Two More Short Stories!

After accidentally finding "Cinder and Inky Again" in an old issue of Child Life through a random ebay search, I had a hunch there was probably at least one other Youmans story published in the periodical.

When I attempted to locate older editions of Child Life through Interlibrary Loan, I learned just how rare this serial is.  Many facilities retain current editions, but only one library in the U.S. has copies available during the years Youmans would have been publishing.  Lucky for me, it is the Minneapolis Central branch of Hennepin County Library, a forty-minute drive from my in-laws'.  The trip was worth it, because among the dusty pages there were two more stories by Youmans: "Cinder" (1931) and "Cinder and Inky" (1932).  Unlike "Cinder and Inky Again" (1933), these two stories are taken directly from the published version of the novel Cinder (1933).

My husband wasn't exactly psyched about being dragged  into downtown Minneapolis to flip through old children's magazines by my side, but with his help, the hunt took little more than an hour, and he was the one to find both stories.  (I don't know why I'm surprised; when my contact lens fell out on our lawn earlier this year, he was the was the one to find the tiny shard of plastic embedded amongst hundreds of stems of grass long after I'd given up!)



Click on the page images to enlarge:


"Cinder." Child Life 10.6 (June 1931): 270-271. Illustrated by Ruth Eger.

"Cinder and Inky." Child Life 11.9 (Sept. 1932): 426-427. Illustrated by Ruth Eger.