I view that more as a result rather than a cause. I guess I’ll learn more as I just checked out Pioneer Girl, but I want to re-read the LH books before I dig into it.
Who is receiving the royalties from these books now? I was going to buy ebooks because my yellow Harper & Row paperbacks from the 1970’s are so tattered and fragile but ebooks are about $6.99 for each book! I was hoping for a bundle of around $20 but bundled they’re about $65. So I guess I’ll carefully read my antiques.
My SO moved here (Seattle area) from Chicago and we drove his truck here on I-90. He didn’t want to do a lot of stopping so I didn’t insist on visiting De Smet very strenuously which would’ve been about a hundred-mile trip out of our way. I don’t even know how many times I’ve kicked myself in the twelve years since. :smack: Bucket list.
I had the same ones, and they fell apart last month when I re-read them for probably the thirtieth time. Sad, but they’re just hard copies.
So I decided to buy hardback replacements. Turns out there’s no hardback edition currently in print: a new edition with colorized illustrations is due out early next year.
Colorized illustrations? Oh, no. Oh *hell *no.
I managed to buy the whole series in the previous, black and white edition, one place or another–mostly from Barnes & Noble’s website–but I paid dearly for a couple of the titles.
Worth it.
Edit: funny. Exactly one year ago we were driving from Chicago to Seattle. We didn’t stop for De Smet, either.
No, the Find-A-Grave photo is not mine. I didn’t take one as I figured there was probably already one on there (and I was right ). I see there are now 7 other photo requests for the DeSmet Cemetery so I might have to make a trip over there some time.
I don’t want to touch on the whole climate change thing, but the winters the last several years have been very mild. I don’t think we’ve had an actual blizzard for quite some time.
But I seen it!!
I know what you mean though. Unfortunately, I don’t think the DeSmet newspapers are online and I don’t know where to go in the courthouse to look at things like that. Or even if they would let me.
As Helena330 says, DeSmet is quite a ways north of I-90. You would have to really want to go there and have the time.
Had this been honored her royalties would have likely made the Mansfield County Public Library the wealthiest small town library in the nation because in addition to the royalties from the books Laura’s estate received millions from the TV series. Instead, the Laura Ingalls Library was essentially falling down by the late 1990s, the reason being that Rose had other plans.
When she died Rose ignored Laura’s will completely and left the estate to her friend, lawyer, and agent, a man named Roger Lea MacBride who she referred to as her adopted grandchild. Could she do this legally? Well, IANAL, but, she did it. The library received $28,000 in the 1970s and the rest went to MacBride and, when he died, his daughter and grandchildren.
So by the late 1990s Laura’s still substantial royalties and the millions that she had earned for the last decades were going to complete strangers: people who had never met her, were no relation, and had no hand whatever in the creation of the books and not the library that she specifically stated she wanted to receive them.
There was finally a lawsuit in 1999. The library settled for $875,000 (which is pennies on the dollar for what they should have received) and the royalties continue to belong to MacBride’s family.
Roger MacBride is a familiar name to political junkies because he was a faithless elector back in 1972. Chosen by the Republicans in Virginia to cast a vote for Nixon/Agnew, he instead voted for a couple of…libertarians. (See how neatly all of this fits together?)
How sad that Laura’s legacy was left in the hands of that tool and his family. With such a large family i wonder why no grand nieces/nephews of Laura and Almanzo didn’t challenge the will.
I had the same set; this was the first set of books I collected. My mother bought me Little House on the Prairie and read it out loud to me, but within a few chapers I got fed up with this “a few pages a night thing” and just plunged ahead on my own. I would have been five when we started, then we back tracked to Big Woods and continued the series one book at a time, over several years. (I think they were all purchased in Duluth MN)
A few years ago we moved cross country and I let many many books go, including that set. I promised myself that any books I really missed I would replace. About a year ago, I found a cardboard boxed set of the yellow covered paperbacks, from Big Woods to Happy Golden Years in a used book store. They were priced at $50 for the set, then marked down to $25. I happened to buy a [del]a bank-breaking shitload[/del] couple of books that day, and convinced the owner to knock another $20 dollars off the total price. Score! I re-read them, almost exactly 40 years after my first introduction.
