There are of course the Tintins, the Martines and the countless Walt Disney books. Many will also spontaneously name the novels of the Comtesse de Ségur, or even, another genre from another era, the I like to read. I still remember the latter all lined up in the displays of the municipal library AND the school library… Obviously, they were the ones who had the monopoly! Besides, is it because we recognized them immediately by their red outline that we were attracted to them, and that we dreamed of also receiving them at home? For their games at the end? Because I may have read a lot of them, but I have to be honest: I don’t remember any of those stories. None as in none, nozero cubed.
The books to which I want to pay homage are books that are a little more “rejected”, or lonesome cowboy. Books that do not belong to a series. If we were lucky enough to have several “rejected” books, they would together form a disparate row on a desk or a shelf, a kind of collection without a name… but our own collection. Books that appear in our lives a bit like family: we didn’t really go to them, they were already in the house, or it feels like they’ve always been there. We live with it.
Without forgetting those that appear overnight, offered for a birthday, for example, or an (of course illustrated) encyclopedia of sexuality, as left by a stork who “passed by”… Here, my child, educate yourself ! And we liked that.
I asked this week the following question on my social networks: what is the book that marked you when you were a child and that you kept until today?
The one that came up most often is The book of words, by Richard Scarry. “My favorite book in which I could lose myself for hours as I loved the images, writes Manon. You cannot know the happiness I had when I found a reissue, years later, for my niece. I also wanted her to lose herself in contemplation in front of these pretty illustrations while enriching her vocabulary…”
“I am obsessed with this book,” adds Marie Hélène. I learned to read on my own very early thanks to this book. And that’s where it hit me: maybe we particularly remember those who allowed us to understand something for ourselves? Like a beginning of freedom, or understanding of who we are…
At home (and it is still there when I write these lines, right in the middle of the library in front of me): it was a book in German – which I have never read, because I do not speak German – Karikaturen Zeichnenwhich shows how to draw weird characters, with bellies and tiny hairy legs, mustaches that you only see in circuses, hanging buttocks, raised asses and eyebrows, nice hats, pipes, cigars … And among all these pensive, angry, bespectacled airs: only one child character, and he sticks out his tongue, the little brat!
In short, I must have leafed through them 2000 times each, these yellowed black and white pages, and even sometimes put my nose in them to smell the smell of his paper (which does not change), without ever asking myself: but what did it bring me? It takes everyone to make a world, perhaps? The people who captivate me the most do not correspond to the standards of beauty?
Conversely, my boxing friend Maude confided to me: “Me, these are the books of Grolier Limitée. Let’s talk about disobedience, rudeness, theft… It’s super Judeo-Christian, but it stuck with me, and I read them to my son. As if, in my values, Judeo-Christianity was still present… Ah well, coudon! »
And that’s how I decided, during the next lesson, to do a jabs to the bag in memory of the shady book on paranormal phenomena that lay on the living room table all my childhood… About three-quarters there, the photo of the silhouette of a child hidden behind someone’s bed who sleeps… Scary enough, and I don’t know why I was always going to see her!
Long live Beatrix Potter’s bunnies!