Gobsmacked by Natural History

[Image: Cover of The Golden Treasury of Natural History, by Bertha Morris Parker. Colors tinkered with a little to match its present look as closely as possible.]

A holiday, a small bedroom in a small house, The Boy, The Book…

I don’t know what triggered the recent obsession, but something must have. Not that I’ve ever really forgotten its object; years ago, I started referring to it this way: possibly the best book anyone ever gave me. I’m not kidding myself, or you: it may not be the best-written, the book I most wish I myself had written, even my favorite book. My original copy got swallowed up into Book Heaven long ago, and I had not (until recently) laid eyes on another copy for maybe forty or more years. But for its long-term impact on me — its staying power in my head — nothing else comes close.

It came to me as a Christmas present when I must have been, oh, maybe nine or ten years old. (It certainly feels like I’ve known it that long.) Dad had always held blue-collar jobs, and Mom — when she eventually went to work (as opposed to, haha, the sheer non-working pleasure of raising four kids) — held secretarial and clerical positions. So we never had anything you could call superficially “privileged.” But at Christmas, they annually went overboard. We got so much stuff.

In retrospect, I wonder if at that time of year they might have been just throwing things at the walls of our minds to see what would stick. I know they loved us — never once doubted it, even — but they’d had little if anything like training or orientation as parents. We were like four aliens deposited in their household: total strangers, maybe even only nominally of the same species. How could they entertain us? Would we like music, maybe? (Get them an LP!) Would we want to become homemakers, or mechanics? (Get them a toy oven, or a garage — made of finger-slashing tin in case they want to become surgeons!) Artists? (A Play-Do factory! a watercolor paints set! colored pencils! crayons and coloring books! heck, throw in a jigsaw puzzle! All in the same year!)

So this one year — again, I think somewhere between third and fifth grade — I found (among the rubble of childhood avarice) two books for me: both non-fiction, both about science. One was a large-format hardcover book, maybe 9″ x 12″, maybe fifty pages long,, entirely about astronomy. I don’t remember many specifics about that book — certainly not the title. It had no paper dust cover. The front, spine, and back were of some ultra-high-gloss material; the predominant color was deep navy blue, scattered with stars. Of all the sciences, astronomy has held my attention the most, and I think to that book must belong a great deal of the credit.

But the other book: ah, the other book. That was the unforgettable one.

My first mention of the book here at RAMH, as far as I can determine, occurred in an aside in a brief post almost exactly three years ago:

…for some books — not all of them “great” ones, either — I might actually hesitate before deciding to go the cheap route. (I’m talking about you, you thick-page, large-format “children’s” book on natural history whose name I’ve long forgotten.)

More recently, just this past April in fact, Julie Danielson over at Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast covered a children’s picture book, Frog Song, written by Brenda Z. Guiberson and illustrated by Gennady Spirin. From the very first illustration which Jules included in that post — thumbnailed at the left — I was transported back a half-century to that Christmas vacation. My comment on that post repeats the best-book-anybody-ever-gave-me mantra, and then goes into more remembered detail:

It was a large-format older-kid’s book (probably predated the YA or MG classifications, who knows), called something like Illustrated Guide to Natural History. Hardbound, possibly 300+ pages, published possibly the late 1950s to mid-1960s. As I recall, it covered the whole shebang: astronomy (especially the Solar System), weather/climate, geology (rocks/minerals, volcanoes, etc.), plant life, animal life (insects, fish, amphibians, dinosaurs, mammals). (Even at 300+ pages, it seems like an awful lot to cover, huh?)

Composing that comment did make me wonder: Did it really cover as much ground as I remembered? Did the illustrations really take the form of the hauntingly beautiful paintings I remembered? Was the book really over 300 pages long?

At such times, under such circumstances, my mind naturally turns to Web searches. I was certain of the words “natural history” in the title, and believed that the word “golden” might have appeared in it, too… And of course I had an approximate range of years…

The answer I sought arrived via a message thread in the “BookSleuth” area of the AbeBooks.com used-books site. (It still staggers me that someone could come up with an answer based on the limited information I gave them.)

And that book — the object of that obsession — is the subject of this new RAMH series.

Over the next, well, the next however-many months, I’ll be posting occasional excerpts from the book, often in the form of scanned-in images and maybe a scrap of accompanying text, or just some commentary from me. I’ll also have some information about the author, Bertha Morris Parker — not a household name, but nevertheless a notable and influential denizen of the twentieth century.

I can’t say that I’ll be marching through the book from start to finish. But the first post on the topic, coming up sometime in the next week, will work from the outside in.

And as long as I included the Gennady Spirin frog above, here’s how the Golden Treasury depicted the leopard frog. The illustration spans pages 78-79:

Note: Over the next month or so, I did a couple of follow-up posts about the book — a series which I need to get back to. For now, though:

• Exploring the book from the outside-in: about the endpapers.
• Part 1 of a miniature biography of the book’s author — a very remarkable woman.