The Day the Cow Sneezed

by James Flora
Harcourt, Brace & World 1957
reprinted by Enchanted Lion 2010

Noted Mid-century Modern illustrator tells a shaggy dog story. Not all illustrators are meant to be seen and heard.

"I bet your cow never sneezed a hole in the schoolhouse wall," begins The Day the Cow Sneezed, and truth be told, the cow in the story didn't either. Through a chain reaction like Rube Goldberg on steroids, the cow's sneeze precipitates a series of events that leads to a number of animals on progressively larger runaway vehicles doing much mayhem to country, town, school, zoo, and carnival rides. And when it was all over, and the world neatly set to right almost as quickly as it had been destroyed, little Fletcher (the boy whose neglect allowed the cow to catch a cold in the first place) is dragged off to the barn by his ear for a little good old-fashioned country discipline by Papa.

But you know what, forget the story. Don't even read it. It's a cumulative story that builds one preposterous whopper on top of another simply to provide Flora a canvas on which to draw this wild anarchy. It's like putting up with a few minutes of boring movie expository in order to get to the explosions. I really don't have a problem sometimes with dropping the whole set-up and starting with the second act in medias res.

Without the story – whose text is a tad tedious – the story makes a perfect madcap storyboard for a cartoon. It isn't sophisticated, but it isn't really much different from any other children's book in the mid 1950s, and the bold shapes and colors Flora employs show us just how tame most attempts at a retro style really are these days.  

His influence at the time is nothing to be, ahem, sneezed at either. As the graphic designer for Columbia Records in the 40s and 50s Flora's work is iconically linked with hundreds of jazz recordings. It's a style you can recognize by sight, one that many hip parents back in the day might have been drawn to without even realizing the connection.

Having said that, it is understandable that the text might fall a little flat. Many great illustrators are able to convey good stories through images without really being able to do the same thing with text. Paul Rand was a genius of graphic design – logos for IBM, ABC, and UPS among others – but no matter how visually modern or stunning, few would call his Little 1 a great children's book. I'm not about to attempt to tar every graphic designer with the same brush and say none of them should write, but there are many, today even, who design and illustrate books they should not be writing themselves. I think sometimes illustrators are giving a pass because they can visually wow an editor that perhaps might intimidate them or make them fear they might lose a good book by suggesting that perhaps they should stick to pictures. It's hard to know for certain, and I admit I may be shooting in the dark here, but I do tend to find that the better picture books come from teams and not individuals.

Now watch, the next dozen books or so I read will completely prove me wrong.

The Moon Jumpers

by Janice May Udry  
pictures by Maurice Sendak  
Harper & Row   1959  

Four children frolic beneath the light of the full moon.  Yup, it's as simple as that.  

On the title page we get a small verse of poetry that sets the tone for the book. 

Summer night is the cool dark grass  
And big tired trees  
With the moon sailing  
On a wind.   

Once the sun has set, the moon is in the sky and Mother and Father are otherwise occupied, the children go outside and do what kids do on a summer night.  They climb trees and dance around and tell ghost stories. And once the Moon Jumpers have had their fun and its time for bed they return sleepily and go to bed with dreams of the morning sun on their minds.  

There is a poetic dreaminess to the text, and so little actual plot, that I am tempted to take the text and submit it to agents just to see if anyone today thought this was commercial enough.  Now, this was a Caldecott Honor Book and I'm going to assume that everyone I would submit the text to would recognize it immediately (right?), but I would still be curious to see how this would be viewed today.  

As for Sendak's art, these are the early years and where he already has his color palate and shading in place for Where the Wild Things Are five years down the road, though the style of his human characters is still very much in progress developmentally.  Their poses and gestures are full and free-spirited (for the kids at least) and there's a glimmer of Max in the facial expressions. 

It's a quiet little book without being cute or cloying.

Lion

by William Pene Du Bois  
Viking Press  1956  

In an animal factory in the sky winged artists invent new animals, including one very unusual looking lion.  

