Books: The Children’s Hour

Most parents would be delighted if their youngsters stopped hanging around that juvenile delinquent, the 21-inch tube, and picked up a good book. Unfortunately, the best that can be said for most children’s books is that they sell well—a sturdy 11% of the total U.S. book trade. Largely churned out by conscientious hacks, the bulk of the kiddie books piles mountains of moral lessons on molehills of fun. Cause for cheer has come in recent months. With an eye on relaxation as well as royalties, some well-established novelists and poets have sortied from their usual literary habitat and invaded the children’s book field with happy results. Some of the happiest:

THE PENNY THAT ROLLED AWAY, by Louis MacNeice (Putnam; $2.25), is a coin’s-eye view of the world pegged on the comic misadventures of “a dime called Dinah and a nickel called Nick and a brown baby sister called Penny for short,” who “lived in a Piggy Bank up on a mantlepiece.” British Poet MacNeice, a junior member of the Auden-Isherwood-Spender literary axis of the ’30s, pitches his pennies in and out of trouble with enough sly surprises to clinch his first bid for fame with the lollipop set.

THE LITTLE HORSE BUS, by Graham Greene (Lothrop; $2), carries its author far from his tortuous bypaths of sin and salvation. This is a sunny-spirited little brief for the old corner “grocer’s shop” v. the Cellophane-wrapped modernity of a “Hygienic Emporium.” A rickety but gallant old horse bus wins the day for tradition in a cops-and-robbers chase, while Illustrator Dorothy Craigie splashes each page with eye-catching color.

THE MAGIC PICTURES, by Marcel Aymé (Harper; $2.50), is all about a wonderful farm where pigs have wings, the wolf who ate Little Red Ridinghood goes vegetarian, and two little French girls named Delphine and Marinette share all their secrets with the animals and none with their parents. Aymé, a skilled satirical taxidermist of the French middle class (The Barkeep of Blémont, The Miraculous Barber), brings his farm animals to life so wisely and winningly that he is now being hailed in France as the best fabulist since La Fontaine.

HURRICANE LUCK, by Carl Carmer (Aladdin; $2), finds the author of Stars Fell on Alabama in a Florida seaport town telling the heartwarming story of a boy who loves his fisherman dad and vice versa.

PILOT PETE, by Alan Villiers (Scribner; $2.50), is about a frolicsome Antarctic porpoise and his marine pals, told with customary authority by one of the few living men who still go to sea in sailing ships and write about it.

THE MOTHER DITCH, by Oliver La Farge (Houghton Mifflin; $2.25), follows a young Spanish-American boy as he earns his bread by the sweat of his brow in the arid New Mexican soil that Novelist-Anthropologist La Farge (Laughing Boy) knows and loves.

IMPUNITY JANE, by Rumer Godden (Viking; $2.50), boasts one of the smallest heroines in recent fiction: a four-inch china doll. Impunity, like Ibsen’s Nora, rebels against the doll’s house, so Author Godden (The River, Black Narcissus) treats her to a high old time as the mascot of a bunch of boys who send her aloft with a toy balloon, spin her on a Catherine wheel and race her across a pond in a toy yacht.

THE MAGIC FISHBONE, by Charles Dickens (Vanguard; $2.50), frames a Cinderella story and a magic wish round the theme that “when we have done our very, very best . . . and that is not enough, then I think the right time must have come for asking help of others.” In a handsome collaboration between centuries, and in the first new U.S. edition in 25 years, Illustrator Louis Slobodkin adorns Word Magician Dickens’ fable with just the right visual touch of fairy-tale grandeur.

One more notable recruit from the ranks of bestselling authors who will join the fall parade of children’s-book writers is H.R.H. the Duke of Windsor. In A King’s Son, the duke will cover a subject no man knows better, his own boyhood as Prince of Wales.