Childcraft [Encyclopedia] in 15 Volumes: Vol. 13, Your Young Child

Title: Childcraft [Encyclopedia] in 15 Volumes: Vol. 13, Your Young Child

Date: 1954 (Previous copyrights 1934-1949)

Source: The Book Thing, Baltimore

Publisher: Field Enterprises

Originally intended for children, and released in many editions in volumes, the Childcraft series was a product of its era. Women with money to spend were at home during the day, and this was the golden era of the door-to-door salesman. Besides playing on mothers’ anxiety about housecleaning (Fuller Brushes) and piety (Bibles), what else could the salesman latch onto? From the mid-1930s and on into the baby boom, mothers were increasingly taken with parenting advice dispensed by experts and “experts” in magazines.

It made perfect sense for the Childcraft Company (originally begun in 1908 and still extant) to sell books to enrich both mother and child.

Most of the advice here is actually fairly anodyne, though a few gender-relations topics do stick out.

Other than that, its most hilarious sections revolve around safety for children. Turns out that us olds are absolutely telling the truth about rattling around the back of a car with nothing more than a blanket.

Most astonishingly, apparently cars in the mid-fifties weren’t well-equipped with back doors that closed tightly? This seems completely absurd, but the advice in the book—the only precaution for safety in an auto—is to “fasten the doors with log chains if you must” to ensure the child doesn’t open them and fly out. Perhaps they had no locks? Though I grew up at the tail end of the time before children were padded to death, even we had door locks which secured the back doors. Though I do recall numerous other safety hazards (spring-closing ashtrays in the back seat; hard steel surfaces in the back area of the station wagon which prompted concussion watches when I rolled into them during long trips….)

For more history on the company and the Childcraft brand, see Funding Universe (Wikipedia was pretty light on this one). The brand is now owned by World Book.

I’ve excerpted the parts I found interesting.

“…publisher W.F. Quarrie & Company purchased World Book in 1919. Quarrie would guide and oversee World Book's development over the next 25 years…
 “During the 1930s, Quarrie assembled an editorial advisory board to guide the project's development. [He] launched one of its most successful children's reference sets in the late 1930s--Childcraft--The How and Why Library. The seven-volume Childcraft was created as a sort of encyclopedia for young children. With an emphasis on simple text and illustrations, the books were designed to make learning fun and to give schools an alternative to more traditional published materials. Each volume addressed different subjects, including literature, such as short stories and poetry, as well as mathematics and the sciences.

This is the frontispiece (I think that's what it's called? I find it so beautiful, the figures read so well even in 2 color silhouette.

 "…In addition to successfully marketing its books to schools and institutions, Quarrie also prospered by establishing a large direct sales force. Salespeople pitched the encyclopedia as a family learning tool that was more usable than the expensive, formal encyclopedias, such as those published by Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.
 "In 1945, Chicago magnate Marshall Field III purchased Quarrie (which had changed its name to The Quarrie Corporation in 1936), and Quarrie became a division of Field Enterprises, Inc. .. Two years after the buyout, in fact, a major revision of World Book was published that increased the number of volumes to 19. Similarly, Childcraft was completely revised in 1949, being expanded to include 14 volumes, about twice the size of the original set.
 "During the 1950s and 1960s, Field Enterprises enjoyed strong demand for its reference books. The nation was experiencing a postwar population and economic boom, and Field's youth-oriented encyclopedias were in high demand. To take advantage of surging markets, the company launched several new initiatives. In 1955, for example, "The Classroom Research Program" was introduced. The program represented an extension of the efforts of World Book's editorial advisory board. Students in classrooms across the nation were asked to fill out cards describing the subjects they had looked for in reference books. This data then informed the encyclopedia's content. By the early 1990s, students were submitting more than 100,000 cards annually. 

 "In 1965, the company published the first edition of Science Year, created in response to the rapidly changing field of science and developed for use with the World Book. Like the Year Book, Science Year represented the beginning of a series designed to generate follow-up sales from existing World Book customers. Also that year, Field began publishing The Childcraft Annual, the Childcraft analogue of the World Book Year Book.
 "…[In 1975] Field's reference book operations were purchased by the Scott Fetzer Company, which renamed the division World Book-Childcraft International before changing the name to World Book, Inc. in 1983. A diversified conglomerate, Fetzer was founded in 1914 as a manufacturer of automobile parts. In 1919, the company switched to producing vacuum cleaners and remained a single-product firm until the mid-1960s, when it started to diversify. In the 1980s, another diversified conglomerate, Berkshire Hathaway Inc., purchased Scott Fetzer. By the early 1990s, Fetzer was operating more than 20 different companies organized in five business groups, ranging from industrial equipment and vacuum cleaners to encyclopedias.”

From Wikipedia, the volumes in this set included these titles. Love to get my hands on them all....

1. Poems of Early Childhood

2. Storytelling and Other Poems

3. Folk and Fairy Tales

4. Animal Friends and Adventures

5. Life in Many Lands

6. Great Men and Famous Deeds

7. Exploring the World Around Us

8. Creative Play and Hobbies

9. Science and Industry

10. Art for Children

11. Music for the Family

12. You and Your Family

13. Your Young Child

14. Your Child Goes to School

15. Your Child in Today's World