Artist Foreman, looking suspiciously like an angel, was one of the first animal designers in the Animal Factory in the sky.  Now in semi-retirement as, well, a foreman to the other artists, he has come up with a new name for an animal -- LION -- and sets about to design an animal to fit the name.  Artist Foreman being a bit rusty designs a multi-colored quadruped with whiskers and a mane of feathers, the tale of a fish, and a variegated striped pattern that defies nature.  Doubting that he has made an animal to match the great name he has given it he goes around to the other animal designers and asks them, in one word, what they think is wrong with the creature.  Size, feathers, color, legs, haircut... each of these responses sends Artist Foreman back to the drawing board to make the necessary adjustments.  

Finally he takes his creation to the Chief Designer and asks what is wrong with this marvelous creature and is told "Nothing!"  Ah, but the Chief Designer hasn't heard the proposed noise for the Lion -- PEEP PEEP! -- but his suggestion that a creature like that would make a mighty ROAR leaves Artist Foreman little choice but to accept that a peeping lion would be as wrong as everything else he originally thought about his creature.  So Artist Foreman returned to his drawing board and roared with happiness over his latest creation.  


This is one of those time capsule books, something I had totally forgotten I'd read as a small boy.  When I stumbled upon the title on a Caldecott book list (it's an Honor title), and with fond memories of his other books besides The 21 Balloons, I had to hunt it down. My first reaction was What an odd take on the creation stories.  Clearly we are shown a heaven in the clouds, with angels of creation in the service of a god, but what we know of the Biblical creation was that the animals were created by God and not his underlings working in a factory.  Then there's the notion that God merely signs off on these creatures not of his design, and that no one dares contradict him... it all reads like an odd bureaucracy, complete with yes-men and semi-competent foremen whose employees laugh at him behind his back. Though fifty years ahead of its time, the book seems to argue both for and against the idea of Intelligent Design.

Of the mid-century children's book authors and illustrators William Pene Du Bois fits an odd space in my nostalgic heart.  There is a childlike whimsy and logic to his stories and illustrations that, as an adult, don't quite hold up.  At the same time that innocence is oddly in keeping with the way kids think.  The odd fraternity of The Three Policemen, the looney inventions of Lazy Tommy Pumpkinhead, even his original illustrations for Roald Dahl's The Magic Finger all speak to this sense of Du Bois channeling some other world that looks like ours but simply isn't.

In Lion he gives a glimpse of a heaven no one has ever claimed, before or since, with angels working an animal factory, working their way through trial and error.  The story allows the reader (or listener) a chance to recognize everything that is wrong with the Lion and decide for themselves what exactly is wrong with Artist Foreman's creation. Were it not for the wings and the clouds the story could be set anywhere, setting becomes almost incidental from the start. The Animal Factory in the Sky is simply a door through which we are given entry into Du Bois imagination.

I was surprised that a single library in my local system had a copy of this book on hand.  Out of print since 1986, I wonder how often it gets checked out by young readers, and how long before this lone copy ends up discarded and lost to the memory of grown children from another era.

The Snow Party

by Beatrice de Regniers
1959 Pantheon edition illustrated
by Reiner Zimnik
1989 Lothrop, Lee & Shepard edition
illustrated by Bernice Myers

Today, a little compare and contrast between two editions of the same book separated by three decades.

Snowed in on and old farmhouse in the Dakotas, a lonely woman begins to fantasize about having a little company. The man, her husband, points out that they don't know a soul and calls her daft for thinking such things. And besides, who'd venture out in the snow for a party even if they did have some friends. That night the storm takes out the electricity and the man decides to bring in 300 baby chick from the barn so they don't freeze. While he is out the back door the first wave of snow-stranded travelers knock on their front door. Happy for the company, the woman starts making some tea while the man welcomes the visitors. Then more stranded folks arrive. Carloads, busloads, whole wedding parties full of people stranded in the snow have made their way to the house. And then a bakery truck is stuck and there's cake and pastries and its a full party. By noon the next day the storm has passed and the stranded travelers move on. leaving the tired farm wife to sleep and dream the party all over again.

