Old Fashioned Library Books

I wrote this comment in response to a blog post from Kristen at Shoe Addict. She was writing about the library and how smells bring her back to certain places in time, and this was my comment to her:

"I recently started going to the library again. I used to spend many summers at the library. The books were musty, especially the ones in the basement, but the library was deliciously cold from the air conditioning. I remember the librarian was an older woman named Marie. I loved the books by Rosamond du Jardin and Beverly Cleary written for teens. My present library is new & modern and not musty and everything is very automated. You check yourself out, you pick up your own holds, etc. There is no librarian named Marie to help you. If you are in a pinch, MAYBE somebody behind the desk will help you. Times have changed!"

Which got me to thinking about books I used to love. As I said above, I loved the books by Rosamond du Jardin and Beverly Cleary. Rosamond du Jardin had a series of books that followed a couple of teenage girls. One series was about a girl named Tobey and the other was about a girl named Marcy. I think they both must have taken place in the 50s and 60s, so they were really old-fashioned books, but I loved them even though they were not modern.

I think maybe that was exactly why I loved them. It was a more innocent time, a time of malt shops and going steady.

And I loved the description of the clothes such as:

From "Practically Seventeen":

"It was the most absolutely swoony formal I'd ever had in my whole life, plaid taffeta in tones of violet, gold, and black, with an off-the-shoulder neckline and a skirt so wide and rustling I couldn't even believe it!"


From "Class Ring":

"...my formal, aqua, with one of those swoony wire bodices that stay up without straps, and yards and yards of skirt to swirl gracefully..."

And from "Wedding in the Family"

"Her aqua sun dress looked crisply cool and showed off her the most flattering advantage. Her hair lay in soft, if slightly damp, curls high up on her neck, where she had tied it back with a white ribbon. Thank goodness her white pumps were clean!"


So those were the Rosamond du Jardin books - just a simpler time.

And I also loved Beverly Cleary. Of course, there were the Ramona Quimby books from elementary school, but she also had books for teens. Again, I suppose they were very 1960s, but I loved to read about the boy problems and dating and babysitting, and it didn't really matter to me that they were written so long ago. I fell in love with those musty books in that musty library.

My favorite had to have been "The Luckiest Girl" about a girl from Portland, Oregon, who spent a year going to school in California. I remember that she wanted an impractical pink velveteen coat and her mom wanted her to have a yellow slicker. I remember the ridiculous fight they got into. I could relate to the whole mother-daughter wardrobe argument!

You can still find those books on Amazon to this day.