Blanche Jennings Thompson

I'm not gonna "review" this book, but I will sample and savor it from time to time. The original SILVER PENNIES (1925) was a book of poems for children that my mom had as a little girl and she always talked about it, often while she was reading to my brothers and me from Robert Louis Stevenson's A CHILD'S GARDEN OF VERSES. It had been lost long ago. So I can only imagine how pleased she must have been to find this 1967 first edition of ALL THE SILVER PENNIES, which combined that first book with its companion volume, MORE SILVER PENNIES (1938). It is filled with poems that children will love, by poets such as Sara Teasdale, Vachel Lindsay, Katherine Mansfield, Carl Sandburg, Robert Frost, Mark Van Doren, Elizabeth Coatsworth, Emily Dickinson, Yeats, and many other takented poets now long forgotten. But I'm pretty sure little kids even today would still enjoy having these poems read aloud to them. A particular favorite of mine is a Joyce Kilmer poem called "The House with Nobody in It." It's about a falling in, abandoned house, and here's a verse -

"If I had a lot of money and all my debts were paid / I'd put a gang of men to work with brush and saw and spade. / I'd buy that place and fix it up the way it used to be / And I'd find some people who wanted a home and give it to them free."

Mom loved that one too. And I remember her own interest in old abandoned houses we'd see when we took Sunday rides through the countryside when I was small. Sometimes we even stopped to 'explore' them.

All my grandkids are too old for this book now. It's best for reading to lap-size little ones. I'll hang on to it. Maybe we'll be graced with some great-grandkids one day, and I'll read to them of fairies and kittens, poppies and lost mittens. I see why Mom loved these poems, lovingly collected and annotated by editor Blanche Jennings Thompson, and the illustrations by Ursula Arndt are equally delightful. Very highly recommended, especially if you have little ones - and if you can FIND a copy.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER… (meer)