Paul Galdone and James Marshall: Two Great Animated Folk Tales

by Tom B.

Little Red Hen

Hey, have you guys read a version of "The Little Red Hen" that was better than Paul Galdone's?

As I mentioned yesterday, if you’re looking for excellent editions of classic folk tales to share with your kids, you can’t do better than the works of Paul Galdone and James Marshall. Both are prolific author-illustrators who have published multiple retellings of some of the most famous stories in the world, but they’ve always found ways to present those stories in really compelling and clever ways.

Trust me. These books will very clearly show you the difference that a skilled author brings to retelling a “classic” tale, even something as familiar as Little Red Riding Hood or The Billy Goats Gruff. Since most folktales are in the public domain, you can find a lot of really cheap, poorly executed picture books of these stories all over the place. (Your local dollar store is probably full of them.)  Take any of those PD versions and hold them against the works of Galdone and Marshall and the difference will be as glaring as the difference between a potato and an iPod.

As a brief sample of the amazing folktale awesomeness that these authors so consistently deliver, sit back and enjoy these animated presentations of Marshall’s The Three Little Pigs and Galdone’s Little Red Hen.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPFPWFjY_kE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zr-yQGD9eAA

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The Difficult Task of Introducing Your Kid to Folk Tales and Fairy Tales

by Tom B.

Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales

Strangely enough, this is NOT a great gift idea for a baby.

One of the most daunting tasks I’ve found in building a home library is figuring out some sort of comprehensive way to introduce fairy tales and folk tales to your child. Because I’m a completist. If I start a series of novels, I have to read ALL OF THEM, even if I start hating the series after volume three.  The same goes for TV shows, movie series, and comic books. And, if I do eventually abandon whatever series I’m reading or watching, I spend lazy afternoons on the internet keeping up with spoilers, so I know what’s going on, even if… you know, I now profess to hate it. (So many hours I’ve spent on Wikipedia reading Uncanny X-Men spoilers and I haven’t bought an issue since the 1990s.) It’s just how I’m wired.

So, as a completist, when I started buying books for my daughter before she was born, I was very cognizant of the fact that it was up to me, as her father, to introduce her to the world of folklore and I didn’t want to leave any gaps in her education. One of the THE first books I ever bought her was a copy of The Complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales, illustrated by Josef Scharl, which was NUTS – literally nuts. That was an insane purchase for an unborn child. Because, while the volume is complete, it is also dense, dark, and academic, with teeny tiny text and annotations galore. It makes for a beautiful reference book, but, c’mon, a kid isn’t going to touch that book until they’re either a). an adult or b). a very, very lonely teenager.

Realizing my folly, I started searching for more accessible versions of classic folk and fairy tales to share with her. I had a checklist – do I have a Red Riding Hood for her? Check. Three Little Pigs? Check. Goldilocks? Check. And I thought I’d assembled a few very decent introductions to the world of folklore for our library. I was pleased.

Red Riding Hood

On the other hand, kids will love this one.

However, after she was born and we started reading books aloud more often, I realized that there were SO many holes in our collection. This became particularly apparent when reading the more modern fractured fairy tales – fractured fairy tales are the more meta, ironic takes on classic folklore. Many of these books – ranging from The Stinky Cheese Man to Each Peach Pear Plum to The Princess and the Pizza – have a lot of fun alluding to and referencing classic folklore, which is normally, in turn, great fun for the parents and kids reading at home. I’m a big, big child of the pop culture generation, so recognizing references is something deeply, deeply ingrained in my DNA. [read the rest of the post…]

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Do You Have the Right Kind of Interrupting Chicken?

by Tom B.

As I described earlier, having an interrupting chicken in your child’s library can be a humorous and fulfilling experience. However, you DO have to make sure that you have the right kind.

For example, THIS is the perfect kind of interrupting chicken for your child:

THIS is not. (Be sure to wait until the end, though):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbGoGLOSPSE

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Interrupting Chicken by David Ezra Stein

by Tom B.

