Came across this in study today and knew no one who'd get a giggle from it like AWers:
DOWN WITH COMIC BOOKS!
Parents should know what their children are reading. It will be news to many parents in Santa Fe that considerable literature of the blood and thunder kind is being read in this city. This is undoubtedly true in every other town of the territory. There is plenty of good literature interesting to children published nowadays at low prices, and there can be no excuse for children being allowed to read dime novels and wild, woolly west stories. The trouble lies in the home training and the scarcity of standard and periodical literature in many homes. A boy who has Cooper’s and Scott’s novels, Robinson Crusoe, a good juvenile magazine and his local daily paper to read at home will not go out and filch money to buy himself a blood and thunder story. A girl who has access to the standard novels of the day, to several volumes of fairly (sic) tales, to a good woman’s journal and the daily paper will not pine for the Saturday Evening Gazette or the Family Story Paper with their perverse and silly love stories. Give children good literature to choose from, and their minds will stand in no danger of being poisoned by the flashy literature which finds too great a circulation in an enlightened country like the United States.
From the Santa Fe New Mexican, April J, 1900, reprinted in Santa Fe, by Oliver La Farge. Copyright 1959 by the University of Oklahoma Press.
DOWN WITH COMIC BOOKS!
Parents should know what their children are reading. It will be news to many parents in Santa Fe that considerable literature of the blood and thunder kind is being read in this city. This is undoubtedly true in every other town of the territory. There is plenty of good literature interesting to children published nowadays at low prices, and there can be no excuse for children being allowed to read dime novels and wild, woolly west stories. The trouble lies in the home training and the scarcity of standard and periodical literature in many homes. A boy who has Cooper’s and Scott’s novels, Robinson Crusoe, a good juvenile magazine and his local daily paper to read at home will not go out and filch money to buy himself a blood and thunder story. A girl who has access to the standard novels of the day, to several volumes of fairly (sic) tales, to a good woman’s journal and the daily paper will not pine for the Saturday Evening Gazette or the Family Story Paper with their perverse and silly love stories. Give children good literature to choose from, and their minds will stand in no danger of being poisoned by the flashy literature which finds too great a circulation in an enlightened country like the United States.
From the Santa Fe New Mexican, April J, 1900, reprinted in Santa Fe, by Oliver La Farge. Copyright 1959 by the University of Oklahoma Press.
