I got two books when I was cleaning out my parents' house. One was probably my mother's, the other was my older sister's. The first is the McCall's Easy Sewing Book, published in 1962, so a couple of years older than me. It's a regular sized paperback book with line drawings only in black and white (no photos)
The other is the Simplicity Sewing Book Updated. It's copyrighted 1975 and printed in Britain. The cover has a woman in a yellow hat and top, with a "flower" made of a pin cushion and scissors and a tap measure on the hat, and a necklace made of thread reels. This book is a larger format paperback, with colour photos and two colour drawing illustrations. The fashions in the photos belong on the TV series Life on Mars ;-)

My most useful sewing book, however, is my copy of the Readers Digest complete book of sewing (I've actually forgotten the name, and it's not accessible right now). I know with that book that if I ever need to know a particular technique, I can almost certainly find diagrams and clear instructions on how to do it!