Happy Sesame Street Day!
Premiering on November 10, 1969, Sesame Street has been a cornerstone of my reading life for my entire life. “C is for Cookie” is one of my earliest alphabet memories and The Monster at the End of This Book helped set me on the path that led to a Master of Arts on the design of books and now has me going back to school again for a Library degree.
The cover of Sherlock Hemlock and the Great Twiddlebug Mystery or The Mystery of the Terrible Mess in My Friend’s Front Yard.
One of my favourites that I still own from my childhood is Sherlock Hemlock and the Great Twiddlebug Mystery or The Mystery of the Terrible Mess in My Friend’s Front Yard, published in 1972 by the Western Publishing Company Inc. in conjunction with the Children’s Television Workshop.
Re-reading it now, it is chock-full of surprisingly sophisticated ideas, like the need for humility and reality checks but also having confidence in what you know, Occam’s Razor but also a refutation of Occam’s Razor, and the importance of obscure knowledge when interpreting facts and clues. Can’t say if it’s correlation or causation, but it’s possible some of this rubbed off on me.
Handwriting analysis of my name written on the title page, in an attempt to date my ownership of this book, is inconclusive as I continue to have the handwriting of a five-year-old well into adulthood.
I blame this defacement of this inside spread on my little sister.
My current Sesame Street collection includes other books both old and new, including Ernie the Cave King and Sherlock the Smart Person in The Invention of Paper, Bert’s Hall of Great Inventions, The Four Seasons: A Play (proudly presented by the Sesame Street Little Theater), The Joy of Cookies: Cookie Monster’s Guide to Life, the aforementioned The Monster at the End of This Book and its sequel Another Monster at the End of This Book, How to be a Grouch, Oscar’s Book, and The Pursuit of Grouchiness: Oscar the Grouch’s Guide to Life.
And to step away from books just slightly, two further nods to Sesame Street, the first under the heading of “book adjacent” and in the spirit of Books & Bricks…
The LEGO Sesame Street set, the first set labelled 18+ under LEGO’s recently launched Adults Welcome marketing campaign and branding.
And finally, because I had to…
Happy Reminiscing!
– Winston