How to Find Good Children’s Books at Budget Prices

There are countless great books to add to your home library, if you just know where to look

A mother reads to her children in this illustration by American artist Jessie Willcox Smith (1863–1935). Public domain

I took a trip to my local library the other day, visiting the children’s section for the first time in a while.

I was appalled.

My surprise didn’t come because the shelves were empty—they were well-filled. Nor did it come because the books I loved as a child had largely disappeared—I already knew that many of them were purged from the shelves, deemed too old-fashioned or beyond repair or replacement.

What surprised me was the row after row of flashy, cartoonish covers sporting titles that signaled a woke, politically correct, and superficial worldview. It seemed that any child who commendably pulled himself away from video games and social media long enough to pick up a book would just receive more of the same content, only in a slower-paced, readable form.

So how do we help our children navigate the world of books in a postmodern society of politically correct feelings and relative truth?

The first thing to know is what makes a good, worthwhile story. One of the most masterful writers of the 20th century, C.S. Lewis, laid out several points in his essay “On Three Ways of Writing for Children,” which parents can use when helping their children choose good reading material.

What Makes a Good Book?

Reading material portraying realistic children is one of the first items for which parents should look. Lewis explains this point by citing Edith Nesbit’s trilogy on the Bastable family, which is told from the perspective of the oldest boy, Oswald, who gives his thoughts and opinions in an honest way that almost any child can relate to. Such a humorous depiction, Lewis explains, “enables the children who read it to do something much more mature than they realize,” namely, to engage in character study—an exercise that aids in understanding not only the book, but also themselves.

In addition to realistic children, good books provide depictions of the various personalities in real life. “Consider Mr. Badger in ‘The Wind in the Willows,’” Lewis writes, “that extraordinary amalgam of high rank, coarse manners, gruffness, shyness, and goodness. The child who has once met Mr. Badger has ever afterwards, in its bones, a knowledge of humanity and of English social history which it could not get in any other way.” In other words, the various personalities depicted in good books provide valuable interpersonal knowledge and skills—but such knowledge is cloaked so that children don’t realize they’re learning it.

Good literature hides the pill of knowledge in the jam of imagination, excitement, and entertainment. Just like television, it provides an occasion for ingesting ideologies and awareness of the world. But unlike television, the picture of the world that a good book presents will actually make the children who read it grow into better men and women, knowledgeable not only of the world in which they live, but of how to interact capably with it.

A third thing that good books should offer is a moral. Not a shove-it-down-your-throat moral, mind you, but a subtle one that settles into the subconsciousness of the child. “The child as reader is neither to be patronized nor idolized,” Lewis writes, “we talk to him as man to man. But the worst attitude of all would be the professional attitude which regards children in the lump as a sort of raw material which we have to handle.” Good books will teach good things, but will do so in such a way that children hardly recognize the values they are learning.

Where Can Good Books Be Found?

In a world of many libraries similar to the one I explored the other day, how do we steer our children toward good literature, or even know how to find it ourselves? Several tricks come to mind.

The first is to look for old books. I have found that anything published in the 1950s or earlier is likely to be solid and wholesome, filled with storylines and morals that are unobjectionable. Unless these books have been republished recently, the covers will likely not be much to look at, and the pages will undoubtedly be somewhat yellowed, but the inside is what counts.

The second is to familiarize yourself with classic authors. Classic anthologies of short stories, such as Joe Wheeler’s “Great Stories Remembered” volumes, are a tremendous tool in this area, for they offer a smattering of author names and story styles. Selecting the ones you like and then searching sites such as Archive.org for those same authors often provides other titles under their names. These can often be found in used bookstores or even online in digital format.

Finally, surround yourself with good book lists. “Books Children Love” by Elizabeth Wilson, “Honey for a Child’s Heart” by Gladys Hunt, and “Hand that Rocks the Cradle” by Nathaniel Bluedorn are several book-length lists that categorize and describe books by genre and age appropriateness. Carole Joy Seid’s online book list is another great resource.

Familiarizing yourself with such resources will soon enable you to spot a likely candidate for a good children’s book a mile away, enabling you to build your own library for your children. A case in point is what happened after I dejectedly left the children’s section at my local library and went to the discard room. Within minutes, I spotted roughly 15 promising children’s books or classics, several of which I had never read but knew were good options because I recognized the authors’ names. Best of all, these potential additions to my home library were less than a dollar each.

Many libraries around the country have these discard rooms, often acting under the banner of the “Friends of the Library” group. They process donations of old books and books the library discards, reselling them for a song to those who know the value of a good book, no matter its age. Exploring these rooms or hitting the large sales these groups host is one of the best ways to start your own library at an inexpensive price.

Who knows? Perhaps you, too, will become a connoisseur of good children’s books!