The book, below--The Picture Dictionary for Children--was a favorite of mine, during early childhood.
I have several books from childhood, and when I happen to look at them (or even, simply, see their spines on one of the bookshelves in the apartment), I'll often get a sense (usually a somewhat vague sense, to be sure, but a sense nonetheless) of that which I felt looking at them when I was very young.
The dictionary was originally published in 1939 by Grosset & Dunlap; subsequent editions were brought out in 1945, 1948, and 1958 (the latter, two years after I was born). The book's title page indicates that the 1958 edition was "Completely Revised," including new pictures. All of the pictures in the book are drawings, as opposed to photographs.
I was looking through the book recently, and noticed something which I found amusing.
The book includes an entry for "radio" (see image below), which features a drawing of a large, old-fashioned radio (the kind which was a piece of furniture, and which had a place of prominence in many homes, during radio's most popular years as a medium).
The book also includes a definition of the word "broadcast" (see below), which includes, likewise, a reference to radio.
Yet the 1958 edition, interestingly, does not have an entry for "television," despite television's ubiquity at the time (and whose rise, as a cultural force, had been accompanied by a decline in radio's popularity). There are, in the book, definitions of "telegram," and "telephone" (see image)--but not "television." I also looked up abbreviations for television, on the off-chance they might be included--such as "TV," and "Tee-Vee." "Tee-Vee" had been employed as a written abbreviation during the medium's early years--in some newspapers and magazines, for example. But neither abbreviation--like the word television itself--appears in the dictionary which I very much enjoyed as a child.
