A Child's Portion of Good Reading

By Stefan Kanfer

Legends and literature about kings and commoners

Isaac Bashevis Singer tells how, at a party shortly after the publication of Zlateh the Goat, he met a woman who asked him to autograph a copy for her. "Who is the child?" Singer inquired. "It's for me," the woman confessed. "I am the child."

No children's book has lasting value unless it speaks to the child in the adult--and vice versa. Works that appeal solely to kids seldom outlast their Christmas wrapping.

Those that attract only grownups lie unread, gathering dust as they await the next garage sale. This year, as before, most volumes aim for the wallet or the crib. But a few manage to speak the universal languages of wit and delight:

Mitsumasa Anno has become the Escher of Japan. His trompe l'oeil paintings and optical illusions have become collector's items, and his books for the young (Anna's Alphabet, Anno's Journey) educate while they keep the risible visible. In The King's Flower (Collins; $7.95), the artist depicts a regent who prefers everything king-size (he fishes for whales, and his toothbrush is carried by two men). Uneasy lies the crown that wears a big head. When the King decides to grow the world's greatest flower, he finds what any kid could have told him: large is legal, but small is regal.

The pop-up book is a century-old tradition, lost and recently reclaimed. In 1878, with ingenious design and careful lithography, Franz Bonn produced The Children's Theatre. In this reproduction (Viking; $7.95), the colors retain their Dickensian character and the stage provides witty valedictories to vanished pantomimes: Haensel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood, the Nativity and a family at Christmas Eve. The Theatre's pictures may not move as fast as the ones on TV, but its scenes have four dimensions: length, breadth, depth and wonder.

The aisle-struck may further indulge their enthusiasms by building another undersized theater: the Edward Gorey mock-up of Dracula (Scribners; $8.95). Despite the title, Gorey's gothica are no more frightening than a Road Runner cartoon. The cast of innocents and plotters resemble worried clothespins, and even the count appears to be a man who would go to bat for kids any time. The only off-putting part of this work is its R-rated instructions. No child should attempt to construct the set without the accompaniment of an adult.

Like Dracula, a joint effort titled Ox-Cart Man (Viking; $8.95) only seems to be memorabilia: a suite of paintings depicting the severity and benignity of old New England farm life. In fact it is as fresh as the mornings it represents and as worthy as the folk who populate its pages. Barbara Cooney's pictures have the grace of folk art, and Poet Donald Hall's deceplively simple tale of a man who travels by oxpower uses white space the way down-Easters employ silence: to speak volumes about the present tense and the past perfect.

If Ox-Cart Man uses few words, The Story of an English Village (Atheneurm; $7.95) is totally mute. Still, John S. Goodall's watercolors are eloquent enough to carry the progress of a British town from medieval beginnings to its present state. In other hands, the use of half pages overlaid on full ones might be a gimmick. But Goodall's visual narrative is so controlled, and his costumes and customs so accurate, that history assumes a personality. Moving by lively steps, it arranges hemlines and coats, advances from midwives to doctors, from town criers to village schools, to the ambiguous benefits of buses and telephones. No other Christmas book can cover so many centuries between the final story and the good-night kiss.

And after lights-out? Dreams, of course. Few black-and-white drawings have caught their incongruous logic as well as The Garden of Abdul Gasazi (Houghton Mifflin; $8.95). A suburban boy takes a nap on a magical couch. When he rises, he finds himself in a twilit garden, owned by an ominous wizard in a fez. Nothing is quite the same, not even his pet. The fat man's hobby: turning pet dogs into ducks. Long after the spell ends, an eerie residue remains, like a dream that persists in the waking world. Chris Van Allsburg's narrative leans too hard on pictures of topiary animals and foreboding dwellings, but his brilliant illustrations resemble snapshots taken by the brain of Poe.

Once Tutankhamun returned from the tomb, it was inevitable that publishers would discover the Nile. Several have done so, simultaneously vulgarizing the past and present. But two new books offer a deep understanding of how people looked and thought a world ago. In Mummies Made in Egypt (Crowell; $8.95), Aliki unravels the secrets of ba, the ancient Egyptian concept of the soul, and ka, the invisible twin of the deceased. Both ba and ka wandered after death, and they could only return to a recognizable body--hence the art of preservation. Aliki's crisp narrative and delicate artwork never veer toward necrology; her interest is in the living past, and her guidebook flatters both the child who receives it and the giver who puts it under the pyramid-shaped tree.

The very young would do well to try a simpler volume, Ancient Egyptian Design Coloring Book (Dover; $1.50) by Ed Sibbett Jr. The motifs of cobra-goddesses, scarabs and animal deities are outlined with precision, and hints about traditional hues (red skin for men, yellow for women) can make anyone who owns a box of crayons into a high-chair archaeologist.

