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The spine jumps out at me from the bookstore shelf. My hand hesitates for a second before pulling “Caps for Sale” from the stack. This can’t be the same book, I think. But as soon as I see the cover, the memories come flooding back.

The cheerful peddler dressed in a striped suit — he’s so hungry, yet still hopeful. The monkeys, laughing while they play the man like a marionette after he awakens from his nap to find that they’ve stolen his caps.

I remember being fascinated by that stack of caps, the way they perched so solidly on the peddler’s head in that precariously tall stack. Their perfect cap shapes.

I hadn’t seen the book in years, but I must have read it as a child. Every word seemed as familiar as my kindergarten classroom decorated with balloons featuring the Letter People, a phonics tool from the ‘70s. I had to change schools halfway through the year and was devastated that I wouldn’t get to see what letters P through Z looked liked. Oh, Mr. Zipping Zippers, I hardly knew you.

Author Esphyr Slobodkina was born in the Siberian town of Chelyabinsk. She was an artist who collaborated with Margaret Wise Brown (“Good Night Moon,” “The Runaway Bunny”) before writing her own children’s books. Even though “Caps for Sale” was her second, it was published first in 1940. But would it stand the test of time?

When I was growing up, Christmas wasn’t a success unless it ended with a pile of books under the tree. My mom made her limited budget stretch by finding all kinds of treasures in the local bookstores and used book nooks. Before Amazon stocked every title imaginable or the big box businesses arranged artful displays full of titles you never even knew you wanted to read, she found forever friends for me on her own, classics like Stuart Little and a spider named Charlotte.

She introduced me to some of my favorite authors, Madeleine L’Engle and L. M. Montgomery. Now I’m hoping to do the same for my son. That’s why the titles I read as a child are starting to show up in Owen’s stocking and at his birthday parties.

This Christmas he was a little disappointed to see that the heaviest box under the tree was full of books. “Can I open a toy now?” he pleaded.

Still, it was those books he curled up on the couch with later that afternoon after the toys weren’t so new anymore. And I know it’s those stories he’ll savor and remember when he’s grown. We’ve pored through the “Adventures of Winnie the Pooh” and read “Peter Pan” so many times, I sometimes forget he’s not my second child.

He’s also got “Blueberries for Sal.” I can practically recite Robert McCloskey’s other classic “Make Way for Ducklings,” but I didn’t read this one as a child.

This story came alive for me in Galena, where I produced a half-hour radio show featuring locals reading children’s stories. I remember Wanda Attla grinning as she snuggled up to the microphone, her daughter watching, rapt, at her feet, savoring every word.

I thought the book was about Alaska, with its berries and bears. I spent one of my first summer nights in the state camped out on our own Blueberry Hill near Valdez, hearing that song running through my head and thinking this new landscape looked like something out of a coffee table book about Ireland.

One late summer morning Owen and I followed our friend Oded and his sister Edit up a hill much like the one where Sal and Little Bear got their mothers mixed up. We were looking for the last of the season’s blueberries, but kept getting distracted by the abundant cranberries just beginning to ripen.

Owen barely managed to collect a handful for himself. He spent most of the time cramming the crisp berries into his mouth saying, “I like sour!” and looking for bears, adamant that Little Sal and her mother were picking berries on that same hill.

When he grows up, will he be surprised to learn differently? And will he find his own beat up copy of “Caps for Sale” and remember laughing until he almost fell out of my lap to see those monkeys stamping both their feet and saying, “Tsz, Tsz, Tsz.”