Scriptographic

A sliver of late December or even early January has broken loose like an icicle and lodged here in mid-November. It’s less than 20 F outside now, and there’s a dusting of unmelted snow on the ground.

Lilly brought About Traffic Safety home from school the other day, a “coloring and activity book,” and at once the rounded characters and thick lines looked familiar. Yep, sure enough, it’s a Scriptographic publication, produced by the Channing L. Bete Co. of Deerfield, Mass.

These kinds of booklets have been used to edify children about safety for a long time now, because I remember seeing them myself in elementary school. I think the drawings were even more rounded in those days than the current versions—the characters had nearly perfect circles for heads, for instance—and I distinctly remember that at least one of those books gave me the willies. Maybe it should have, since it was about what to do in case of nuclear attack.

Lilly’s Scriptographic traffic safety coloring and activity book is fine as far as it goes, but there’s no page that warns kids to watch carefully for morons yakking on their cell phones while barreling through intersections. So I shared that wisdom with her myself.