Curious George
George is an African monkey who has come to America with his friend The Man in The Yellow Hat. They get into all sort of trouble in this 1946 Childrens' novel.
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- Depends on what sort of knowledge you're trying to get. If you just want to be able to point out constellations, I would recommend The Stars by H. A. Rey (yes, the same guy who wrote Curious George). It's unique in that it displays the constellations in a manner that makes them actually look like what they're trying to represent (which ends up making them much easier to find). There's also some good descriptions of the mythology behind many of the constellations and some other interesting features in the sky that can be picked out with the naked eye or binoculars. There's also a section at the end that discusses the celestial sphere (how the sky changes during the seasons, the ecliptic, precession, etc.).
If you want something with more depth, I highly recommend Night Sky from St. Martin's Press. It's a little 300 page field guide that will give you a comprehensive introduction to the heavens and basic astronomy and provides you with enough data to go out observing with. The first quarter of the book is devoted to introducing the fundamentals of astronomy from the celestial sphere, to coordinate systems, to telescope designs, to the magnitude system, to variable stars, and stellar evolution. The rest of the book contains star charts, detailed descriptions of each of the constellations and interesting objects therein, and information on the planets. The only problem is that the book is a bit old, so the tables of data (sunset times, positions of the planets, etc.) are now out of date. Nevertheless, it's well worth buying.
If you would like a more serious introduction to astronomy and know some basic physics and calculus, you can do no better than to read Introduction to Modern Astrophysics by Carroll & Ostlie (affectionately known as BOB -- the Big Orange Book). It's about 1500 pages long and covers absolutely everything in astronomy. It's clear, comprehensive, and will likely tell you everything you need to know.
- And yet your example is squarely in the center of the problem. How many children's books from 1850 are in your house? How many children's books from 1950 are in your house? What percentage of your own children's books are still in your possession?
Children's books have a very short shelf life. New ones get published all the time. A very tiny percentage become Curious George and get reprinted for decades, but the rest go out of print. The printed copies get used by children and therefore become ragged and nasty. In ten years you will have thrown them away. Hopefully you will have thrown them away: Clutter is no good either. If we want to preserve them it should not be your house's job.
This is why archiving is hard. It is why backups are hard. It all seems so redundant when the objects are shiny and new and sitting right there, they're in the stores, they're on all your iDevices, they're all over YouTube. And then one day you wake up and the original film of your 1970s-era Oscar-winning movie has fallen apart. This actually happens! You've got to think ahead.
The danger of the digital era is that we get tempted to rely on a number of physical copies that is so small that we get blindsided by black-swan accidents. That's what this is really about. The movie Metropolis was ultimately saved because it was distributed in physical copies and a film archive in Argentina didn't throw theirs away like everybody else. That sort of thing is in danger of stopping. Make copies!
