When I was very young, pre-school age and into at least the first grade, my parents used to read to me quite a bit.

I know this because I can just vaguely remember being read to or taking a book to one of them, but mostly I know this because in later years my parents would remind me how much they used to read to me when I was young. They claimed that that was the reason that I liked to read so much.

I still remember a lot of the books that I had when I was knee high to a grasshopper. There were the children’s Golden Books and the Ding Dong School books by Miss Frances. And there were individual titles like Slower Than a Lady Bug that I recall well to this day.

Later on I remember getting some sort of astronomy book with pictures of the planets and stars and such.

Most of those books are long gone.

But I still have one that I think was given to me by my aunt Irene as a Christmas present in 1955 when I was six.

I would have been too young to read it myself, so I assume my parents read to me from it.

But by the time I was in second grade I must have been able to handle it myself because I recall reading from it while we were still living on the farm.

And I continued to delve into it for years afterward.

It’s the oldest book that I still have in my library. Through all the moves and the downsizings of recent years, I’ve kept that book, because the title describes it pretty accurately: The Illustrated Treasury of Children’s Literature.

And I know when it was given to me because someone (my mother?) wrote my name and the date in it.

It truly is a treasure as it has something for children of all ages, from Mother Goose rhymes to Arabian Nights tales to Brothers Grimm stories to Lewis Carroll and Aesop, from Charles Dickens to Mark Twain.

My only quibble with it is that the longer tales are only given as excerpts.

But while I rarely dip into it these days, it’s one of those books that I don’t intend to part with, even though everything in it is public domain and can be found on the internet.

Anyway the reason that I bring it up now, is I recently watched an episode of The Golden Girls (Season 7 Episode 3) where Rose and a young girl were enjoying a children’s story, and wouldn’t you know, but the book they were reading from was very clearly The Illustrated Treasury of Children’s Literature.

Nice to know they didn’t fake it with just some random book.