As I’ve said in a few other posts, T loves books. Actually, T enjoys some books so much that we already have a few “series” of books because he’s enjoyed the one book that much that he insisted I find other books with the same characters, story themes, or other similarities. The little photos on the book with the other titles in the series also capture his interest and help with his efforts of persuasion. Marketing at its finest, and proof it works, folks!

One example of T’s bibliophilia comes from his second birthday, where he received a book that was part a bigger series called “People Who Help Us.” The book was a two-in-one book with a story about a firefighter under one cover, and then you flip it over and it’s a story about a police officer under the other cover. T fell in love with the book almost immediately, which made me happy because it was something very different from anything we had owned to date. I shouldn’t have been surprised as T already loves the people who help us in our neighborhood – the mailman, the UPS delivery man, the dry cleaner attendant, grocery stores clerks – so it’s fitting he’d love a book series about such a theme really, and firefighters and police officers were a great draw as well. The gift also came at a perfect time as he was outgrowing some of the baby books we owned (and were pretty tired of), and these were actual stories with small plotlines and character development versus just standard picture board books. Oh, I almost forgot – the book was paperback, too, which was also very big-boy and grown up. And guess what else the book had? Yep, those little photos of the other stories in the series on the cover, so of course T started asking where the chef, vet, doctor, and teacher were already (again, way to go, marketers!).

The book was under a Scholastic imprint and a specialized printing being the two-in-one book format, so I knew that finding anything else at Scholastic in this particular series would be unlikely, but I still kept looking for a few months anyway. After that proved futile, off to the internet I went. I searched high and low for these books, and during my search I discovered that the actual publisher was in the UK, which on amazon.com and pretty much every other retail site meant, cha-ching. Then I got a tip from C to do a search at an online used and collectible bookseller called Abe Books (http://www.abebooks.com/). Within just a few seconds of searching, there was my series being sold stateside, and for a nice, low price to boot (hooray!). I ordered up the other four books in the series and happily watched T’s reaction as he opened the package and saw his collection become complete. He was so excited in fact he brought a couple of his new books to school and asked his teachers to read them during circle time; T made his teachers so happy to see his love of reading, and his teachers were happy to see how happy it made him to share this with his classmates, too. Oh, and if these were used books , I was none the wiser; their condition was just fine for our needs anyway.

T still enjoys reading these books to date. They are a great series for T to grow with as one of the other really cool features of these books is the glossary at the end of the book that defines keywords from each story. Now we know what T means whenever he asks to read “the glossary books,” and we’re more than happy to be the people who help him with reading them whenever he wants to do so.