We will be visiting the Hopkinton Public Library, our "sister" library in Hopkinton, MA on September 17th. They have just undergone significant renovations, so we will be sharing some lessons learned with them. Our two libraries are often confused, most recently when the organization that was supposed to pick up the unsold volumes after the Friends Annual Book Sale in June, mistakenly traveled to Massachusetts to haul them away. By the time the driver arrived back in NH, they were unable to finish the task. Doubtless our September visit will be a happier occasion.
OK: True confessions. I love to read obituaries. They are often just plain good stories. The one below is for Bobby Lynn Maslen who developed the "Bob" books. Of course, if you don't have small humans in your life, you may not be aware of Maslen's work. It is. nevertheless, a good "bookish" obit.
If you’re a teacher, sometimes the best classroom materials are the ones you improvise yourself.
Bobby Lynn Maslen learned that lesson after she was hired in 1968 to teach preschoolers part time at the Catlin Gabel School in Portland, Ore. She couldn’t find anything that she thought was pitched right for emerging readers, and in the mid-1970s she began experimenting.
“She was really looking for something to bridge from ‘I know my letters but I can’t read’ to, ‘I have read my first word,’ ” her daughter Lynn Maslen Kertell told The Oregonian in 2013.
Ms. Maslen began making little individualized books for each child out of sheets of typing paper cut in half. She had bought two small leather dolls at a crafts show and, naming the circular-shaped one Mat and the triangular one Sam, began creating stories about them with the children, drawn in her homemade books with simple figures.
The project led to Bob Books, a series for very young readers that in the beginning Ms. Maslen and her husband, John, who became her illustrator, had printed on the school’s press and distributed themselves, packaging each set in plastic sandwich bags.
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The publisher Scholastic began putting out the books in 1993, and over the decades countless children have used them to learn reading. Scholastic says more than 16 million Bob Books are in print.
Ms. Maslen died on Aug. 16 in Portland at 87. An announcement from Scholastic said the cause was Alzheimer’s disease.
Ms. Maslen always maintained that the goal of her books was not just to teach reading.
“What we wanted to create,” she said in 1994, “was not only the skill of reading but the love of reading.”
Bobby Lynn Hartness was born on Dec. 10, 1930, in Sanford, N.C. Her name combined the names of her parents, Robert and Lynn (Williams) Hartness. Her father and his brother were second-generation owners of the Sanford Milling Company. Her mother died when Bobby Lynn was 5; a grandmother and other relatives helped raise her.
She received a degree in clothing design from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1954 and went to work in New York for the Youngland clothing company. She married John Maslen in 1955. Four years later the couple moved to Oregon. John Maslen worked as an architect while Bobby Lynn raised their four children and began volunteering at their schools.
She took a part-time teaching job at Catlin Gabel to supplement the family income. The trend in some segments of the children’s-book market was toward lavish illustrations and substantive themes, but when Ms. Maslen turned her attention toward helping preschoolers read, she recognized that simpler was better.
Smaller was better, too.
The original Bob Books, made for little hands, are about the size of a postcard and might have only six or eight pages. They were sold in sets of 8 or 10 or 12 books, with each set aimed at a slightly more advanced level of reader.
Book 1, Set 1, titled “Mat,” was a masterpiece of sparseness. It told its story (the essence of which was that Mat and Sam sat) with words of three letters or fewer, almost all of them made of up the letters M, A, T and S.
More letters were introduced, then longer words, along with more complex plots, so that by “Floppy Mop,” a Set 3 book, youngsters could be caught up in the high drama of what happened when Tom sat on his dog, Mop, while Jack the cat chased Zack the rat:
“Mop ran after Jack and Zack. ‘Stop, Mop,’ begged Tom. Mop stopped.”
Ms. Maslen’s approach was to combine ideas from phonics — the relationship between sounds and spelling patterns — with just enough storytelling to allow a young reader to feel pride in having grasped the tale. Her husband matched the simplicity of the stories with rudimentary drawings that had a childlike quality; many were just outlines, so children could color them in.
Making the books was not as simple as it might have seemed.
“Writing 12 books in three-letter words is a challenge,” Ms. Maslen said, referring to the 12-book Set 1, “Beginning Readers.”
As word of the books spread, keeping up with demand was also a challenge. Portland State University published the books for a few years, but then the Maslens turned the franchise into a family business. Eventually they couldn’t keep up with demand and struck a partnership with Scholastic.
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“By that time we were going crazy,” Ms. Maslen said. “We knew the potential was much more than we could handle ourselves.”
The line has since expanded into games, workbooks, digital products and more.
In addition to her husband and her daughter Lynn, Ms. Maslen is survived by another daughter, Sylvia Maslen Davids; two sons, David and Paul; and eight grandchildren.
In 1995, Ms. Maslen gave The Associated Press a list of suggestions for parents wanting to help their young children read. Sing alphabet songs, real or made up, she advised. Point out short words when reading aloud and ask the child to read them. And, she said, be sensitive to a child’s attention span. Expect the reading sessions to be short.
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