Books: For Children

One out of every nine books published in the U.S. is a children’s book. The bulk of this output does not occupy the classic realm of the imagination but a huge waste-of-time land. There are usually stories about neurasthenic little animals that want to secede from the animal kingdom. There are tales about plug-ugly ducklings (human) who can’t seem to acquire a friend until the sentimental fadeout page. For pre-teentimers there are soap operettas about girls “who never quite know how to talk to boys.” The boys are usually busy talking to a pet moose or rocketing off to the moon. But at least, the cautionary yarns of the brush-your-teeth-or-mommy-won’t-love-you variety seem to be on the wane. So are humorless educative nip-ups of the A-is-for-aspidistra, B-is-for-bathy-sphere order.

Parents on a book hunt are well advised to adopt the following rule: the younger the child, the better the books that are available. Books for tots are usually splashed with color, well designed, and sometimes contain surprising riches of fun and wonder. Older children would be better off kicking the kiddy-bait habit and graduating to Huckleberry Finn. A sampling of the season’s best offerings for small fry and a few distinctive items for older children:

THE SUN (text adapted from Helga Mauersberger, pictures by Klaus Winter and Helmut Bischoff; Franklin Watts; $3.95) rollicks through the cycle of the seasons in an anthropocentric spree. Miss Sunshine is the high-powered female producer of the solar show. Her problem actor is Cousin Rain, a climatological cut-up who releases Mr. Thunder and Mr. Lightning from their padlocked castle. Miss Sunshine’s loyal ally is Mr. Rainbow, the official scene painter who slips about, brush in hand, to give beetle, butterfly and snail shell the appropriate hue of the season. The pixyish, Chagall-accented illustrations set the special tone of the book.

MUD PIES AND OTHER RECIPES (by Marjorie Winslow, with illustrations by Erik Blegvad; Macmillan; $2.50) varies between arch and fallen arch. The sly fringe benefit for parental readers is the spoofing of standard cookbook lingo. Sample recipe:

ROAST ROCKS

“Place 6 medium-size rocks in an oven and roast until hard on the outside but still rare inside. This takes about as long as chasing a butterfly. Roast Rocks tend to be difficult to slice, so serve each doll a whole rock. Serves 6.”

THERE IS A DRAGON IN MY BED (by Sesyle Joslin, illustrated by Irene Haas; Harcourt, Brace; $2.25) is the kind of book that separates the privileged U child from the underprivileged non-U brat. It is bilingual, featuring first-reader French for cosmopolitan moppets. Two tykes, a boy and a girl dressed in their parents’ clothes, take a mock-adult trip to Paris. The author’s gentle wit consists in creating a mildly inappropriate setting for the appropriate French phrase. The little girl falls into a fountain under a spouting marble fish. Caption, “Il pleut, Monsieur (eel pluh muh-seyuh),” means “It is raining, sir.” Irene Haas’s line drawings superbly evoke a tourist’s Paris. A book for the household that thought it had everything when it bought Winnie Ille Pu.

WHERE DOES THE BUTTERFLY GO WHEN IT RAINS (by May Garelick, with illustrations by Leonard Weisgard; Scott; $3) arouses the interest that is native to a child as a question-asking animal. The wet-weather habits of assorted fauna are explored in animated doggerel (“A rabbit can dash—whoosh—into a bush”). And Leonard Weisgard’s pictures are done in exquisite mutations of blue that suggest misty Japanese prints. Only irritation: the reader never is told where the butterfly goes when it rains.

OLAF READS (by Joan Lexau, illustrated by Harvey Weiss; Dial; $2.75), after a fashion. When his mother sends this freckled little menace out to mail a letter, he puts it in a basket marked PUT LITTER HERE. “I can read,” said Olaf, “but they can’t spell.” Not librarians, policemen, or entire fire departments can keep Olaf from his disastrous alphabetical go-rounds. As an almost-know-it-all, Olaf is probably the funniest first reader since Mrs. Malaprop.

THE REMARKABLE HARRY (by Evan Hunter, pictures by Ted, Mark and Richard Hunter, introduction by Anita Hunter; Abelard-Schuman; $2.95) is a remarkable stunt. Evan (The Blackboard Jungle) Hunter told a bedtime story that so captivated his three sons, all under eleven, that they drew pictures for it. The kids will not lose their amateur rating, but the illustrations do have a gawky charm. The story is about Uncle Fenster, who had “the snazziest, jazziest, razz-a-ma-tazziest very most mustache that ever was had,” except that he was always soggying it up in the breakfast cornflakes. One day he waxed it, took off like Daedalus, and landed almost dead, alas. What with proud Mom’s introduction, this is a wacky product of togetherness.

LET’S BE ENEMIES (by Janice May Udry, illustrated by Maurice Sendak; Harper; $1.95) is a little boy’s tempest in a treehouse. John and James have been pals. But James always wants to be boss. He carries the flag. He takes all the crayons. He grabs the best digging spoon. John tells James off and vice versa. But the finale is a Chaplinesque vignette, with the two pals rolling off together on a shared roller skate apiece. Small fry, hot from the daily sandpit wars, will dote on this.

