Small Wonders For the Young

By Stefan Kanfer

Lively enchantments from Leonardo to Sendak

There are illustrators and illustrators. But there is only one Maurice Sendak. His drawings for Grimm fairy tales and his million-copy bestseller, Where the Wild Things Are (1963), unfolded the primary metaphors of dreams; In the Night Kitchen (1970) fused Walt Disney, Laurel and Hardy, the comic strips of Winsor McCay and the reassuring images of bread and bed; Outside Over There (1981), the story of an airborne young heroine, had the enchanting quality of classical ballet. After that, Sendak's interests turned to the stage, and he designed the sets and costumes for Leos Janacek's opera The Cunning Little Vixen, as well as operatic adaptations of his own works. It is the theater that informs Sendak's illustrations for E.T.A. Hoffmann's Nutcracker (Crown; $19.95). This is not the customary sugarplum rendition. As the artist points out in his introduction, the Christmastime ballet was based on a version of the tale by Alexandre Dumas, "smoothed out, bland and utterly devoid of the weird, dark qualities that make it something of a masterpiece." With characteristic wit and technical wizardry, Sendak has restored those qualities. Marie, journeying from childhood to the altar, old Drosselmeier the taleteller and Nutcracker himself are no longer marzipan creations. In Ralph Manheim's vigorous new translation, mice and soldiers, clowns and children speak out as never before, and Sendak has found pictorial equivalents for their idiosyncrasies. The illustrations will be on deposit at the Rosenbach Museum and Library of Philadelphia, which owns Tenniel's original drawings for Alice in Wonderland. A fitting destination: last century's classic has been joined by a modern candidate for that status.

Mitsumasa Anno has been called the Escher of Japan because of his ability to trick the eye and educate the mind. In Anno's Flea Market (Philomel; $11.95), two old peasants wheel a cart across a medieval square. Horseless carriages suddenly appear in the background. A stagecoach is on display, and African explorers have arrived with a cache of ivory tusks. In Anno's crowded canvas, allusions are everywhere: the novels of Robert Louis Stevenson, the paintings of Monet, the films of Rene Clair reach across the years. With his panoramic, limitless cast, this flea market constantly renews itself and seems, unlike the reader, incapable of growing up or growing old.

For several decades, New Yorker Cartoonist William Steig, 78, has devoted himself to diverting children as well as adults. His latest work, CDC? (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $6.95), tells jokes by using what seem to be isolated letters and digits. At first glance the pages hold pure nonsense: two small boys watch a television set; below them is the legend "R T-M S B-N B-10." But when the letters and number are pronounced, young readers can crack the code: "Our team is bein' beaten." A Martian has descended from a spaceship. The line explains, "N-M-E L-E-N." A doctor holds aloft a test tube and announces, "I F D Q-R!" The whimsical drawings and ingenious punch lines are M-U-S-N from the beginning to D N.

"Leonardo was the greatest artist in the world." So begins Leonardo da Vinci, by A. & M. Provensen (Viking; $14.95). "He was also an astronomer, an architect, and an engineer who made hundreds of inventions." Granted, but how can a child be shown the breadth and scope of a genius five centuries removed? The Provensens have performed the impossible, and they have done it in twelve pages. Their solution is worthy of Leonardo himself: a popup book designed to show a movable church, a flying machine, a winged man, engineering and anatomical studies, a three-dimensional model of the heavens and a mural that actually fades before the eyes. From the base of these structures, the reader learns about the look and feel of the Renaissance and about the restless intelligence of an artist who even noted, in his famous mirror writing, the audacious discovery EVOM TON SEOD NUS EHT. A warning: pop-ups are for the very young. This year juvenile readers with a deeper interest in art should turn to a far more comprehensive volume.

In Great Painters (Putnam; $15.95), Italian Artist Piero Ventura ranges through history from the pottery of ancient Greece to the murals of Picasso. Along the way he stops to consider almost every major artist; he shows how Duerer worked in woodcuts, the techniques of Holbein (seen painting the clothes of a straw model because the King is too busy to pose), the hidden Christian imagery of Goya, the palette of the impressionists, the contained violence of the fauves and cubists. Ventura augments photographs of the paintings with his own sketches of the artists at work, explains such terms as fresco and perspective and concludes with a series of brief biographies. There are yearlong art-appreciation classes that do not contain as much information and delight.

No Old Testament story seems retold as often as the episode of Jonah swallowed whole (there are strong suggestions of it in works as disparate as Pinocchio and Jaws). But somehow Warwick Hutton has found a way of giving the tale a fresh approach in Jonah and the Great Fish (Atheneum; $12.95). The text is simplified but not simpleminded, and if the sins have been scaled down, the sinner has not. As Jonah and his shipmates are buffeted by the tempest, the wind seems to blow from the page, and the great fish that consumes him soon turns from a monster into a seaborne aquarium. One half expects to see a sign on its vaulted rib cage warning OCCUPANCY BY MORE THAN 1,000 FISH AND 1 PROPHET IS UNLAWFUL AND DANGEROUS. Despite his whimsy, Illustrator-Narrator Hutton violates neither religious nor literary scruples. Happy endings, after all, are not exclusive to fairy tales; even the Bible has them, now and again.

The world is hardly in need of new alphabet books. The shelves of every children's library sag with them. But Bert Kitchen's Animal Alphabet (Dial; $11.95) should displace a score of bygone manuals. Each member of his wild kingdom is involved with the letter that begins its name: the koala hugs the main stem of the K; two bats hang from the crossbars of the B; an ostrich peers out from the great hole of the O. This is no restatement of the obvious; an elephant may push an E, but what is that long-tailed bird perched atop the Q? What kind of fish are swimming in the water trapped by the upper part of the X? What is that spotted amphibian sliding down the N? Answers: a quetzal; an X-ray fish; a newt.

Paul Creswick's 1902 classic Robin Hood (Scribners; $18.95) is written in 19th century baroque: "You shall pay no more than ten pieces of gold for your entertainment, excellence," decreed Robin. "Speak I soothly, men of the greenwood?" But it is N.C. Wyeth's 1917 illustrations that carry the day. Each of them has the sweep and drama of unabashed romanticism; a score of movies have tumbled from these portraits of Robin, Little John and Maid Marian. And there have been even more literary spinoffs. Surely this is not the last of the retellings; it is merely the best. -By Stefan Kanfer