I’m celebrating the end of the decade on Martha’s Vineyard with some friends. The other day, we went to a library here that’s having a book sale. Well, sale is the wrong word, because these books are free.

We found the lovely volume pictured at left, Babies Are Human Beings. You might think this is common knowledge, given how human babies seem, but apparently this was groundbreaking in 1938 when the book was first published.

Of course, the book’s argument is more subtle than its title suggests. According to the flap copy, “Here, for the first time, parents have been taught to face the facts: babies are not carbon copies of their parents. Each child has a personality of his own from the first day of his life.”

Mostly, we liked the cover. And the great caption for the cover’s photo, which is reprinted facing page 80. That caption: “Strangers may make grotesque faces at him in well-meant attempts to elicit his smile . . .”