In my post about Imogene’s Antlers the other day, I mentioned how rare it is to find a book that can make your kid really laugh out loud. It’s fairly easy to find your kid a book where, upon reflection, they’ll say, “yeah, that’s a funny book.” But finding a book that inspires pure, spontaneous laughter, those titles are few and far between.

That being said, Interrupting Chicken by David Ezra Stein doesn’t just make my daughter laugh, it makes her lose her mind.

Interrupting Chicken

Finally. A book that teaches kids the joys of interrupting their elders...

Honestly. She goes bonkers for this admittedly very, very funny picture book in a way that I’ve never seen her react before. And the funny thing is – Interrupting Chicken should be an ideal bedtime book. It’s about a father chicken trying to put his young daughter down to sleep and read her a final bedtime story, but, as the title suggests, she keeps interrupting him. It’s a book built around the bedtime ritual, so, originally, I thought this would be a perfect new bedtime book for our family.

Interrupting Chicken

So cute when she's not interrupting...

I was WRONG. I find I can’t read Interrupting Chicken to my daughter at bedtime anymore because it has the opposite effect of a good bedtime book – it actually wakes her up. It doesn’t just wake her up. It makes her hyper. She loves it SO much and she’s created such a weird, funny little ritual surrounding the book that, while we read it, she becomes such an active participant that she freaks out a little bit. Which, don’t get me wrong, is HILARIOUS to witness. However, when it’s already past 8:00 pm and it’s a school night, it gets to be a bit much. So, full disclosure, Interrupting Chicken is a book about bedtime that we only read during daylight hours at the moment, but it is still one of our favorite semi-recent additions to our home library.

This is the first David Ezra Stein title that our family has read, and he’s a major talent, both as a writer and as an illustrator. Interrupting Chicken has a fantastic visual style that brings together various different mediums – the main spreads with the chicken and her father are watercolor paintings with a great palette of reds, greens, and browns; there are sepia-toned storybook pages interspersed throughout the story; and we even get the chicken’s own attempt at making her own picture book that’s illustrated in crayons. The sheer design of the book is really impressive.

[read the rest of the post…]

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The Very, Very Cool Imogene’s Antlers Episode of Reading Rainbow

by Tom B.

Reading Rainbow

Butterfly in the sky, I can go twice as high...

I was a huge Reading Rainbow fan when I was a kid. Heck, there’s a whole generation of bookish children from the 1980s that, thanks to the influence of the best reading-related series that PBS ever produced, would very quickly form a cult behind LeVar Burton if the world ever found itself dropped into a Mad Max/Stephen King’s The Stand-esque dystopian wasteland. So, after I wrote my post on David Small’s Imogene’s Antlers yesterday, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Reading Rainbow actually did a whole episode themed around Imogene’s Antlers back in the 1980s.

It opens with LeVar visiting the Philadelphia Zoo to discuss the differences between animals and humans and, around the 6:40 mark, they start talking about Imogene’s Antlers directly and even get the hilarious Imogene Coca (Get it? Har, har) to do a reading of the book. Check out the video here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhdZO8agUo4

Isn’t that such a great show? That video completely reminded me how wonderful Reading Rainbow was and I plan on spending tonight trying to locate some of the episodes on DVD to share with my daughter.

Oh, and, just FYI, if I ever met LeVar Burton in person, it would probably resemble something like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zweTtDGlK-c&feature=related

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Imogene’s Antlers by David Small

by Tom B.

There are artists and illustrators that, I will admit, I have completely pushed on my daughter. When picking out books for her, I default to my own personal preferences far too often and the results of this editorial bias on my part are usually mixed at best. Sometimes she connects with my hand-picked selections and embraces them as her own; other times, she rebels against them fully and, as punishment, makes me read her a Disney Princess book. We fall into these roles fairly often, but every now and again, like the best children always do, my daughter throws me a curveball, just to mess with my equilibrium. One of the most pleasant of these unexpected surprises was the way that my daughter, very independently, claimed David Small as one of her very favorite children’s book creators and claimed Small’s Imogene’s Antlers as one of her very favorite picture books.

