The Good Cheer Book

This post WWI book, published in 1919, is a gem!  I found "The Good Cheer Book" at the Brand Bookshop, a used bookstore in Glendale. (Sadly, this book browser's heaven is going out of business.  Happily, all the books were 70% off!)

The gorgeous cover is what first caught my eye.  I bought the book thinking I'd sell it in my "Bookish" shop; but after opening the cover and perusing inside, I knew I had a keeper!




It's an anthology full of thoughtful quotes and poetry.  The author asks in her introduction, "Why the Good Cheer Book?"  She answers:

The greatest war of the ages has passed, leaving in its wake maimed bodies, broken hearts, shattered hopes, unrealized ideals, soul-hunger, and menacing social and economic unrest...

There are many people - sick people, discouraged people, lonely people - who need nothing so much as an understanding and sympathetic friend to help them to discover themselves and their power to create their own good cheer.  May this little book prove to be such a friend....

~Blanche E. Herbert

The first excerpt in Part I: "The Diagnosis", puts forth several questions that could be asked today.  The answer?  Well, one would not be given this diagnosis today!  (In this age of self-vicitmization, I found the straightforward answer refreshing - what do you think?)...

Are you enjoying life?  Do you feel a certain kind of expectancy and glad looking forward when you awake in the morning as to what the events of the day may bring to you?  Or is it with an uneasy, disappointed, and somewhat guilty feeling that you find yourself when consciousness returns?  Have you come to fell how insincere and degenerate all the people around you have become, and how few people can really be trusted in the world today, and how little true religion there is, and what a hard time you have had, harder than anyone else?  

Then there is something wrong with you.  Not with life, nor with your fate or lot, but simply with you, with your own character.  As the mother told her boy, you are one of the uninteresting good people who have lost their interest in the problems of life, and so have become uninteresting.

-John Edgar Park

Watch my Good Books Facebook page for lots of inspiring quotes from this Good Book!

"Let me live in my house by the side of the road

And be a friend to man."

-Sir Walter Foss