Posts Tagged ‘Children’s Books’
Let me tell you a tale…
This map, by social realist artist William Gropper, was created to showcase the diversity of national myths and folk stories and was distributed abroad through the U.S. Department of State starting in 1946…
Gropper, born in New York City’s Lower East Side to a working-class family, deeply identified with labor movements and the Left throughout his life. He worked as a cartoonist for mainstream publications New York Tribune and Vanity Fair, as well as the leftist and radical newspapers Rebel Worker, New Masses, and Daily Worker. During the Depression, like many other out-of-work artists, Gropper designed murals for the Works Progress Administration.
The “folklore” on display in this richly illustrated map is a soup of history, music, myth, and literature. Frankie and Johnny are cheek-by-jowl with a wild-eyed John Brown; General Custer coexists with “Git Along Little Dogies.” Utah is simply host to a group of “Mormons,” in which a bearded man holds up stigmata-marked hands to a small group of wives and children, while a figure labeled “New England Witches” flies over New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Vermont…
Click here (and again) to see the map in much larger format (or find it at the Library of Congress); read the full story at Vault.
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As we revel in regional differences, we might recall that it was on this date in 1938 that Theodor Geisel– Dr. Seuss– published The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins. Geisel had published And To Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street the prior year; 500 Hats was his second children’s book and the first of three (it was followed by The King’s Stilts and The Seven Lady Godivas in 1939), all of which were, atypically for him, in prose. He returned to the rhyming form for which he’s known with his fifth book, Horton Hatches the Egg.
Amaze your friends!…
And so, the season of carnivals, fairs– of Midway Madness– begins… Covet that kewpie? Wanna take home that teddy? “Beat the Carnies: The Secrets to Winning 5 Popular State Fair Games” has you covered.
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As we wash the cotton candy off of our fingers, we might send illustrated birthday greetings to Richard Scarry; he was born on this date in 1919. Scarry wrote or illustrated over 300 children’s books, which have (so far) sold over 300 million copies worldwide.
Mrs. Bunny turned on the television to little bunny’s favorite program.
The little bunny turned the sound away up loud and nearly frightened his mother out of her wits.
Oh naughty bunny.
(from Naughty Bunny, 1959)
Please, Dad! Please read the one where the plague victim gets caught in the hurricane and is crushed by a tree…
From the ever-illuminating Ten Zen Monkeys, “The Most Depressing Children’s Books Ever Written“… Consider, for example, #5:
Andrea Patel, a Massachusetts schoolteacher– and pastry chef, and musician– represents the earth as a big blue circle of tissue paper, then writes “One day a terrible thing happened,” as a big red splotch appears on that circle.
“The world, which had been blue and green and bright and very big and really round and pretty peaceful, got badly hurt.
“Many people were injured. Many other people died. And everyone was sad.”
Then she tries explaining terrorism to children — using more tissue paper collages. There’s a tornado, an earthquake, and a fire — all bad things that happen naturally. “But sometimes bad things happen because people act in mean ways and hurt each other on purpose,” she writes. “That’s what happened on that day, a day when it felt like the world broke.” Then there’s a picture of the pieces of the world blowing away and drifting across the blank whiteness of the next page…
The book was finished within weeks of the September 11 attacks, and Patel donated all the book’s proceeds to a 9/11 charity, but the whole exercise is still a little disturbing. People fumbled for the right response to the terrorist attacks, and in the end, this is probably Patel’s most inadvertently honest sentence.
“This is scary, and hard to understand, even for grown-ups.”
One should steel oneself, then find them all here.
As wonder whatever became of Tom Terrific, we might recall that it was on this date in 1584 that Sir Walter Raleigh was granted a Royal Patent by his Patron Elizabeth I to colonize Virginia.
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