This is the third of these little Salesian Missions booklets I’ve read this year; I read The Way in June and Priceless Gifts in August. Given that I bought another booklet when I got this book and The Way in April 2023, I have at least one more floating around the stacks here in an unread state. They tend to get jammed into narrow slices between larger books only to pop out at strange times, like when I’m not hoping to start a larger book before the Winter Reading Challenge begins on January 2.
So: a booklet small enough to fit into a #10 envelope with poems by Whittier and Whitcomb Riley which won’t help me to keep them straight (although remembering Riley is the Little Orphant Annie and Old School Day Romances guy helps me to remember that Whittier was the more serious of the two). Several poems by Helen Steiner Rice back when she was a going concern (I just read her Wikipedia entry, and an interesting but brief story which is told with greater detail on her Web site–she died in 1981, and she has a Web site, so let that be an indicator of what a big deal she was to some).
At any rate, you could do worse than to read these little booklets with their focus on inspirational messages and mixtures of greeting card scribblers and major poets and to read old Ideals magazines which are mixtures of the same with some grandmothers’ poetry included as well. I recently bought a stack of a major poetry magazine issues from the last year, and I’m telling you that they are, in fact, much worse. So don’t laugh at me for picking some of these up and wondering if I should start actively collecting them (given that they were published many per year for decades, probably not). And enjoying them for the little literary charcuteries that they are. Designed to be disposable but with indispensible literary merit within. What a culture we once were.
