American Girl’s 1990s Twins Need Books

As we get closer to the release of the American Girl 1990s Historical Twin Dolls, Nicki and Isabel Hoffman, we spend more time reminiscing about our own childhood during the ’90s. (It’s a bit traumatic to be labeled “historical” in your 30s.) Elizabeth and I are twins of the first order, identical as is medically possible and closer than non-twins can understand. While we didn’t need AG to suggest that we take two dolls and call them twins (did that on our own), we’re thrilled with their collection. Well, actually, we’d have been happy with just the one set, if you really get down to brass tacks. It’s the PIZZA HUT Book-It! set, and we absolutely need at least two of them (more, if AG can keep their prices down on this one). The Book-It! program was a HUGE part of our lives!

Imagine being rewarded for reading your favorite books . . . we really were in seventh heaven during our Book-It! days. Our home was filled with books (that’s a funny story that I’ll get to in a minute*), but the family budget didn’t include eating at Pizza Hut. And our Mother ingrained a love for books in the two of us, whether for story or illustrations, before birth, I think. So, we really need these Book-It! sets. (Oh, I mean, our dolls really need those sets. Sorry.) Particularly the red cup with the logo on it. Sorry, but we won’t be sharing any of the set pieces this time.

Anyway, what good is a Book-It! set without books?! Not much. As soon as we heard that 1990s dolls were coming, we started working on our own doll library, complete with doll-sized books. Books that we grew up reading in the 1990s. As in, real kids’ books from back then. So, we’ve been working for months on just pulling out what we want to abridge and reduce to doll size. Not an easy task in a house with 8,000 books, at least half of which are children’s books. Some books are good for the story, some for their illustrations. And two of us have to narrow this down to a manageable collection. Two people with very different tastes in what makes a good book.

Fortunately, a lot of the books we read met both of our needs. Like Berenstain Bears.

And we have to have Boxcar Children.

And a lot of you remember Mary Kate & Ashley! (Jill and Silver graciously allowed us to wig and dress them like the new twins for this photo.)

Then there’s Little House, My Father’s Dragon, Curious George, Three Cousins Detective Agency, Linnea, Babysitter’s Club, Sadie in the Northwoods . . . Oh, my! I’d better stop here. I haven’t even gotten to the Jill Barklem or John Patience books from England. Or the non-fiction gems like Golden Guides.

And what about– Right! Those, too! And, you know, you have to have somewhere to keep them. Before we got “real” bookshelves, we had wood crates stacked in our bedroom to store our stuff. Just like these. Mine were the antique-y looking stained ones, but Elizabeth always liked the unfinished Ikea look.

Since these are the books Sis and I grew up reading, they’re the most difficult to abridge. We always try to use the most interesting pages (illustrated, when possible) but still maintain the idea that some are chapter books. Not all of our books have one continuous chapter, but the pages will be in order (if not consecutive). The readers are even worse to cut down. Which illustrations do you leave in, and which do you pass over? Not an easy task, I can tell you. We like all the books in their complete form. But needs must, and we think the time spent was worth it. And this is just a fraction of what is stacked in my desk (smile)!

The photos are difficult to present, because these books look like you’re seeing full-size versions. That’s why we always show a photo of our items with a doll(s). It isn’t easy to make a 2 to 2-1/2″ book look this lifelike. It’s really so much fun. I just wish we had more time to spend on it . . . another eternal circle, isn’t it?

Feel free to leave a comment below with a list of your own favorite books! There might be one we haven’t met yet!

*Oh, yes. About a small home, filled with four creative people who need lots of space and supplies, that’s crammed to the ceiling with books. When we were two years old (1989), Mom noticed that public and school libraries were dumping their “old” children’s books by the dumpsters. A lot of books, by the many hundreds at a time, and it felt like a tidal wave of destruction. Mom knew she couldn’t save them all, so she spent hundreds and hundreds of hours going through each title, picking only what she thought we’d actually read. That was the beginning of a home library that often had  more titles than most school libraries. Books were stacked everywhere, even on shelves around the room up near the ceiling. We moved those books from Florida to Tennessee (when we were four), where we saved even more books from certain extinction. The stacks were taller, but we weren’t allowed to mount shelves in a rented house. When we were six, we moved all of those books from Tennessee to Ohio, where we rented a larger-but-still-small house and bought four 5′-tall Sauder bookshelves. That’s when Mom got serious about things. The Mansfield-area libraries and schools couldn’t dump the books fast enough. Beautiful books, in that wonderful library binding, with unforgettable stories and illustrations. It would be ten years before we stopped being first in line at every book sale around the state (and I mean everywhere around the state). We often told people that we’d learned state geography by mapping the week’s book sales.  (Did I tell you we were homeschooled?) By the time we were about ten years old and owned EIGHT of the Saunder’s bookshelves, we had to admit that we had nowhere left to put more shelves or book stacks. No problem! Mom sold the sofa! “After all, you don’t need a sofa. You can do the same stuff at the dining room table or sitting on the floor in the middle of the room.” (Did I tell you that we were raised without a television?) That sofa space sucked those bookshelves in like a vacuum does the corner of your sheer curtains! And we kept driving to book sales. And stacking. And shelving. Finally, Mom decided that since she couldn’t sell the dining room table, we would have to do some kind of makeshift shelves in the bedrooms (the teeny little office area was already lined in books). We loved our books, and there wasn’t one that someone hadn’t read or used for reference. We were somewhere around five thousand strong by that time. But change comes to all of us. Even those of us with books. When we were twelve, our parents bought a house about 40 miles south of where we lived. An old farmhouse in what was then “the country”.