Twice upon a time there was a writer and illustrator named Uri Shulevitz. When he illustrated The Lost Kingdom of Karnica (Scribners; $8.95) he amplified Richard Kennedy's tale with a subtle palette. It creates a kingdom where everything is bounteous--until a farmer discovers a strange red stone.

The nation's wise man warns that the stone is the heart of Karnica: "If we remove it, the kingdom will die." But in such stories, the rulers never listen, giving the author an opportunity to draw a powerful moral about conservation. It is no accident that Sierra Club Books is a co-publisher.

In The Treasure (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $7.95), Shulevitz speaks in his own voice to tell the story of old Isaac who dreams of a treasure far away, near the royal residence. The poor man has no ambition to play the palace, but his hunger for riches leads him on, only to prove that travel is narrowing and that no one can become truly rich until he looks into his hearth and soul. The back-in-your-own-backyard conclusion is timeworn, but the book's slow cadences and sprightly tones lend it the character of a legend that can never grow old because it was never young.

When a child wonders about size--Am I big for my age? Or too small? Will I always be short?

Or too tall?--there can be no more elegant and reassuring self-help book than Karla Kuskin's Herbert Hated Being Small (Houghton Mifflin; $6.95). Herbert gauges his mini-stature by standing next to his parents, always a mistake. Depressed, he sets out on his own. So does Philomel, who feels humongous next to her little family. But when boy and girl meet in the woods, they discover that they are the same size. Everything is relative, observes this cascade of wise rhymes. Einstein would have been pleased.

M.B. Goffstein's Natural History (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $6.95) gives children another kind of reassurance. The terse text and light watercolors examine a little ball called the planet earth, then move closer to watch the interdependence of animals and humans. It manages to touch lightly on all aspects of life, from war and poverty to square meals and love.

Goffstein is a minimalist, but her text and pictures carry the same emotional freight as William Blake's admonishment to see the world in a grain of sand and eternity in an hour.

"The little blue heron swallowed the moon," says Hosie's Aviary (Viking; $10).

The exaggeration is permissible; the paintings are by Leonard Baskin, and the highly charged text is by his children, Tobias, Lucretia and Hosie, and his wife Lisa. All of them are manifestly dazed by the artwork. With good reason. A renowned graphic artist and sculptor, Baskin Sr. limns a whole aviary of familiar birds. But his subjects' eyes seem to burn through the pages, and the rendering of their beaks and feathers makes even the common robin and crow seem birds of paradise.

Like the Pied Piper, Arnold Lobel has a vast, uncountable following of children.

But unlike the Piper's troops, Lobel's keep reappearing and asking for more. He has responded with scores of books, and this season he presents Days with Frog and Toad (Harper & Row; $5.95), five short stories that teach the value of friendship, as well as the delights of working, loafing and being alone.

Anthropomorphism is Lobel's strength: all of his creatures appear to be good-natured humans in animal suits. In Tales of Oliver Pig (Dial; $5.89) he illustrates Jean Van Leeuwen's prose with a family of pigs whose siblings squabble, whose mother has bouts of sadness and whose father can be arbitrary as well as forgiving. A bit hamhanded, but certain to be hogged by parents and children who know why Aesop told human truths with a cast of animals.

The year's most perverse children's book is Raymond Briggs' Fungus the Bogeyman (Random House; $4.95). Fungus is free to do what kids cannot: live underground, put grease in his hair, make things go bump in the night and in general be a grain of sand in the public eye. His adventures cover oversized pages full of puns ("Hullo, my dreary," "my direling") and bile green anatomy charts that provide a perfect send-up for the child who has ODed on gnomes and faeries.

The Peacock Party (Viking; $7.95), by Alan Aldridge with Harry Willock and George E. Ryder, is the season's most demanding work. The rhymes vary from one-syllable words to items like apogee and collation--an invitation to learning, but also to mystification. The illustrations are something else: portraits of the animal kingdom as seen by the surrealist eye and rendered by the quattrocento hand. Long after the Peacock poetry is memorized or forgotten, the pictures will detonate in the mind, like the bizarre conceits of John Tenniel for the Alice books.

The spirit of Tenniel also hovers over Frogs and the Ballet (Gambit; $9.95). Ever since Disney presented a group of pirouetting alligators in Fantasia, reptiles have been as comfortable onstage as they are in the swamp. The Muppets are further evidence, bolstered by Donald Elliott's informative guidebook and Clinton Arrowood's corps d'amphibians.' In fact, the text is a straightforward introduction to the dance. But somehow, when the steps are illustrated by frogs in tutus and tights, an air of lunacy pervades the proceedings and the young reader is suddenly an attendant at the wedding of comedy and art.

All of these bright volumes have their share of chills and favors, and the giver may wonder whether sentences might occasionally be too advanced or pictures a bit demanding. Stop worrying. This season, as always, it is well to heed the dictum of Ogden Nash:

Oh, what a tangled web do parents

weave

When they think that their

children are naive.

--Stefan Kanfer

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