One Less Book

It's State Fair time here in Minnesota. I'm planning to attend on Tuesday, so I should have a report afterwards.

Right now that means my main participation is listening to small prop planes circling the fairgrounds, dragging advertising trailers. As of last year, the planes became an incessant irritation on both weekends, with the second "weekend" including Thursday through Labor Day.

They don't go over the Fair, oh no. They go over the parts of Saint Paul next to it and the adjacent suburb to the north, Falcon Heights, where people live. And as far as I can tell, the Fair's attendees don't notice the planes or the ads, so it's not only a waste of fuel and carbon pollution, it's burning the advertisers' money too. 

Except to make all of the people who live under the planes hate the advertisers and swear they will never use their services. 

So while I have been sitting in my house with the windows closed, I cleaned out some stuff. One thing I'm going to get rid of is a 1934 elementary school geography textbook I acquired at some point. It's a strange thing: I have no idea what grade level it was meant for. There are way too many words for a 1st or 2nd grader, but the kinds of questions it proposes for the child reader sometimes seem like they're meant for a 5-year-old. 

I have a hard time believing any kids, even in the 1930s, read and absorbed the content of this book. 

It did include this charming illustration, however:


Most of the book's images are halftone photos, but there are also a substantial number of line art cuts of animals and plants. I think those were repurposed from other publications, in the case of plants, likely from horticultural works. 

In the days of letterpress printing, you couldn't just do a drawing and scan it to reproduce on a page. Cuts like these were etched into metal and reused over and over again. 

I don't think these serious textbook publishers would have commissioned an illustration of anthropomorphic vegetables, but it's what they found to use that was close enough and it fit their budget. All they could do was add a somewhat disdainful caption, "The artist sees the garden vegetables as people."