Children's Book Collection

Also inspiring this project is the generosity of other recent donors of children's books: Nancy Finke, Dorcas Paul Gastier; Wallace Martel, Gabrielle Bamberger, Judy Riggle, Donald Oresman, and Anne and Charles McFarland. Many more books now housed with the Children's Book Collection have also been gathered from existing library holdings and long ago donors. Many of the items in Series 5: Spellers and Readers, have been part of the Library's collection for a very long time and were associated with the Department of Education.

In 2013, Oberlin College Student and Special Collections student assistant Rebecca Ciota visited Ms. Hunt in her home for the purpose of interviewing her about her book collecting past. The following (edited) text is drawn from Rebecca's notes, as well as a transcript of their conversation:

I was born in Cincinnati.  But when we moved to Lorain, I was supposed to go into the second grade. But because I was one of these curious children, I had learned to read from my father reading the funnies.  I’d make him read them over and over. He was real patient. My mother wouldn’t: once was it! But he said; "okay." And pretty soon I’d say, well you said that this word and I started reading. I wanted to teach the other kids, but they wouldn’t sit there. So I taught my dolls, my teddy bear. So I have been reading from the time I was four.  Since then he, believe it or not--see I was born in 1911, what was happening in 1915, first World War.  Cincinnati was a German city. They had a big German population and they had classes, bilingual, we went to kindergarten and had English and German and I learned to read German. When I was in the second grade, we moved to Lorain. I was reading fourth or fifth grade books. So they skipped me a year and after that, every couple years, I would skip a half grade, because I annoyed the teachers, because I was always telling the others what the answers were. So I graduated from high school when I was 15. 

Ms. Hunt started collecting children's books at the age of six, after her sister returned from a trip to Europe with five books bought in London as gifts for her little sister.  Ms. Hunt loved the gifts; and family members quickly learned that the appropriate gift for Ms. Hunt was a children's book. Starting in 1976 and two years into her retirement, she and her sister went every year to England, using Thomas Cooke's travel agency (who found her books as well as made her travel arrangements).  Esther and her sister would tour London book markets, bookstores, and every little British countryside town's bookstore in order to find new children's books; later, she would also purchase books from book dealers. When purchasing books, Esther looked for books published before 1915 with colored illustrations.  She maintained no specifics on size or anything else. For her first few voyages, Esther was able to ship entire cases of children's books back to the United States. Books were duty free and, initially, Esther claimed, few people bought old children's books. Slowly, other people began collecting children's books, and acquiring so many became difficult.

Ms. Hunt trained at Oberlin College, became a kindergarten teacher, and loved it. She was one of the few in Lorain County with the appropriate understanding of pedagogy for young children, but she claimed that it was not her career that influenced her collection but her love of reading and her love of the comics her parents read her when she was a child.

When I first started . . . they didn’t have kindergarten in Lorain. That’s why I taught Toni Morrison in first grade . . . I have several letters from her. I taught her sister, Lois. I taught her brother, Buddy.  I knew her mother and father. Her father worked in the steel plant and her mother did housework. Her real name was Chloe Wofford. But she married Harold Morrison and they got divorced. She had two children and I heard from her, not because she writes to me, but when she got the Nobel Prize, I was so proud. I couldn’t help it. I wrote to her and said she had made, not my day, but whole career. But I had nothing to do with it. She was very ordinary in first grade. 

But see, when they opened kindergarten, I took over, and I kept kindergarten.  Every couple, maybe every five years, I’d say, “Give me a first grade for a change.”  Then I’d be glad to go back to kindergarten.  They gave me a plaque for my 45 years of service.

Thank you Esther, your dedication to education and your delight in children's books lives on in this collection.