Oh Skin-nay! The Days of Real Sport: Matts G. Djos, Professor Emeritus, Mesa State College, Colorado - Brossura

Dear Reader,May you enjoy this juvenile treasury of 1880's Americana. I inherited it from my mother, Siri Engman-Djos, who was born in Minneapolis in 1905, some eight years before the original cartoons and verses were published. I would imagine that authors Nesbit and Briggs would be astonished that their modest little creation had endured nearly a hundred years, tattered and worn as it is. A charming forerunner of the modern comic book, it was probably intended as little more than an entertaining diversion about a collection of preteens, their parents, aunts, cousins, teachers, neighbors, and buddies; but it survives today as a very real (if not still wonderfully amusing) first-hand snapshot of late nineteenth century hard working Americans, complete with swimming holes, wooden sidwalks, vacant lot baseball, ice wagons, Sunday school picnics, and Saturday night baths. "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," we may recall, was published in 1884; and Skin-nay and his friends might well have been Huck's contemporaries. While they may have grown up to fight WWI, we see them here at an age and in a time far more innocent and unassumng than we might ever imagine. Here then, without editing or cosmetic improvements (you see the book exactly as it survived), you are witness to a simple world of late nineteenth century entertainments and discomforts, including the bewildering optimism of a time long, long ago. It is indeed a masterwork in its own right, a rich, comic, boyhood portrait of Midwest America that can't be put down until the very last cartoon and the very last verse are enjoyed. Matts G. Djos, Professor Emeritus, Mesa State College, Colorado