I spotted the "Young America Serves" book in the latest issue. I have several of these, and they're not particularly rare. I was given one quite a few years ago by someone who believed that it qualified for my collection of coin collecting albums. It's a common mistake made by well meaning individuals, and I've found myself with a wide variety of not-quite-there items.

As sometimes happens, however, I became slightly hooked on this area of collecting, and I now have more than a dozen savings books for children that are similar in concept and construction, though often varying in their graphic design. A few of these have found a place guarding my collection of Library of Coins albums, and I'm attaching a photo. All date to the 1940s, though the cover illustrations reveal that one or two clearly had been in production as early as the 1920s. The Young America Serves was a wartime update to the basic edition seen at the far left. Children were encouraged to save their change to buy war stamps that could later be exchanged for war bonds.

A few years ago you ran photos of a savings book from my collection that still had the original coins hidden under paper strips that, when completed, formed a picture. This feature was included in a very few of these books to dissuade kids from retrieving their pennies, nickels and dimes, as it would damage the complete puzzles. I posed the question to readers of whether I should retrieve the coins myself, now that they were 70+ years old and could include scarce dates/mints. The few responses were in favor of keeping the book intact, with the coins still hidden, and it remains so today.

To read the earlier E-Sylum article, see:
THE DEFEND AMERICA COIN SAVINGS BOOK(https://www.coinbooks.org/v25/esylum_v25n16a31.html)