Imogene's Antlers

Imogene's Antlers, a laugh-out-loud library title

Small is a fantastic illustrator and author, who’s illustrated over 40 picture books (many of which he wrote himself), but he first got on my radar thanks to his searing 2009 memoir, Stitches, which stands as one of the best graphic novels I’ve ever read. I was actually at the 2009 National Book Awards ceremony in New York when Stitches was nominated in the young people’s literature category – it’s wonderful, but definitely not appropriate for most kids younger than high school age – and my main regret from the evening (aside from accidentally knocking a tray of drinks onto an old woman) is letting someone else grab the free copy of Stitches from our table’s centerpiece before I could.

I loved Stitches, but I hadn’t heard of Small before reading it. And, when my wife came home from the library one day, touting that she found a David Small picture book to read to our (at the time) 3-year-old, I was skeptical. And I don’t really have a good reason why. One theory I have is that I’ve seen lots of illustrators who typically create adult-themed material completely fall on their faces when they tried to create a “kids book.” Sometimes their works talk down to their audience, sometimes they’re just showcases for their art (with no semblance of a story), sometimes they’re achingly ironic, sometimes their attempts to reach kids just don’t work. The irony, of course, is that Small had been a successful and award-winning children’s book creator for YEARS before he published Stitches, but my limited exposure to his work gave me COMPLETELY the wrong idea about who Small was. And that’s my fault and yet another prime example of one of the most recurring themes here at Building a Library – I am wrong a lot. A LOT.

So, I didn’t push David Small on my daughter. In fact, I did the opposite. I presented the picture book my wife had found at our local library – titled Imogene’s Antlers – to her with an enormous indifference. I assumed that the book would be over her head or just wouldn’t connect with her and let my wife read it to her first, totally expecting that the book would flop. Once again, just to restate an important point, as a father, I am wrong A LOT.

My daughter went nuts for Imogene’s Antlers. NUTS. We have bookcases full of kids books in our house, but you could probably take all of the books that actually made my daughter laugh out loud, made her cackle like a madwoman while she read them, and those books would take up about a shelf and a half. Imogene’s Antlerswould definitely have a place on that shelf. [read the rest of the post…]

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My Favorite Thing about the Sesame Street Book Club…

by Tom B.

Yes, the books from the 1980s Sesame Street Book Club are cool, they remind me of the heyday of Jim Henson and Sesame Street, and they’re an amazing value for your dollar. BUT, with all that said, my favorite thing about the Sesame Street Book Club might be this disclaimer that ran on the back covers of most of the books.

Sesame Street Book Club Disclaimer

So great...

That’s right:

Children do not have to watch the television show to benefit from this book.

I don’t know why that sentence tickles me to my core, but it does. It just seems so earnest and idealistic. Can you imagine picking up a Spongebob Squarepants, Scooby Doo, or Clone Wars easy reader at a bookstore and seeing a disclaimer on the back that says, “Hey, if you haven’t seen the cartoon, no worries. We tried to make this a great standalone book anyway”?

It would NEVER happen. Most of those spin-off books are basically just advertisements for their source material. OR they’re just simplified summaries of movies or TV shows. (Some of them “simplify” their summaries to such an extent that they’re virtually illegible unless you’ve already seen the movie, watched the show, played the video game, etc.)

But, bless their hearts, the creators behind the Sesame Street Book Club titles weren’t just trying to create another ancillary revenue stream. They were, honestly and truly, trying to make engaging, exceptional kids’ books. They were trying to tell stories, teach the alphabet, and help kids learn, first and foremost, and the fact that the characters came from a popular TV show was just icing on the cake. Yes, I’m sure money was made and the corporate side of the Children’s Television Workshop was anxious to get some books out there for parents to purchase, BUT they didn’t let their quest for the almighty dollar completely drive their content strategy. The Book Club could’ve just tossed out cheap transcripts of popular Sesame Street sketches – The Rubber Duckie Song: The Book or These Are the People in My Neighborhood: The Reader. Instead, they actually decided to TRY – they chose to try to make some really smart, educational books, even though they didn’t have to. And that’s admirable.

