vintage children's books

Yesterday, grain edit tweeted about a vintage modern kids book for sale in their etsy shop. It is a fun looking book that reminds me so much of a vintage book that I snagged from my parent's house. Mine is a first edition book called Everything Has a Shape and Everything Has a Size, by Bernice Kohn and illustrated by Aliki from 1964.

My mom is an elementary school teacher and she gets to dig through the library discard pile every once and a while. She found this book and had it in the toy box she keeps for the grandkids at her house. The illustrations were so lovely, I just didn't want to see it get its pages ripped out, or chewed to a mushy pulp—which has been known to happen to our books from time to time. We rescued it from the bottom of the bin, where it was buried under old stuffed animals and barbies with chopped off hair (thanks to my sister) from my childhood.



One particular spread seemed so fitting in our home. The little girl and boy on this page remind me so much of Alden and Tula, and I wanted to find a way to display these illustrations without removing them and destroying the book. The picture of the little boy was, however, just a little too sad. I made a few adjustments in photoshop—flipped the frown to a smile and made the balloon a little bigger—before printing it out. Patrick has a great method of making simple transfers using acetone and color copies, so we decided to enlarge and transfer them onto wood panels. If anyone is interested in the process, I can put together a step-by-step instructional post.


Now the pictures hang together in our playroom and the book sits up on a shelf. The kids love to read it, so we take it down quite often, but it always gets returned to its special little spot... out of reach.


Alden insisted on being in this picture, so I suppose this is his first Modern Thrifter cameo.