PRINT ADS

Sometimes when I’m in a reflective mood I try to picture my grandmother and my father sitting together at a kitchen table in a house before my time. It’s a house my grandfather converted from a small barn that he moved onto a foundation on what was then the outskirts of Albert Lea, Minn.

Over the years additions were made and it was still in use the last time I drove past it some years ago. I’ve often wondered if the occupants know their home’s history.

Dad, just a little kid in this picture I conjure, is eating a sandwich and spelling words for his mother in between bites. His bulldog, the one he taught to pull a wagon, sits next to Dad’s chair.

That’s an image I’ve formed from a story he used to tell me about living close enough to his school that he could walk home for lunch. His mother, Florence, my grandmother, heavy-set, wearing an apron over a house dress, her long hair wrapped into a bun, was a teacher who wanted her son to be literate so she drilled him on spelling and other subjects at lunchtime.

So it is that I have a clue to a puzzle: What is a 34-book Little Leather Library doing on my bookshelf? It came to us after Dad died 11 years ago. I remember seeing it while growing up, but I don’t recall ever reading the books even though I love to read. The set includes speeches of Lincoln and Washington, two Shakespeare plays, poems by Browning, stories by Poe and essays by Thoreau and Emerson, all neatly held upright by Indian-head bookends. I decided recently to learn more about the books, which we have treated more as an antique display, and get on with reading them at last.

They’re a bit awkward to read, only 3 inches wide by 4 inches high, the imitation leather bindings stiff with age and the paper browning at the edges, though not brittle.

According to an Internet site devoted to them, the first editions of the set in 1916 were leather-bound. The edition I have was “an early type of imitation leather consisting of latex-coated canvas on the outside with flocking on the inside.”

A boxed set of 30 could be purchased for about $3 plus postage, insurance and C.O.D. charges. Millions of the books (one ad claimed 20 million) were purchased sometime in the 1920s when the books were advertised on the back cover of National Geographic.

With that information, I can now imagine another scene. I fast-forward a few years and Dad is now a teenager. They’re at the same table reading a National Geographic, probably the October 1922 issue that was devoted entirely to the African continent. Perhaps they traced the routes of rivers, some of them noted to be unexplored, on the colored map.

Was that when Grandma Skoloda decided to send for the Little Leather Library advertised on the back page of the issue? That would explain the four extra books I have; the offer that month included four free Kipling works as a bonus.

I imagine a fine Indian summer afternoon with the curtains blowing in a cool breeze, the chickens clucking in the back yard and the occasional clop clop of a horse passing by the house. There she is at the kitchen table, writing with refined strong pen strokes the following address: Little Leather Library Corp., Dept. A-121, 334 Fourth Ave., New York City.

She didn’t have to send money. The volumes would arrive by mail for her inspection. She must have decided to keep them.

So the Little Leather Library tells me stories beyond its yellowed pages.