Ellen Howard

Ellen Howard is the author of fourteen books and several short stories for young people, ranging from picture books to a young adult story. She speaks frequently in schools and libraries across the country.

Photo courtesy of Ms. Howard's website.

They still sit on my shelf, those six weighty black tomes that opened the world of books to me: MY BOOK HOUSE edited by Olive Beaupre Miller and published in 1921. Well, actually only five of them were a part of my childhood. The first volume had disappeared on the day of my mother's seventh birthday party in 1928. She assumes it went home with one of the guests and mourns its loss to this day.

My grandmother bought MY BOOK HOUSE, an anthology of great literature, for her own tree children, spending money that should have gone for food. I wonder if she realized at the time what food she was providing for their minds and hearts, and not just theirs, but ours-her grandchildren.

It was in MY BOOK HOUSE that I met the Princess on the Glass Hill, and Snow White and Rose Red and their marvelous bear. It was in MY BOOK HOUSE that I leaned that "Cinderella" was told in Korea as "Pigling" and on the walls of an Egyptian tomb as "Rhodopsis and the Golden Sandals." It was in MY BOOK HOUSE that I played on the shore with David Cooperfield and Little Em'ly and first journeyed homeward with Ulysses. It was in these pages that I appreciated the distinguished life of my hero, Louisa May Alcott, and resolved someday to write stories as good, as enthralling as hers.

Some years ago, my aunt found at a garage sale a first volume of MY BOOK HOUSE, a slightly later edition, bound in green, not black, and missing its full-color cover illustration. So now my set stands complete, waiting perhaps for some other child to discover the treasure in its pages, to discover literature.

Ellen Howard