” is one of several novels by a woman named Catharine F. Sellew. Her other works are “Adventures with the Gods,” “Adventures with the Heroes,” and “Torchlight.” I didn’t find much biographical information about her, but I did find a rather nasty Kirkus review about “Giants” that I totally disagree with. The review states: “The author falls to establish the unreal nature of the material and establishes a factual, casual air which is unsettling to any sense of historical perspective a child may be achieving.” Repetition of the word “establish” aside, you can see how annoying this review is. You can read the rest here, but I don’t recommend it.
I’m not sure what that idiot Kirkus reviewer was thinking, but I read this book as a child and found it absolutely fantastic. I think kids are far more perceptive as to what is real and what is unreal than entitled critics will ever understand.
As you may have guessed by now, the book is a collection of Norse mythology and follows the adventures of Thor, Loki and Odin in a way that’s entertaining and delightful. For years, I had this book on a shelf by my bed, and I’d give it a re-read every five or six months until I hit the age of 13. It always struck me as a treasure since it had been discarded from the library and that kind of made me think I was the only one who had a copy. Remember I grew up in the era of the Rudolph cartoon and the Island of Misfit Toys, so this was something I was thinking about.
My random recollection of this book inspired me to look for it to read to my own girls. I scoured my shelves and came up empty. Had I thrown it away? Impossible! Concerned, I went to my closet, opened up a box, and BOOM! there it was! The first book on the top. The cover has separated from the spine at this point, but the pages are all there. I lifted the book up, turned it to the first page, and lo and behold I was pleasantly surprised to see that my beloved copy of “Adventures with the Giants” is, in fact, a first edition!
A quick search of the internet revealed that this particular first edition isn’t worth all that much. Perhaps the Kirkus review saw to that, or perhaps the fact that Catharine F. Sellew was a woman writing in the 1950s is to blame. Actually, it’s pretty interesting that I’d pick up a book from the 50s written from a woman, however, it’s been my experience that you can almost always find more evidence of the achievements of women in recent history than people like to claim.
This particular book is special to me for a lot of reasons. It brings back memories of grade school, the specter of the library discard is something I still find haunting (some of my books are in libraries now after all), and I simply enjoy the stories it contains. Contrary to what the idiots at Kirkus think (professional reviewers are all bought and paid for ) “Adventures with the Giants” is a fantastic retelling of the Norse myths. It’s the one I grew up with, and I was actually furious to see Thor as a Marvel character since the comic just didn’t get the story right.
So, the next step in my journey with “Adventures With the Giants” is to read it to my kids. Catharine F. Sellew died in 1982, but I hope there are people out there following her legacy who would be proud to know this book is still being read 68 years after it was published. That’s a remarkable achievement. Books have always played a greater than average role in my life, I’m happy to know the first purchase I ever made was a first edition, and that it’s a book I continue to read 30+ years later.
Also, if you have some change in your pocket, and are looking for a fun activity with your kids, perhaps you should seek out a library discard book fair. You can buy forty used books for the price of a new one, and if you flip to the first page, you might even discover the treasure of a first edition. Also, your kids might enjoy doing research on authors who lived forty or fifty years ago. There are interesting stories all around us. You just have to look. Sometimes little adventures bloom into the defining moments of your life.
