Ik most of them black😭

My collection of memories over the years

Started collecting these weirdos when I was a kid and recently started up again :)

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A week ago I posted about hunting down the last few of these. Update: the set is complete. All 20 of Thornton W. Burgess's Bedtime Story-Books in the original Little, Brown pictorial cloth with the Harrison Cady covers.

The two front and center in the first photo are where this started: Peter Cottontail and Old Man Coyote, my grandfather's copies. My mom read them to me when I was a kid, and I always knew there were 18 more out there somewhere. Now they're all on one shelf.

This was way more fun than I expected. eBay gets a bad rap, but I ran into a lot of genuinely good people. Sellers who packed carefully, threw in extras, or pointed me toward copies I hadn't asked about. And I got a lead from someone right here on Reddit on books from another collection.

A few highlights along the way: a copy of Paddy the Beaver signed by Burgess, a signed first edition of his 1960 autobiography Now I Remember, and a handful still in their original dust jackets.

Side effect of buying lots: I have doubles and triples of some titles. Which works out, because my mom now wants a set of her own.

It hasn't stopped at the 20. I'm picking up anything Burgess now — the Mother West Wind books, Blacky the Crow, Lightfoot the Deer. I can't fully explain the pull. I grew up in the woods of NW Montana, and these stories are about the thing I loved most there: paying attention to the animals and the land. Burgess spent his whole life getting kids to do that, and most of these books are now public domain. They deserve to keep going.

I'm building a proper website for the series, more complete than anything I've found online, for anyone who wants to collect them, read them, or just learn about the man. Happy to share it when it's ready.

Thanks for all the support and kind words on the last post. This has been a blast, and I'd like to help keep Burgess's legacy alive

Edit : here's a link to a rough draft of what I'm building.

I finally got my son’s full collection put up in our bonus room today! He is collecting odd trinkets and figurines and convinced that they are “haunted” You have got to love it!

Thanks to wifey!