When I was appointed to our local library board, the City Librarian asked me to write a brief piece about my own early library and reading experiences. The moment that I spied the book “All of a Kind Family” in my school library remains so vivid and important to me that I had no trouble responding. The answer had always been there.
I fell permanently in love with books and with libraries on a rainy day in second grade. Already a reader, I became enthralled with the “bigger-kid” paperbacks in the school library that spun on their own gold rack. Something about one book in particular really jumped out. The book was Sydney Taylor’s “All-of-a-Kind Family”. On its cover was a drawing of five similar girls, of various heights, wearing matching pinafores and high-topped boots. I checked the book out and began devouring its tales of family and neighbors on New York’s Lower East Side, in the early 1900s, a group “rich in kindness, though poor in money”. I read about penny candy and Roman candles, pushcart peddlers and the power of imagination in tough times. I went on to read the book’s three equally enthralling sequels and, when my daughter was in second grade, I read “All-of-a-Kind Family” to her. I still have my original copy of this book, which I was given, and which has followed me across the country and back, perching on multiple bookshelves in multiple homes. To this day, I’m rarely without a book to read and I’m still a sucker for the library’s spinning gold rack, even if it happens to look more like the New Fiction shelf.
Most lifelong readers can probably conjure a similar memory. What’s yours?
Photo by Susan Sachs Lipman
