“

One winter night during junior high, I glanced up at the night sky and out of the corner of my eye I saw a small silverly cloud. A closer look revealed a small cluster of six tiny stars. “Hmmm,” I said to myself,” I wonder what that is?” I remembered an old book I had on my shelf called “The Stars.” So went and after a quick search, realized that the cluster was called the Pleiades and they are part of Taurus. “Cool,” I thought, and I sat down to read the whole book through.

This is my all-time favorite book from my youth. I have many, many memeories of me and my dad spending hours up on the roof at night, looking at this book through our red-painted flashlight, naming the stars and tracing the constellations. We did this at least once a week for several years, during all seasons. Even to this day, almost 40 years later, I look up in the sky and immediately see old and comforting friends that haven’t changed since then. And I feel like I know where I am.

Then during college, I took a photocopy of the book to Kenya, where I lived for a semester in the bush. This time, Kenya being on the equator, I had the pleasure of meeting new friends; the constellations of the Southern Hemisphere. Way cool.

I have given this book as a gift to friends, children of friends, just about anyone who I have seen glancing into the nightime sky.

So now I just bought myself a brand new copy; I’m going to Sri Lanka to help with disaster relief and, alas, my original cloth-bound hardcover 1962 edition is just too old to make the journey with me. However, I am very eager to re-aquaint myself with those friends I first made back in the African sky.

I have to say that Rey’s method for showing the constellations outdoes everyone elses: Gemini looks like two stick figures (note the cover illustration), Orion a hunter, Scorpio a scorpion, etc. Every other illustration I have ever seen has shown the constellations as apparently random lines between random points. This makes it nearly impossible to see the constellations for what they are. And I don’t understand why other publication such as magazines and newspapers don’t use Rey’s system. Copyright issues, perhaps?

This book is an amazing gift that will inspire you and/or your kids, and it’s a great way to spend time and bond with him/her/them. I take it whenever I travel, and I always find it is a great way to get people, young and old, curious, excited, and interacting. I can’t speak highly enough.

”

– Review of H. A. Rey’s The Stars: A New Way to See Them, by Amazon user Ben

Reposted from http://lies.tumblr.com/post/65998455674.

the-eldest-woman-on:

Star Chart

This illustration is from The Stars by H. A. Rey (the Curious George author/artist). I have a beaten-up copy that is, in a certain sense, my oldest book. I own books that are older, but of all the books I own its the one that I’ve had the longest, with a distinct memory of reading this physical copy as a young child.

It’s the original cloth-bound hardback of the first edition, published in 1962, which makes it exactly as old as I am. I remember reading it (which would have meant looking at the pictures) when I lived on Hilton Drive in Redlands. We moved from that house just after my parents divorced, so I could not have been older than four, or at most five.

I loved it then, and love it now.

Reposted from http://lies.tumblr.com/post/65998342261.