The new house was a one-room cabin in 1870 and had been added onto every 30 years or so. Not the biggest thing ever, but lots more room for books (smile)! Two upstairs bedrooms had been converted from attic space between 1911 and 1949. Then, in 1978, someone had added a master bedroom and bath on the second floor, which took up about half of the upstairs. This was a no-brainer for Mom. The two small bedrooms were fine for sleeping, and we now have a library / family room for crafting and reading. Dad built floor-to-ceiling/wall-to-wall adjustable bookshelves from real wood (no more bowed and sagging Sauders) around the whole room. Two of the smaller dining-room walls got the same treatment, and our bedroom got a single bookshelf running around it close to the ceiling. There was a small (6″ deep) ceiling-to-floor alcove behind the door where Sis and I sleep that got built-ins to hold our “special books”. I won’t mention the odd places that got shelves. There were too many.

By about 2005, the public institutions had successfully rid themselves of anything worth reading (editorial comment), and we began to focus on what Mom always referred to as “filling in the gaps”. The first “gap” I remember filling in was “pigs”. Information is a funny thing. You don’t know what you don’t know until you can’t answer someone’s question. Pigs were only the first of many, many gaps that have been filled since the turn of the millenium. Time changes and interests change. (Did I tell you that we’re now 35 years old?) Mom has made jokes over the last 20 years about selling off one of the two sofas we now own. But it’s only a joke. Because we actually sold the dining-room table several years ago, in order to fit three desks and computer workstations in one small dining room. I don’t think it ever occurred to us to remove the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. After all, you can always find a place to eat. But you might need a brief history of the “Kingdoms of Europe” one day, and then where would you be with a big round table and no book?

In 2018, right after Dad was diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer and his company announced it was moving to Florida without him, we spent months thinking we’d have to move somewhere for him to find a job. In two months, we carted truckloads of antiques (house was filled with ’em) to a donation store. And books. Lots of books. To the library book sale warehouse (the eternal circle, eh). Close to 4,000 of them. At that time, we knew that we’d topped 12,000 books in the house and hadn’t counted any further. That leaves us with around 8,000 or more. Like I said, about half of them are children’s books (we didn’t cull those), the rest mostly non-fiction. We probably don’t have close to 300 adult fiction books, and most of them are what people might call classics. Elizabeth likes Agatha Christie and has a sizeable collection of those. Mostly, though, we’re a non-fiction house. History. Military history. British history. Biographies and autobiographies. Herbs and homeopathy. Needlecraft. The list goes on, and there probably isn’t a book in our collection, then or now, that someone didn’t read or use. They’re like old friends. Some of the shelves that were emptied in 2018 now house CDs and craft supplies for the Etsy store. One whole floor-to-ceiling unit, three feet wide, was converted to a doll apartment building by adding a door to the front and adjusting the shelves to about 20″ high. We no longer feel like we live in a library, but people who come over probably see things differently. Wonder what they’d think if they knew that all of the shelves are double-stacked?

A funny story. When we moved to this house in 1998, we probably only had about five thousand books. Our friends provided older boys at both houses, to help load and unload the boxes. Ha! That was a sad day for American manhood (smile)! Sis and I were 12 at the time, and those boys whined about the weight of the boxes and wouldn’t carry them. The adults were busy with the furniture, and we were on a time limit with the rental truck, so Elizabeth and I ended up carrying most of them by ourselves. Hundreds of boxes.

But it was worth it. Because, in the end, we wouldn’t have been able to make these mini books for our dolls. Now, how’s that for getting the most out of your books?!