It’s a little disturbing how strange that idea seems in the current age of platform synergy and leveraging content assets, but it gives me yet another excuse to indulge in my nostalgia for vintage Sesame Street arcana, so I’m just going to look at that beautiful disclaimer, think about Mr. Hooper, and smile.

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In Praise of the Sesame Street Book Club: Some of Best Used Kids Books You Can Buy

by Tom B.

Sesame Street Book Club: A My Name Is Annabel

Sesame Street Book Club: A My Name Is Annabel

I’ve made a lot of mistakes while trying to build a library for my daughter. I bought a lot of “classics” that I’d never read before, only to discover that neither my daughter nor I particularly enjoyed them. I purchased a big stack of 300-page Disney storybook collections from an outdoor Borders’ bargain table, thinking I was getting a deal, only to discover that being forced to read a barely literate retelling of Beauty and the Beast20 times in a row to a mildly-addicted 3-year-old just isn’t worth a 70% markdown. And I spent way too much time picking out titles that I personally found cheeky and clever rather than, you know, trying to figure out what a kid might actually like to read. I’ll totally admit it – mistakes were made. And I continue to make mistakes on an almost weekly basis.

But, every now and again, I lucked into making one or two tremendously awesome decisions – decisions for which I still occasionally pat myself on the back. At the top of that list is my decision to buy a whole lot of 1980s Sesame Street Book Club books on eBay.

Parents – you need to buy some of these titles for your kids. They’re perfect for children ages 2-5 (they make nice early readers for older readers too), they’re fun and engaging, they’re (for the most part) extremely well written, and, here’s the best part, they’re usually cheap. Honestly, you can normally find whole lots of Sesame Street Book Club titles on eBay at a cost of $1 to $2 per title (if not less). Any home library worth its salt is going to include some percentage of used books, and these books – both economically and creatively – are the deal of the century.

Sesame Street Book Club

Our house is covered in Sesame Street Book Club titles...

If you’re not familiar with the series, it’s probably because it’s been out-of-print for years. There isn’t a ton of information on the 1980s Sesame Street Book Club online – the best resource is this page on the Muppet Wikia, which does a fantastic job collecting information on the series. The very cool Dad Aesthetic blog also did a nice write-up of the series, summarizing it thusly:

The Sesame Street Book Club was a series of mail-order hard cover books for young readers released in the early 1980s. This collection of 62 books forms an excellent library of bedside reads for toddlers and young elementary students. The books cover a range of basic conceptual themes (The Sesame Street Circus of Opposites), vocabulary (Don’t Forget the Oatmeal!), math (The Count Counts a Party) and social skills (Molly Moves to Sesame Street). However, the observational and life-learning topics sit the best with my toddler. Those include Farley Goes to the Doctor, The Twiddlebugs’ Dream House, When I’m as Big as Freddie and The Case of the Missing Duckie. [read the rest of the post…]

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Fantastic Book Trailer for Lane Smith’s Grandpa Green

by Tom B.

I’m hot and cold on book trailers – I generally like the idea, but sometimes take issue with the execution – but I have to say I really, really dig this simple, short promotional spot that Macmillan put together for Lane Smith’s Grandpa Green.

It sells the visual appeal of the book and, I think, gives you a nice sample of its tone and voice as well. Check it out.

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A Tribute to the Great Florence Parry Heide and The One and Only Marigold

by Tom B.

