The Children's Hour

CHARLOTTE'S WEB (184 pp.) -- E. B. White--Harper ($2.50).

THE HAPPY PLACE (58 pp.)--Ludwig Bemelmans--Little, Brown ($2.50).

MARY POPPINS IN THE PARK (235 pp.)--P. L. Travers--Harcourt, Brace ($2.50).

BIG TIGER AND CHRISTIAN (593 pp.)--Frifz Muehlenweg--Pantheon ($4.95).

This year's crop of children's books has been remarkable on two counts: 1) it is probably the largest in publishing history (more than 1,000 titles), and 2) as a whole it comes close to proving that junior is just as well off curled up with a good TV set. There have been shovelfuls of forgettable stories about small, cuddly animals, limp sagas of family life and boneless biographies of the great and neargreat--most of them full of worthy but somewhat dull lessons, such as brush teeth regularly, don't gobble goodies when visiting, and don't talk back to mother.

Happily, amid these mountains of pudding, there were a few splendid plums.

In Charlotte's Web, The New Yorker's E. B. White retires, as all city intellectuals should, to a roomy barn on a large farm. Here, on a cosy dung heap, he sets Wilbur, a runt that is never likely to make much of a pig--a sort of porcine Cinderella, in fact. But thanks to bottle feeding by a little girl, Wilbur waxes so stout that he is a cinch to become the farmer's Christmas dinner. Wilbur's hard plight--considered first too puny, then too appetizing to live--excites the pity of a spider, who spins over his sty such complimentary words as SOME PIG, TERRIFIC, RADIANT and HUMBLE. The farmer is so impressed by these magic signs that he spares Wilbur, who lives fattily ever after. Author White (who lives on his own Maine farm) also does a fine job on farmyard life as seen through the eyes of geese and sheep, and reaches his peak with a scurrilous rat named Templeton who, like Satan in Paradise Lost, pretty nearly steals the show.

In The Happy Place, Ludwig Bemelmans serves up the recipe that he first concocted many years ago for adult consumption ; it consists of some absurd character put down-in a setting that is just around the block and dolloped with matter-of-fact nonsense. His present hero, a city rabbit named Winthrop, is not conjured out of a top hat but from the place city rabbits normally come from--"a toy village enclosed by chicken wire and located in Section B, on the sixth floor of a big New York department store." Winthrop is first reduced from $2.98 to $1.78 because he proves not to be "colorfast, washable and docile"; then he finds himself out on his ear in the harsh world of Central Park, where he undergoes such painful experiences as being chased by a whippet and overhearing a chat between two humans on how to cook hasenpfeffer. Winthrop chums up with other park animals, and together they create a typical Bemelmans mixture in a world of magic which is entered, naturally and easily, "at 104th Street and Central Park West."

In Mary Poppins in the Park, the century's most famous nurse-governess returns to the scene. The accent is on the word "governess," for the basic fact about Mary Poppins is that she is a Tower of Strength, a Rock of Gibraltar, a Fort Knox whose secret bullion rules the world. Employers who ask her for references are given one of the outraged sniffs that are as much a Poppins characteristic as her long, turned up nose, her carpetbag (which is always empty and yet, somehow, always contains her starched aprons and a camp bed), and the parrot-headed umbrella which is the closest she gets to a magic wand. Children who threaten to disobey Mary Poppins (it is never more than a threat) are reduced by one glance from her ice-blue eyes. In her latest adventure-fantasy, the creator of Mary Poppins, Australian-born Mrs. Pamela L. Travers, offers a cautionary bit of advice: "I warn you, children, take care of your shadows or your shadows won't take care of you."

The shadow in question is that which is thrown by the lively imagination and which, when lost, reduces human beings to mere mounds of flesh. All the characters in Mary Poppins in the Park are rich in substance and shadow.

In Big Tiger and Christian, Fritz Muehlenweg has written a jumbo-sized adventure story for youngsters old enough to read for themselves. His story begins with a martial skirr in the Peking of 1922. Warlord General Wu Pei-fu is marching on the city. Christian, the son of an American doctor, and his Chinese friend Big Tiger, both twelve, venture out to fly a kite and are snatched up by two of Wu's scouts. In dutiful obedience to their captors, the boys help them capture a whole trainload of military equipment. Delighted, General Wu sends the boys home by the only safe route -- a 3,000-mile detour through the Gobi Desert. On their tremendous journey they have adventures enough to impress Tom Sawyer: a Living Buddha trusts them with a secret message, a great bandit prince bows down to do them reverence, a buried treasure opens to their shovels in a ruined city. The story never rips & snorts; it moves with the pace of a desert caravan. But in its freshness and steady excitement it has some of the marks of a real children's classic.

Other good books of the year:

BABAR'S VISIT TO BIRD ISLAND (40 pp.) --Laurent de Brunhoff--Random House ($3.50). What happens when a royal family of elephants pays a social visit to the Bird King & Queen, told with engaging naturalness by a French author-artist who knows how to splash his pages with vivid panoramic views that have what every child loves in a picture--a brilliant general impression combined with endless small details to be picked out at leisure.

GERALD McBOING BOING (25 pp.)--United Productions of America--Simon & Schuster ($1). The little boy with the built-in sound track for a voice brings his success story from the motion-picture cartoon to the printed page.

AMAHL AND THE NIGHT VISITORS (89 pp.)--Gian-Carlo Menotti--McGraw-Hill ($2.75). A fine book version of the story Composer Menotti wrote for his TV Christmas opera last year (TIME, Dec. 31), in which a crippled shepherd boy adds his crutch to the gifts of the Three Wise Men.

NEW WORLD FOR NELLIE (38 pp.)--Rowland Emett--Harcourt, Brace ($2). A fussy, ramshackle British train with a bad case" of wanderlust spins off to America as a plane, masquerades a while as a riverboat, and returns as a submarine, fueled solely by the remarkable comic imagination of one of Punch's most inventive contributors.

THE COMPLETE ANDERSEN (1,239 PP) --Heritage Press ($6.95). All the old magic of Hans Christian Andersen in one handsome volume, newly translated by Danish-born Actor Jean Hersholt, plus three tales never published before.

PUSS IN BOOTS (28 pp.)--Translated by Marcia Brown--Scribner ($2). A free translation from the French of Charles Perrault makes this classic bubble with mirth while Marcia Brown's illustrations blaze with color.

THE MAGIC CIRCLE (288 pp.)--Edited by Louis Untermeyer--Harcourt, Brace ($3). A perennial anthologist has sifted some poetry that rhymes and rouses, from The Highwayman to The Shooting of Dan McGrew.

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