spin-offs and other books i've never read
How I spent way too much time this weekend is the fault of My Little Primer. That's a young-child curriculum which uses the "My First Little House" Books." I bought the curriculum earlier this year even though my young child is a senior in high school. Back in the annual-Rocky-Ridge-Day years, I collected a bunch of "My First Little House" books, even though I don't think most of them have ever been read. They do have beautiful pictures, if you can overlook the fact that Laura has bangs and Jack is the wrong kind of dog.

Someone posted a list of "all" the titles in the "My First" series and made the comment that the books were hard to find these days, which made me decide that I had to get out all my books and see if I had them all. I must have it all.

This involved two trips to storage to retrieve boxes of books. Then it involved TWO DAYS where I made piles of books and lists of books and visited amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com and ebay and harpercollins.com (you get the idea) to make sure I knew what books were "My First" books and if I had them all. I'm still not sure I have a complete list, but I'm sure that I'm missing at least four or five titles. And I'm pretty sure that I'm not going to rest until I've tracked them down, even though they too will probably never be read.

While I was knee-deep in books, I figured I'd go ahead and make a webpage about the spin-offs and adaptations. I swore when I started working on pioneergirl.com that I'd only write about the original series published by Laura Ingalls Wilder, meaning from Little House in the Big Wood through These Happy Golden Years. Then On the Way Home crept in -- because I couldn't very well neglect a book when I spent years researching the Cooley family, could I?

So now the board books and craft books and spin-offs and rip-offs have taken two days of my time and taken over a page on pioneergirl.com. The really sad thing is that now it looks like I'll not only be tracking down a few easy reader books, but the Laura "Chapter" books with "new covers" (oh dear, mine are old covers from way back in the 1990s...) and even the Rose Chapter books.

From what I understand, it's not the popular stuff that's worth something down the road; it's the crap that didn't sell (meaning there was less of it out there) that increases in value. I'll be sitting on a mint condition gold mine some day.
- posted by pioneergirl at 10:34 PM