The first difference between the two is that the older version of the book is more of a picture storybook while the later edition hews more closely to what we recognize as a picture book today. In hardcover, the 1959 edition is closer in size to a trade paperback, and the illustrations are simple pen and ink drawings that have a folksy charm and seem more like spot illustrations. The pictures have a quirkiness to them, and the couple presented are round and old and very much country. Separate from a beginning reader, but not quite a middle grade book, this was clearly aimed at the emerging reader ready for slightly longer stories and fewer illustrations.

In the more recent edition (and it's odd to think of 20 years ago is "recent") the illustrations are full color and cominate the page in bright watercolors and more cartoon-y illustrations. The man and women here look a little more like aging hippies who were part of the back-to-land movement. They don't seem at all old. And as for its size the book is only slightly more square that the original, not quite as large as contemporary picture books.

Cosmetic difference aside, it's interesting to see how the text was modified for the new version. In 1959 the book opens with the happy couple in front of their farm house with the following text:

There was this little old woman and this little old man and they lived in a little old farmhouse 'way out in Dakota.

Charming, like a folk tale. Jump ahead thirty years and we get the following opening:

There was this woman, and there was this man, and they lived in a little old farmhouse way out in Dakota.

The breaks in the newer version remove some of the cadence of the original, and the word 'old' has been removed as a descriptor. Already I'm struck with wondering why the changes were made. Did it somehow seem irresponsible to put a pair of old people out in the middle of nowhere in a snow storm? Does it seem improbably that old people could want to party? Was this a question of ageism creeping into the revision?

And where the first book opens simply with that one line, the later version continues on for three more short paragraphs with the couple indoors talking. Through the window you see snow but no sense of the scenery you get with the older edition where, cleverly, the title page, the LOC page, and the dedication page all show the farmhouse and a nearby tree going through the seasons from spring through fall, with winter in full effect on that first page. It's setting and place and time and not a word used. It's the book equivalent of a movie's title sequence, or a musical's overture, and it doesn't feel anywhere near as jarring as simply jumping into the story without taking the time to establish itself.

The two books have exactly the same page count, and yet in the older book the second page explains how they lived on a farm with chickens, and in the third it talks about it snowing and snowing before the woman talks about being lonely. In the update the woman talks being "mighty lonely here with just you and the chickens for company" in the second sentence.

I don't think I'm reading into this by suggesting that the original version implies an empty nest couple who suddenly find themselves alone at the end of their days. The passage of time, the seasons, are clearly an indication of time's passage. With the new version we find a couple who don't look old enough to have raised kids and so the woman's longing for a party comes off more as a whim, a fancy, and somehow less serious. Frivolous.

Form here out the changes seem more one of economy – allowing for larger pictures and shortcutting the story where it isn't necessary. When the first guests arrive the woman sccops up some snow to make tea. It's a small detail from the original, not missed in the revision, except it is all the richer for the imagery it provides a story. The reader can try to imagine how much snow would be needed to make enough water for a tea party. It is precisely because the older book isn't a traditional picture book that it includes these details, but by reducing the story to fit the format is looses something.

The newer illustrations, had there never been anything to compare them with, would have been perfectly fine. But in comparison it is hard not to notice that for all their color and vibrancy they lack a depth. They are all surface, flat, stagnant. The older pen and ink drawings might bore younger readers for what they lack, but in return they have a sense of depth and paegentry. At the end, when the baker's truck is unloaded, the Myers illustrations show a sea of heads each holding platters of different pastries. In the Zimnik illustrations the line of helpers unloading the truck is repeated over two pages, which give the story a sense of lots of trips and an abundance of treats. In addition, despite the lack of horizon line, there is depth in the processional with the blank of the page serving as part of the white-out created by the storm.

