Katy Kangaroo has a big problem and it is breaking her big heart! She has no pocket in which to tote her little boy, Freddie. Death by lion seems so extreme, even by today’s standards.) Katy No-Pocket

(And, you can thank me now for not including details about the sometimes gruesome but morally instructive volumes Sixty Saints for Girls and Sixty Saints for Boys in the bargain please, find other ways to teach your kids that they won’t always be popular by doing the right thing. Here are just a few of these cherished books - note that many of them are perhaps lesser-known works by famous children’s book authors and illustrators you will already know and love. I am so grateful for the treasured titles my Matt, her youngest son, brought back to our family in Seattle these precious stories anchor our legacy family bookshelf and encouraged our own two children to love reading and reveling in the cleverness of language and the beauty of brilliant illustration. She raised seven children (first child born in 1949, last born in 1964) they were a bookish brood, and after she died, her surviving sons and daughters had the sorrowful, but I expect ultimately joyful, task of divvying up the many picture books accumulated in their home over the decades-long span of their childhood. She was a brilliant, down-to-earth and fun-loving human being, and one of the greatest gifts she imparted to her children and grandchildren was a love of reading and languages (she was conversant in an over-achieving five herself, including de rigueur Catholic schoolgirl Latin). My family marks the anniversary of the passing of my mother-in-law each December.

Anatole by Eve Titus