Colourized illustrations? Providence protect us! Garth Williams for me thank you. Interestingly I can pick his work out anywhere. Once I saw an open page of a book and bet my son I could name the illustrator. I came out a dime richer and my son became even more convinced of his mother’s nerdiness in regard to all things Book.
[QUOTE=Back cover of Harper Trophy Editions]
The illustrations by Garth Williams are the results of 10 years of research. Mr Williams actually followed the path of the Ingalls family during the period 1870-1889.
[/QUOTE]
As for the Little House illustrations, can anyone else relate? As a very young child I was frightened of Garth Williams. I had no concept of “stalker” but that was how I saw Mr Williams. Stalking the family for nineteen years, watching their wagon head west, spying on them almost drowning in the rising creek, observing all their hardships, and doing pen and ink sketches of it all! (Remember, I was really young, the concept that he was doing this nearly a century later did not occur to me.)
Oh and in Little House on the Prarie in the early chapters it explicitly mentions that Laura and Mary SHARE a tin cup of water at meal times. They family really had very few material things.
I don’t know about Almanzo’s family, but sadly Charles and Caroline Ingalls have no descendants. Grace and Carrie both married but Laura was the only one who had children so Rose was the last living descendant.
If I remember correctly Carrie had some stepchildren. Charles’s brother was married to Caroline’s sister and they had children so if there are descendants there they’d be the closest living relatives.
Regarding the colorized books, I’ve seen those and have wondered if the original illustrations were in color. If I ever publish a memoir I’d love to have Garth Williamsesque illustrations.
I always imagined him as a sad, monomaniacal illustrator who spent his whole career researching and illustrating this one series of books and never did anything else.
A quarter of a century later my baby daughter began to accumulate Little Golden Books, and I learned differently.
I owned a set of books by EB White, (Trumpet of the Swan, Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little) illustrated by Garth Williams, so I knew he had a career as an illustrator. He somehow managed to do this, while stalking the Ingalls family !
The book that I recognized instantly? The Cricket in Times Square. The Dell Yearling edition. I never read it, which is surprising. It seems both my school library and the librariesI visited had every Dell Yearling book published. It is a publisher and imprint I recognize immediately. (Along with Harper Trophy)
Damn, the things I will never forget, but can I remember to buy milk? I’ve been to the grocery store *twice *today, and still have to go out again if I want milk in my coffee tomorrow!
I was introduced to his work through The Tall Book of Make Believe. I recognized his work instantly when I received the Little House books for Christmas years later.
Yep. That’s the set that was given to me for my fifth birthday. It’s sitting on our table now, waiting for me to get the gumption to throw it in the recycle bin. I feel like a traitor, but the books literally fell apart the last time I read them. Little sections of pages went everywhere.
My yellow covered books were all purchased singly. The first few were gifts, but from Plum Creek on they were bought one at a time in Duluth or Minneapolis on holidays, with “my own” money. It was frustrating to wait until our next trip, but at least I aged with the books. I don’t think reading the knife scene in Happy Golden Years would be appropriate at age five, and my mother really didn’t do censorship of my reading material.
My poor little yellow books were in such sad shape that I ended up using libraries in two counties (both ebook and physical) rather than disturb them. But I got it done: I’ve re-read the entire series in order from Little House in the Big Woods through The First Four Years.
I don’t agree with *Two Many Cats ** premise about the tin cups (or there ever being too many cats) but thank you so much for starting this topic and sending me on this literary quest. I think it’s been longer than I thought since re-reading these books as I’d forgotten quite a bit. It’s going to take me awhile to get through Pioneer Girl but I look forward to it. I’ve read some articles online and have skimmed the book a little. When I was young and the days before the internet, I remember thinking that Laura was like someone’s kind grandmother telling stories to her grandchildren. I wondered about her and wanted to learn more. I’d had an inkling that she was, gasp, HUMAN, but over the years my interest and curiosity ebbed and flowed. Now, finally, with so many resources, here she is (albeit pieced-together) and I’m going to get to know her in-depth as she really was. I’ll miss the fantasy grandmotherly Laura.
From the reading I’ve done, I don’t like Rose at all, but I gather that if it weren’t for her we wouldn’t have these books at all so I’m grudgingly grateful.
). I see there are now 7 other photo requests for the DeSmet Cemetery so I might have to make a trip over there some time.