The conversion of the picture storybook into another format is not new or unique. One of my favorite childhood picture storybooks, Roald Dahl's The Magic Finger, now exists as a rather slim middle grade book with Quintin Blake illustrations that don't have the same warmth and magic as the ones originally provided by William Pene Du Bois. Here, the book was shifted down to a picture book which is the only way it could go because it isn't quite enough for a middle grade reader.

But what is the problem with the book for children that is about the length of a short story? Why do kids have to make this progression from picture books to beginning readers to series books like The Magic Treehouse? I fear the day someone decides (really, its only a question of time isn't it?) that William Stieg's picture storybooks would make better middle grade readers, or become simplified into board books using their original illustrations. I feel sometimes like the adult world is pushing kids to reader faster then they are ready, faster than they want, and to accept longer and longer books out of some need to not leave them behind, educationally. Reading for fun, for the sense of accomplishment, with stories that can be reader and enjoyed and reread in a single sitting... I sometimes sense these are the casualties in the publishing and reading wars.

But let's hear it for the libraries that still carry both editions of The Snow Party so that readers can find the version that suits them best.

See and Say

a picture book in four languages
woodcuts by antonio frasconi
harcourt, brace & world, inc 1955

Until just this moment when I looked up the publication date I would have sworn this book was 15 to 20 years younger than it is. This multi-lingual abecedarian groups words and images at random throughout with each object named in English, Spanish, French and Italian, including a pronunciation guide as well. The words and images are common items independent readers would know, allowing for this book to be a beginner's guide to learning common words in four languages. On the last page there is a list of common phrases, a sort of beginner's phrase book for world travelers of the picture book set.

Another book checked out more for the pictures than the content, Frasconi's woodcuts are bold and simple graphics that use layering and the texture of the wood grain to good effect. The use of four colors (and black) is done in a very modern way, and the lower case font I think is what initially threw me in terms of guessing the book's year. Despite its age, the book is still serviceable (though I believe it is no longer in print).

Out of curiosity, I was curious to see when Mattel first produced the See n' Say, a toy where children would line up a pointer to an illustration of an object on a clock-like face, pull a string, and hear a stirring voice say something like "The cow goes.. moooooooo!" These simple analog learning toys were quite the rage in the 60s (and still in production under the Fisher-Price name) work well enough for the pre-reading set, but are limited to a dozen objects and quickly are abandoned. The book See and Say, which predates the toy by a decade, contains at least 60 words and their variants in three other languages.

My point? That even today, there is more value to be had in a book than an expensive toy, that simplicity doesn't mean limitation. Once a child has learned to match an image with a name and a sound, what more is there? What prompts the child to want to explore more? With See and Say there is the opportunity to not only learn the name of things, but the similarities and differences in names across cultures. There is an open door to sound out new words, and the possibility to excite the love of languages in young minds when they are most elastic and available to learn second, third, and fourth languages.

In the 1950s, when See and Say was published, the post-War world embraced travel abroad and the idea of learning more than one language was a bit of cultural capital that was also a high point of education. Today, with English having established itself as the international language of commerce, it is no longer necessary to learn another language in order to travel and breeds a sort of arrogance that other nations and cultures resent. It is not unusual to find Europeans who know three or four languages, including English, but in the US a polyglot is seen either as a learned scholar or a show-off. I hear kids marvel at how well foreign students speak English and know several languages while they struggle to master their own native tongue.

So while I was drawn to this book for its art I realize that things have changed in the past half century in picture books, because I don't know how popular a book like this would be today. We live in a country where English-only ballot initiatives underscore just how intolerant we've become, where instead of learning other languages we now suspect those who speak foreign tongues might be terrorists out to get us. We might do well to consider the generations coming up and looking at the books we give them as a way of fostering tolerance and understanding.

Or we can let publishing get taken over by electronic devices and continue to insist that our cultural arrogance is everyone else's problem.

Wow, how'd I get way up here on this soapbox?