À la recherche du... er... textbooks perdu

I said the other day (in muuranker's LJ) that I couldn't remember much about what history I studied at junior school. Today, though, I was doing some work in a school library, and came across RJ Unstead's From Cavemen to Vikings, and I remembered it intensely. While I may not be good at remembering faces, I have very strong visual memories of the books I read when I was young, and just a quick glimpse of once-familiar pictures can evoke a whole raft of other memories and impressions from the time.

Most of those memories come from books I read by choice - those blue-spined Ladybird books about famous people, for example, or those chunky purple-spined books on kings and queens that I borrowed from the adult library, and books on the history of costume illustrated by... agh. famous illustrator. can't remember name. aargh. [EDIT: Ah yes. Victor Ambrus. Maybe it wasn't a series, but I clearly remember certain pictures] - but some clearly come from school books. I can remember Singing Together song books - both the visuals and many of the songs - and I have a very vague impressionistic memory of a series of work books that we had to fill in, but can't remember the title. I can clearly remember the visual layout reading test we did every year, with idiosyncrasy as the final word, and I can still picture Peter and Jane and their dog.

Since we had to cover all our textbooks at secondary school, my memories of textbooks from those times are of the various old wallpapers and re-used wrapping papers that I used to do it with. I have no memories therefore of titles or covers, but I suppose I would recognise the inside if I came across it one day.

What I really can't remember at the moment, though, is what books we used at Primary School to learn about countries of the world. This is now annoying me.

Barbie and the classics

I was ordering books today, and I came across one called Barbie and the Three Musketeers. I think a whole new genre needs to be opened up. No work of classic literature can remain unimproved by the addition of Barbie or one of her friends. What about Barbie Eyre, where Barbie, a stunning long-legged beauty, emerges from school with only a pink car and a bulging make-up bag to her name, and ends up transforming grumpy Mr Rochester, giving his gloomy house a gleaming pink makeover? Marvel as Barbie creates the My Little Pony of Troy, and later journeys for ten years in her quest for the perfect hair dye! Weep as Lady Barbie Macbeth wanders the halls of her fairytale castle, weeping at the thought of dirt on her slender perfumed hands!

Those after a shorter read can try Tolkien's grim little novella, Barbie of the Rings, in which Barbie throws away the One Ring in chapter two, on the grounds that its design is so last year, and is then torn to pieces by the Black Riders on their little ponies, who were drawn unerringly to her by her pink dress, which stood out like a sore thumb in the blasted wastes of Mordor.

Boys are not excluded from these revolutionary classics. Shakespeare's G.I. Joe: Prince of Denmark depicts G.I. Joe (or "Action Man", as he is called in the land of Shakespeare's birth) successfully killing his evil uncle after an action-packed five-act adventure of swimming crocodile-infested rivers, flying through the skies of Denmark with a jet-pack, and such like. His soliloquy "To ski or not to ski", in he which debates the manner of his approach on his uncle's chilly Danish castle, is justifiably famous.