So much was superior about the Gen X childhood. We had decent schools, conscientious teachers, no social media madness, no “AI” nonsense, and no smartphone obsessions.
We also had a thriving children’s book industry. And no—I’m not referring to Harry Potter. (Most Gen Xers were in our 30s when Harry Potter appeared.)
We had comics and storybooks, of course. But there were also plenty of children’s books that respected the intelligence of children. Many of these books were quite sophisticated by today’s standards, what might accurately be called “middlebrow”.
Among these was the How and Why Wonder Books series. Most of these were published in the early 1960s.
I owned this volume: The How and Why Wonder Book of The Moon.
This title, targeted at the casual juvenile reading market, went into considerable detail about the science of the moon and the history of lunar observation. Since this was published before the 1969 lunar landing, that event was not covered, but plenty else was.
In the 1960s and 1970s, it was still assumed that intelligent people would spend more time reading than staring at electronic screens. How and Why Wonder Books, though written for children in the 1960s, would be beyond the reading comprehension levels of many adults born after 1990. Make of that what you will.
-ET