A LITTLE RABBIT (by Matias; Walck; $2) suggests that bilingual books may soon polyglot the market. This, too, is in French and English. Comparing the English (“It is I, John, the little rabbit. I am nibbling a carrot”) with the French (“C’est moi, Jean, le petit lapin. Je ronge une carotte”), it almost seems as if children’s books, like opera, sound better in a foreign language. John-Jean is a pretty ordinary rabbit, but Matias could almost be Matisse as he spatter-paints his pages with gorgeous blobs of red, yellow, orange, blue and green.

MISS ESTA MAUDE’S SECRET (story and pictures by W. T. Cummings; Whittlesey House; $3.25) is as American as Our Town. Esta Maude Hay is a spinster schoolteacher who lives in a rickety house on the edge of town, with two cats, a goldfish and a parrot. She dresses in black and drives a black, vintage tin lizzie, known as “Miss Esta Maude’s machine.” But Esta Maude has a flaming secret vice, a racy, sin-red sports car that she drives like the wind of a Friday midnight. Author-Illustrator Cummings manages to be folksy, foxy, and covertly Freudian all at the same time, and his book will appeal to any child who has conjured up an off-hours double life for teacher.

THE WING ON A FLEA (by Ed Emberley; Little, Brown; $2.95) is a precise ballet of triangles, rectangles and circles performed in an amusing thicket of Steinbergian curlicues. Through a repetition of designs, the author-illustrator opens a child’s eyes to the similes and metaphors of nature, the recurring likenesses that link man and animal in the great chain of being. “A triangle is the wing on a flea/ And the beak on a bird/ If you’ll just look and see . . . A bandit’s bandanna/ An admiral’s hat/ And in case you don’t know it/ The nose on a cat.”

THIS IS EDINBURGH and THIS IS MUNICH (by M. Sasek; Macmillan; $3). As readers of his Rome, London, New York and Paris books know, Author-Illustrator Sasek unwraps cities like Christmas presents. He does not have to simulate a child’s natural wonder at what exists; he shares it. From the seven tons of bells in Munich’s New Town Hall to the address of the oldest house (No. 5 Burgstrasse), he makes his facts sound like discoveries and his Munich sausages appetizing enough to nibble. Edinburgh, with its floral clock, riot of tartans, and Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders, gives Sasek’s artistry more scope. This superior junior travel guide deserves a special skirl of the bagpipes.

THE COMPLETE FAIRY TALES OF OSCAR WILDE (illustrations by Charles Mozley; Watts; $4.95) are timeless parables of good and evil for which no child can be too old and no adult too young. In the past, Wilde has often been reduced to the importance of reading and seeing The Importance of Being Earnest; now he is being rediscovered as a magical fabulist and as great a moralist as he was an immoralist. Wilde saw life as a fatality, and many of his fables end tragically. None can be summarized or quoted out of context, for they are mosaics into which Wilde put the man-hours that it takes to polish a diamond.

THE RISE AND FALL OF ADOLF HITLER (by William L. Shirer; Random House; $1.95) is not, as might be supposed, merely an instant, small-package version of Shirer’s massive bestseller, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. This book is more sharply and dramatically focused on the man rather than the world he terrorized. Shirer writes with dignity, authority and a total lack of adult condescension. Without blinking the problem of evil, he captures the demonic fascination of Hitler, whose life was essentially the success story of a monster. Like most of the Landmark series, this book is for the keen and sober youngster who is ready to put away childish things and become, like every man, a child of the time.

FROGS MERRY (by Juliet Kepes; Pantheon; $2.95) is like skindiving by proxy. One drops into an aquamarine world of luminous blues and greens. There is no more story line than the splash of frogs at play. Suddenly, two herons goose-step into the pond. But the lily pads, like huge oriental fans, hide the frogs from their enemies. Frolicking again, the frogs ride a turtle like a raft. Time for a supper snack of algae and dragonfly eggs, and the frogs’ perfect day is done. Mrs. Kepes draws the way jazz sounds, and her book is an improvised underwater lyric.

THE STORY OF YOUNG KING ARTHUR (by Clifton Fadiman, illustrated by Paul Liberovsky; Random House; $1.50). Like the actor who plays Hamlet, no author can wholly fail when telling the Arthurian saga. While no Malory or even a T. H. White (The Once and Future King) Author Fadiman is a cut above Lerner & Loewe (Camelot). His grave young hero seems to sense that he is on the threshold of a mythic destiny. Fadiman’s Merlin is a wiser Polonius. His courts and tourna ments are a pageant of medieval glory as if they had been clipped from the film sequences of Olivier’s Henry V.

TOBIAS AND HIS BIG RED SATCHEL (by Sunny B. Warner; Knopf; $3) reflects every moppet’s image of himself as a grown-up Mr. Fixit. Toting around a battered old doctor’s bag almost as big as he is, Tobias finds novel uses for its contents. With his saw he rescues an absent-minded carpenter who had built a house without a door. With his shovel he refloats a stranded whale. Author-Illustrator Warner’s pictures are as winningly harum-scarum as her resourceful little hero.