FFB: The Scott, Foresman Invitations to Personal Reading Program edited by Helen Robinson, et al.

I've written before about the Scott, Foresman reading/literature textbooks that my various schools, public and private, used through my elementary through high school education (1970-1982), in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire and Hawaii. (They had the Dick and Jane first-grade franchise in the '60s, and were ubiquitous, obviously, in later grades as well.) I remember the first actively psychotic teacher I had, a second-grade reading teacher who egregiously resented my ability to read before entering her class, growing volubly vexed with me when I wrote in the answers in the blank spaces in the text assuming that was what we were meant to do.) Among the supplementary materials Scott, Foresman offered were editions of various selected children's and YA books that they published in uniform "framed" cover-format as above and below, though in various sizes--the books were more or less in the dimensions of the original editions, and reprinted the original covers, except with no dust jackets and printed-on-the-boards images of those original front covers. I don't have them to hand, but as I recall them they didn't make an attempt to reprint the back covers or flap copy.

Image of these books, and the list below, courtesy Jennifer Arrow's blog

The list at the end is the set that was available for browsing and reading in my fifth grade and sixtth grade classroom at Nathan Hale Elementary School in Hazardville, CT. (The examples above might've been pitched to a slightly younger set of readers, with a Jean Craighead George early reader that I've never seen...while I do clearly remember her powerful Newbery Award-winner Julie of the Wolves and My Side of the Mountain. (We had one classroom with one teacher for all but some art classes at that small school at that time, and the same teacher for both fifth and sixth grades, and nearly the identical population in the classroom in those two years. We were also, probably unfortunately but conveniently, divided by our perceived ability as readers, with a half-doze of us on the students' left side of the classroom the sophisticated readers, using as our textbooks Scott, Foresman's Vistas (in fifth grade) and Cavalcades (in sixth)...the intermediate readers, making up most of the class, had another text (title forgotten) and sat in the middle of the classroom; and the ten or so of the struggling readers sat on the right, and used the Open Highways volumes for their grades. Scholastic Book Services and Dell Yearling paperbacks, among some others, were available for the kids to read during "open reading" periods or indoor recess, in shelves at the back of the room...I dipped in more than most, I think, even among the "advanced" readers. 

Among those which mad the strongest impression were Henry Reed’s Journey by Keith Robertson, the first of Robertson's Reed and Midge Glass novels I read and the second in the series (I recall that a chapter from Henry Reed's Baby-Sitting Service had been included in one of textbooks), Harold Courlander's collection of mythlore and folktales from around the world Ride with the Sun, and the handsomely illustrated edition of "The Charge of the Light Brigade"...though I now remember, looking at this list, that I definitely read the Newbery-winning Across Five Aprils and The Twenty-One Balloons from this set, and North to Freedom, the Danny Dunn books (that one doesn't stand out in memory) and Sea Pup Again (interesting the degree to which they didn't feel the need to include the first novels in a given series). Pretty sure I read James Kjelgaard's Stormy, as well, having already read his Big Red and a few others (at least a few of those among the paperbacks on the same shelves)... Kjelgaard having been a prolific writer for adults, in the slick magazines and higher-paying pulps, as well, who died young, after illness...Robert Bloch helped him shape up some of his last work for publication, when he was simply too ill to produce final drafts. 

To what extent did your classrooms have their own collections of books when you were in elementary grades, and did you have any fond memories of those collections...in addition to any libraries your school also maintained? (We had a library at that Enfield, Connecticut school...Hazardville having been absorbed by Enfield some decades before...which was in 1973 already a "media center" instead...the first thing I remember taking out from there was an audiocassette dramatization of Dracula...which my brother, then aged two, gleefully recorded over in part while playing around with the inexpensive cassette player/recorder I had at that time.).

The Scott, Foresman Invitations to Personal Reading Program set we had in my 5th/6th grade classroom:

Adventures in Many Lands

Henry Reed’s Journey by Keith Robertson

The Minnow Leads to Treasure by A. Philippa Pearce

The Singing Cave by Ellis Dillon

“What Then, Raman?” by Shirley Aroroa

Science and Nature

The Giant Golden Book of Biology by Gerald Ames and Rose Wyler

Jets and Rockets and How They Work by William P. Gottlieb

The Peaceful Atom by Bernice Kohn

Sea Pup Again by Archie Binns

Stormy by James Kjelgaard

Biography and Historical Fiction

Across Five Aprils by Irene Hunt

America’s Ethan Allen by Stewart Holbrook

From the Eagle’s Wing by Hildegarde Swift

Trace Through the Forest by Barbara Robinson

Tree in the Trail by Holling C. Holling

Legends, Myths, and Other Tales

The Golden Treasury of Myths and Legends adapted by Anne T. White

Ride with the Sun edited by Harold Courlander

Science Fiction and Fantasy

Bob Fulton’s Amazing Soda-Pop Stretcher by Jerome Beatty, Jr.

