Kichler gives the `Orange Biographies' an update.

Byline: Nancy Pate

She is 8 years old. The doctor says she has rheumatic fever and she must stay in bed _ for three months. She can't believe it. Three months! She's already bored to tears.

More than 40 years later, Indiana publisher Florrie Binford Kichler vividly recalls those days when she was confined to her bed.

"It wasn't like now with a TV in every room or hand-held video games," she says. "But I could read, and one day my Aunt Mary, bless her heart, brought me a book. It was an orange biography of Mary Todd Lincoln. That was it, I was hooked. My face lit up every time Aunt Mary came to visit with an orange biography."

Those "orange biographies" familiar to baby boomers across the country are actually a fictionalized series known as the Childhood of Famous Americans created by the Bobbs-Merrill Co. and published primarily in the 1940s and 1950s for 8-to-12-year-olds. Most adults haven't thought of them in years, but Kichler is hoping to change that.

"After I was better, I would go to the library and there they all were, all lined up alphabetically by last name," she says. "I kept the library…