We don’t know about you, but many of our most cherished memoires of childhood come from spending an afternoon with a book in hand — and perhaps relatedly, many of our most cherished reading experiences come from childhood. It just seems that everything is so much more captivating when you’re a kid — things are newer, images and characters are more likely to send one off down an endless rabbit hole of imagination, and hey, what else do you have to do with your time? In a fit of nostalgia, we scoured the interwebs for awesome vintage photographs of children reading everything from comic books to newspapers to novels, whether alone or with friends, in school or on the sidewalk. Leaf through our mini collection of vintage photos of kids engaged in our favorite activity after the jump, and if you are so moved, leave your own childhood memoires of reading in the comments.
Fred Stein, Children Reading Newspaper, Paris, 1936. Photo via.
Children looking at picture books at school, Santa Clara, Utah, 1940. Photo credit: Library of Congress, via.
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This is 5-year-old Vivian Mary Hartley, aka movie star Vivien Leigh, reading a book at the Bangalore Racetrack, in Bangalore, India, circa 1918. Photo via.
Kansas, 1954. Photo via.
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Washington, D.C, 1935. Photo credit: Carl Mydans, Farm Security Administration, via.
Children reading a faxed newspaper, circa 1938. Photo via.
Reading lesson in Washington, D.C., 1942. Photo credit Marjory Collins and the Library of Congress, via.
1951. Photo via.
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