Lists of Stories and Programs for Story Hours — Key Ideas to Explore

Age-Graded Story Lists and Program Suggestions

The manual opens with stories for children three and four years old, arranged in order of difficulty, with author names given where titles appear in the library catalogue. This is followed by lists for five- and six-year-olds, and then suggestions for story hours for little children. The progression is methodical: for older children, the book offers cycles of Greek, Norse, King Arthur, Charlemagne, and chivalry tales, along with stories from Chaucer, the Faerie Queene, Irish hero tales, Shakespeare, the Old and New Testaments, Robin Hood, and ballads. Each list is preceded by a short explanatory paragraph, and the index to titles provides cross-references.

Sources and Adaptations for the Storyteller

For each story cycle, the manual lists specific editions and adaptations. For example, under Shakespeare, it notes Tales from Shakespeare by Charles and Mary Lamb as a well-known version of twenty plays, and Mary Macleod's The Shakespeare Story-Book as accurate and popular with children. For the Old Testament, it cites the Douay and King James versions, Josephus's Our Young Folks Josephus, and several adaptations such as Bible Stories Retold by L.L. Weedon, described as retold simply but not without dignity. The manual also includes a section on books about storytelling itself, indicating a professional audience.

Special Days and Narrative Poems

A separate section addresses stories for special days, chiefly for little children: Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving, Arbor Day, and Hallowe'en. Notably, the foreword explains that no lists are given for Washington's Birthday or Independence Day because biography and history are fully indexed in library catalogues. Instead, a list of patriotic and historical narrative poems is provided. This selective approach reflects the manual's focus on filling gaps rather than duplicating existing resources. The narrative poems section includes both prose selections and stories for reading aloud, broadening the scope beyond oral storytelling.

Readers should approach this manual as a period-specific tool shaped by the practices of a single library system. Its value lies in the concrete lists and source annotations, which reveal what stories were considered suitable and how they were grouped. The absence of modern critical apparatus or discussion of storytelling technique means the book is best used as a primary source for early twentieth-century library work with children, not as a current guide.

Leafing through the St. Louis manual, I paused on its quiet lists of fairy tales—so practical, so unassuming—and remembered a different catalogue altogether. There is a similar earnestness in that A List of Books Published by Chatto & Windus, September 1891 — A Closer Reading, a publisher’s stock taking that somehow holds the same patient faith that a story, once offered, will find its child.