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“Catch the Reading Bug,” this year’s edition of the Fairbanks North Star Borough Public Library’s summer reading program, has been signing up kids for the free, fun-packed activities for a week now, and the library’s swarming with little shavers and shavettes, just the way we like it.

A “shaver,” according to the American Heritage Dictionary, is “a small child, especially a boy,” but the term should include girls, too, considering today’s feminine exfoliation rate.

Speaking of shavers, recently I was reflecting upon barbers from the ’50s with a similarly-aged gentleman co-worker. In those slower-paced days of white smocks, bright aromas and man talk, indulgent barbers — mine was called “Red” and his was “Curly” — dabbed our pristine jaws with hot lather, carefully stropped straight razors and scraped away the invisible sideburn fuzz.

The ritual and grown-upness of it all left fond memories, but barbershops like that are nearly all gone, like hornbooks.

Hornbooks were popular five centuries ago, just after the advent of printing. Back then instructional information was printed on sheets of paper that were attached to small, 3.5-inch by 2.5-inch boards with handles. The paper was secured by narrow brass edging strips and covered by a transparent sheet of horn for protection.

The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature says the British Library owns a manuscript from 1400 that “mentions schoolchildren being taught by ‘a bok nailed on a brede (breadth) of tre (tree, i.e. wood).

Shakespeare referred to them, too, as in “Yes, yes, he teaches boys the Horn-book” from “Love’s Labour’s Lost.”

What did they teach? The OCCL says “The wording printed on horn-books scarcely varied during the centuries.” A small cross in the upper left-hand corner was followed by a capital A and lower-case alphabet, the five vowels, the alphabet in capitals, a syllabary, or table of syllables, an invocation to the Trinity and the Lord’s Prayer.

Horn books were superseded by battledores, which looked like hornbooks but were larger and cheaper, with the printed paper glued down and protected with varnish. Eventually, wooden rectangular-shaped battledores were replaced by rounded ones made of cardboard that more closely resembled, and were sometimes used as, shuttlecock rackets.

The first, titled the “Royal Battledore,” was invented in 1746 by Benjamin Collins, and they were manufactured through the next century.

Collins’ business associate in this was John Newbery, the first British publisher to make a living from children’s literature. Newbery is legendary in kiddy lit circles mainly because he was the most successful, with “The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes,” which saw 29 editions, being his best-seller.

Today his name is synonymous with inserting fun into juvenile fiction, and the Newbery Award is the highest honor given the best children’s fiction. However, his 1744 book, “A Little Pretty Pocket-Book,” is often misattributed as the first real children’s book.  Books for children came out in the 1600’s but calling them “dour” is putting it mildly. For instance, James Janeway’s “Token for Children” (1672) described itself as “being an exact account of the holy lives and joyful deaths of several young children.”

Two books pre-date Newbery’s by at least two years: Thomas Boreman’s “Gigantik Histories,” a book about buildings and places in London, and Thomas and Mary Cooper’s “The Child’s New Play-Thing: Being a Spelling Book Intended to Make the Learning to Read a Diversion Instead of a Task.”

What a concept! It’s the idea behind the library’s highly successful Guys Read program that demonstrated to 450 fourth-grade boys that books can be fun and men like to read. Teams of men share boy-friendly books with fourth-grade guys by reading snippets while the boys eat lunch. Sponsored by Auto Service Company and Mayor Whitaker’s office, the program has proven effective at re-exciting boys about reading.

The facts remain: Reading for pleasure incites more reading, which heightens reading skills. Why bother? Consider the “Literacy Behind Prison Walls” report that shows 70 percent of U.S. prison inmates are functionally illiterate or read below a fourth-grade level.

More options in life are available to those who read well, and as Mark Twain put it, “The man who does not read good books is no better than the man who can’t.”