Enter The Farm Book

The Farm Book, story and pictures by E. Boyd Smith (Houghton Mifflin, 1910) With The Farm Book, Smith introduced two bright, venturesome—and impeccably dressed—young protagonists, Bobby and Betty, whose real world experiences would become the focus of three of the artist's most popular picture books. In this first volume of the series, the brother-sister team is dispatched from New York City for a long promised stay at their Uncle John's New England farm.

On December 17, 1910, in its holiday review of The Farm Book, the New York Times noted: "The descriptions of what [the children] see and do and learn are written in a very simple style while the illustrations are so full of accurate detail that little readers can spend hours over them, tallying them with the text." With a keen feeling both for the extent of children's curiosity and the limits of their attention span, Smith gave his readers—especially the city-dwellers—much to consider: the journey milk makes from cow barn to urban doorstep; the march of modern progress represented by the replacement of old-fashioned water-driven gristmills with those powered by steam; and the timeless fun of climbing a tree.