It came! Oh, yay! It came!!

Some 41 or 42 years ago, I was sitting in a hospital waiting room (a hallway, more like, with seats to make it a waiting place) with my mother. The lighting was horrible flourescent, the paint was that institutional white-grey, and I was feeling stressed. So my mother read to me from this picture book.

This is the one memory I have of her reading this book with me, so it may have been borrowed from the library. But I've never forgotten it. Pictures and words have stuck with me all these years. And the book cheered me up, even in that grim setting.

And ever since the jekesta started the LiveJournal Communinity naarmamo, snatches of it come back to my mind.

But, in the great injustice of the World of Man, the book has gone out of print.

So, a couple of weeks ago, I bit the bullet, and bought a used copy from Amazon. The cost of the book was less than the cost of the shipping. I was told it probaably wouldn't arrive until September, after Art-Making Month is over. But it arrived today!! Yay!

I don't want to risk abusing the old book or my new scanner by trying to squoosh it under my scanner lid. So I'll just type the words of the poem inside, and you can imagine the pictures that go with them... okay? That will be almost as good:

( Draw me an Elephant -- by Anne S. Samson (c. 1967) )

Tell me: how can it be that this book was allowed to go out of print, and to be thrown out of a children's library with a big red DISCARD stamped on both its endpapers, and it's Date Due pocket glued shut, so that nobody could borrow it again?

Why isn't this in the ranks of "Goodnight Moon" or "The Very Hungry Catapillar?"