Sometimes the world is a weirdly bittersweet and wonderful place. I spent most of this evening typing out a long tribute to The One and Only Marigold, a picture book that I dearly love and a book that my daughter adores. As I finished the article and began searching for hyperlinks to accompany the text, I saw on the internet that it was just announced that Florence Parry Heide, the author of the book, had passed away in her sleep last night. She was an amazing 92 years old and authored over 80 children’s books during her prolific career. What an amazing woman and what a huge loss for children’s literature.

Lane Smith helps his collaborator on Princess Hyacinth (The Surprising Tale of a Girl Who Floated) (Random/Schwartz & Wade), Florence Parry Heide, celebrate her 90th birthday at ALA.

Lane Smith helps his collaborator on Princess Hyacinth (The Surprising Tale of a Girl Who Floated) (Random/Schwartz & Wade), Florence Parry Heide, celebrate her 90th birthday.

I had the pleasure to meet her once in 2009 and she couldn’t have been more charming. So, in tribute of the favorite daughter of Kenosha, Wisconsin and an author that has created far too many books that my daughter has fallen in love with, I offer this heartfelt tribute to The One and Only Marigold and of Florence Parry Heide herself. Honestly. If you love great children’s books, pick up ANY of her titles and you’ll be happy you did.

My tribute to The One and Only Marigold now feels a bit self-indulgent – Mrs. Heide deserves a better elegy than I could ever write – but I want to leave my original article pretty much intact to simply show off the sheer fanboy-ish glee that this wonderful woman inspired in a grouchy thirty-something dad. You will be missed, Mrs. Heide.

And now, onto The One and Only Marigold …

####

As I’ve mentioned before, when looking for books for my daughter, my favorite thing in the world is the unexpected surprise. I LOVE stumbling upon a book I’ve never heard of before and having that moment of discovery – like all the secret knowledge of the world has just fallen into my lap.

Now the hilarious irony of these moments is that, usually, when I have them, I’ve accidentally “discovered” something that is already WIDELY known and HUGELY famous. The only person that hasn’t heard of these titles yet is ME. I call them my “Christopher Columbus” moments. I charge ahead and plant a flag on a book, screaming, “LOOK WHAT MY GRAND INSIGHT HAS PLUCKED FROM OBSCURITY! I CLAIM THEE!” And, then, after a proud few moments, someone normally takes me aside and quietly explains that the book was a best-seller, won the Newbery Award, and has been the subject of 10 movie adaptations (5 of which I’ve probably seen).

The One and Only Marigold

The One and Only Marigold

Case in point – I have that oblivious sense of discovery pride about The One and Only Marigold by Florence Parry Heide and Jill McElmurry. However, I think I’m mostly just happy that I lucked into finding such a delightful picture book, because finding Marigold not only introduced us to a wonderful book, but it also introduced us to the great Florence Parry Heide, who quickly became one of our favorite authors.

I’m not going to try to recount Mrs. Heide’s insanely impressive resume here – try this link or that link for some background – but her prolific career that has included collaborations with a breathtaking variety of authors and artists including Edward Gorey, Sylvia Van Clief, Jules Feiffer, and Lane Smith. She even has her own holiday in her hometown of Kenosha, Wisconsin. And, like an idiot, I hadn’t heard of her until 2009.

I was attending the American Library Association Annual Conference in Chicago and had been hunting the convention floor for a copy of Princess Hyacinth: The Surprising Tale of a Girl Who Floated, a picture book that I’d heard raves about and that had artwork by Lane Smith – one of my favorite illustrators ever since I first read The Stinky Cheese-Man. When I finally found the table where Lane Smith was signing copies of the book, I was introduced to a charming older woman, who, as it turns out, actually wrote Princess Hyacinth. This was Florence Parry Heide.

[Note: If you don’t already own Princess Hyacinth, go buy it now. Right now. Go ahead. I’ll wait. Honestly, it’s that good. I’ll do a write-up of it one day, but Marigold didn’t nearly get the same level of popular attention as Princess Hyacinth, so it can wait. Oh, and her books with Edward Gorey are fantastic too. OK, more on Florence Parry Heide soon.] [read the rest of the post…]

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