The City Under the Back Steps by Evelyn S. Lampman

Danny Dunn, Time Traveler by Jay Williams and Raymond Abrashkin

Books Too Good to Miss

Mr. Twigg’s Mistake by Robert Lawson

North to Freedom by Anne Holm

The Story of Design by Marion Downer

The Twenty-One Balloons by William Pene du Bois

Poetry

The Charge of the Light Brigade by Alfred Lord Tennyson

The Moment of Wonder edited by Richard Lewis

For more of today's books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

FFB/MS: THE LONG GOODBYE, a 1972 draft of the screenplay by Leigh Brackett; BRASS KNUCKLES by Stuart Dybek (University of Pittsburgh, 1979)

This copy of a 1972 draft of Leigh Brackett's film adaptation of Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye is missing some key pages (not simply page 21 as annotated on the title page) but nonetheless is a very worthwhile reading experience, as Brackett proves she's as adept a scriptwriter as one might've guessed from her often brilliant, and diverse, fiction, and the films made from her scripts. It's offered as part of a multimedia web post on the Cinephilia & Beyond blog, along with several interviews with Brackett and others, and the draft was written before Robert Altman was associated with the project, but with knowledge that Elliott Gould was meant to play Philip Marlowe. One of the points of rage regarding the film for many Chandler/Marlowe fans is that Gould seems unlikely to be the Marlowe of Chandler's fiction (he doesn't seem quite right to Brackett, either, as it turns out, but not so much for the reasons that most of the Chandler fans resent so volubly...she sees Gould as insufficiently hardboiled, essentially). She also makes clear, both in the script and the discussion about it, that she takes full responsibility for the single fact that most enrages so many Chandler purists, the murder of Terry Lennox at the end of the film, a matter Brackett notes is left far more nebulous at the end of the novel. She also heightens the degree, in her script, to which Marlowe is not just sardonic but a smartass, which might well have been in part inspired by knowledge that Gould was meant to have the role, while retaining what Brackett sees as the most important aspect of the character, his basic uncompromising incorruptibility, his unwillingness to play along with those around him who want him to look the other way or go along with the gag even when it would be safer for him to do so. (I should admit at this point I remember the film, which I've seen about three times over the decades in its entirety, better than I do the novel, which I've read once thirty-plus years ago.) The film differs in notable ways from this draft of the script...Marty Augustine the gangster doesn't abuse his girlfriend-of-sorts as a way to get at Marlowe, and Altman's obsession with nudity, whether a thrown away joke as with Marlowe's neighbors or used to further heighten the insanity of Augustine in a setpiece in the film, is also missing from this script...though the abuse of his wife Eileen by the drunken bully Roger Wade is if anything more intense and vile in the script as written. (And how much Chandler's, or Brackett's, Roger Wade is meant to be after Hemingway is an interesting question.)

The utter concision of the dialog, and the grace with which the boiled-down version of the novel is conveyed in her script (Brackett notes that to truly film the novel as written, it would take at least five hours...perhaps a project someone should attempt), and the adeptness with which Brackett makes the adaptation believable as a contemporary story in 1972 is all very much worth experiencing firsthand, even, again, given that the PDF document is missing a few pages. Having read the novel or particularly seen the film will help with those elisions...and I have to wonder if the PDF document is missing the later pages through a slip-up on the part of the blogger. There are apparently a few other script drafts floating about from Brackett's career, but a formal, complete collection is more than overdue, given the importance of her work as a whole and of most of the films she scripted or wrote treatments for.

Stuart Dybek's Brass Knuckles is another odd choice, I suppose, even for the heavily crime-fiction-oriented FFB roundelay, as it's his first collection, from 1979, of poetry and prose-poetical vignettes. Divided into four sections, "Exile at 7", "The Mystery and Melancholy of a Street", "Grand Entrance" and "My Neighborhood", it's largely a set of evocations of the tougher parts of Chicago, in and around the Polish-American neighborhood where Dybek was raised. A lot of the ground tread here falls somewhere between the abuse of children and its consequences in Joyce Carol Oates's similar work and the self abuse of Charles Bukowski's, though the writer I'm most reminded of is Ed Gorman...even if Dybek is more a Romantic than Ed was, in several ways, and has some manic asides and foregrounded metaphors, such as the suggestion of a not completely bad marriage that has the diminutive groom standing for a while on his wedding cake, holding hands with the wax bride figurine, while his actual bride cavorts with most of the wedding party, that fit in well with the mythical allusions, gritty details and explorations of lust and frustration throughout the lives of the characters. And much of the book is very funny, only some of it tragic. 

Perhaps almost as sad as some of the more sober bits is the fate of even some of the colleges, much less their little magazines, that this work first appeared in, in the 1970s, though looking again I suppose it's just the Goddard Journal that would be utterly vanished now. Though perhaps it's telling in a small way that the book has seen its more recent edition from not the state-owned University of Pittsburgh Press, but Carnegie-Mellon's...

For more of today's books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.