In the 1970s and 1980s, as preventing nuclear war gained urgency and momentum, several illustrated books were published that gave American young people here a startlingly close view into the destructive power of the bomb. Decades later, living memory is fading, and some of those ambitious works have fallen out of print. One of these is Maruki’s Hiroshima no Pika (1980), a masterpiece that allows parents to invite children to bear witness to sorrow together—and grow into the adults who will have the courage to be afraid and empathetic enough to work for peace.

The late Toshi Maruki, who wrote and illustrated the book, is known in Japan primarily as a painter, including of the Hiroshima Panels, murals depicting the unthinkable destruction of the atomic bomb. In 1945, she and her husband Iri Maruki, also an artist, had rushed to Iri’s hometown of Hiroshima to help with relief efforts after the bombing. In the decades following the war, the Marukis created large scale murals documenting the devastation wrought by the bombs. They toured with the panels to raise awareness and counter the limitation of information available to the public on the extent of the tragedy. The couple also came to depict other atrocities, including the Nanjing Massacre and Auschwitz, and victims of environmental poisoning in Japan.

We are lucky that Maruki saw her art making as compatible with creating books for young people, because the Hiroshima no Pika makes clear what a unique calling she had for children’s literature. Perhaps part of the reason she could do both is that in Japan picture books have historically been held in higher regard.

In the American edition, Hiroshima no Pika carries its Japanese title, rather than a translation, such as Hiroshima’s Flash. It’s a title that holds the reader at a distance. But once inside the book’s covers, the experience of surviving an atomic bomb is presented with intense intimacy. The story—part composite, part based on a survivor Maruki met—follows a young girl, Mii, whose family lives through the bombing. We first meet Mii and her parents at breakfast, the skies clear. Mii’s father compliments the delicious sweet potatoes her mother has prepared. Then, at 8:15 a.m., a sudden flash—and their world is an inferno. Through the rest of the book, we follow Mii as her mother guides the family as far away as she can from the flames.

Along their flight to safety, Mii witnesses a world in chaos. In Maruki’s expressive illustrations, the fleeing survivors form great waves of agony. But through Mii’s eyes, we also see individual tragedies: A sparrow that can only hop, because its wings are singed. A mother holding her lifeless baby, who walks deeper and deeper into a river until Mii can no longer see her.

After their long flight through wreckage and across rivers, Mii and her parents fall asleep at the coastline they’ve finally reached, thinking safety is at hand. Time stops making sense. They wake up four days later as help arrives, shocked so many days have passed.

Hiroshima no pika book was very influential on me when I was young, perhaps most because of the two final spreads, which cover what happened after the chaos subsided. A child reading about disasters might be accustomed to finding their protagonist has been saved in the end. Here, the false ending at the beach gives way to new forms of suffering.

Mii never grew after that day. Many years have passed, and she is still the same size she was when she was seven years old. “It is because of the Flash from the bomb,” her mother says. Sometimes Mii complains that her head itches, and her mother parts her hair, sees something shiny, and pulls it out of her scalp with a pair of tweezers. It’s a sliver of glass, imbedded when the bomb went off years ago, that has worked its way to the surface.

Mii’s father had seven wounds in his body, but they healed and for a while he thought he was getting well. Then one day in autumn after the Flash, his hair fell out and he began coughing blood. Purple spots appeared all over his body, and he died.

Many of the people who had said, “Thank God, our lives were spared,” later became ill with radiation sickness. Though this happened in 1945, some of these people are still in hospitals. There is no cure for their disease.”

Maruki had a gift for portraying the monumental scale of devastation. But she also understood the power of the detail to wake us up. A grand scale can shock, but it can also be numbing; a sliver of truth can be fine enough to enter your heart. After reading the book as a child, I never forgot the image of a forever-small Mii, glass erupting from her scalp.

Now, rereading as a mother, I think I’ll never forget the passage when Mii’s mother realizes her daughter has been gripping her chopsticks for four days. Mii is not so many years removed from a time when she would have grasped strongly if her mother pressed a finger into her palm.

“Mii-chan! You’re still holding your chopsticks!” her mother exclaimed. “Here, let me have them.” But Mii’s hand wouldn’t open. Her mother pried her fingers open one by one. Four days after the bomb, Mii let go of her chopsticks.

Not every sliver of truth is a painful one. Mii is witness in her journey to frenzy and death, but also to heroism and generosity. Mii’s mother carries Mii’s injured father on her back. An old woman uses what is left of her strength to offer Mii a ball of rice.

The book ends on an anniversary of the bombing, showing Mii lighting lanterns in remembrance of her father and the dying swallow she saw. Maruki closes with a simple message that is hopeful, but without the false reassurance that we are so often tempted to give as parents. “It can’t happen again,” Mii’s mother says, “if no one drops the bomb.”

This Thursday is the day of remembrance. Buy the book! But also: read a scanned copy of the book online free at the Internet Archive’s invaluable library.

What we like in this genre: direct and informative, but not so dense you can’t read it aloud. Accurate, but not clinical. There’s room for humor, but it can’t overpower the subject, and the jokes need to offer us some craft, not mere relief. (My kids do not agree with this last criterion. They revel in pretty much any taboo-violation joke.)

And the illustrations must be central to the work! If you’re going to teach me something, particularly if you’re going to show me an unsung body part, a maligned byproduct of digestion, or a taboo-shrouded bodily function, do it with verve.

So it’s fitting to start with Taro Gomi, the prolific Japanese picture book author—an author-illustrator who leads with the visuals. (Check out his recent career retrospective.) Gomi, whose background was in graphic design before he moved into children’s books, ran at perhaps the lowest-status bodily function of all—and did so with primarily the illustrations in mind. Then, through a somewhat improbable route, became a key figure in the small universe of memorable body books for American children.

Its popularity as an adult gag gift notwithstanding, Gomi’s Everyone Poops began as a high-minded project, with not merely respect for its subject but an appreciation of its visual poetry. Here’s how Gomi tells the story of his inspiration:

“I happened to have a meeting with the head of Tokyo’s Tama Zoo. He’d asked me to get there early in the morning before the place was open, as he was busy, so around six I came in the back gate and strolled across the zoo to his office. Just then, the morning sun struck some animal droppings with steam rising from them, and I thought it was a beautiful sight. I took a lot of pictures.

“On the way back, I had the idea to draw a book about poop. There were books about food, but none with vivid pictures of the end product, after it had passed through the body and come out again. People only see the zoo after it’s been cleaned up. I’d been lucky.

At first, according to Gomi, the publishers hesitated, but eventually the publishing house Fukuinkan Shoten published it in Kagaku no Tomo (Children’s Science Companion), its influential science-based picture book magazine. Fukuinkan credits Everybody Poops with opening the door for more frank discussions of anatomical topics previously thought unfit for children’s books.

Over time, the publisher released a number of stories about the human body and its functions through Kaguku no Tomo. Many became standalone books in Japan, including Everyone Poops, published in 1977. The series spotlit, among other things, elements of anatomy that were not simply overlooked, but kept out of books due to adults’ discomfort or lack of curiosity.

Genichiro Yagyu’s oddball body books

One of the more prolific creators in the Fukuinkan Shoten body science series was Genichiru Yagyu, an author-illustrator who deserves more attention here. (Here’s his self-deprecating bio.) The Yagyu approach was less about highlighting the beauty of a disfavored bodily function, as Taro Gomi had done, than about bringing detailed anatomical information to children in an energetic and playful style.

But perhaps the real raison d’être of Yagyu’s books is the joy of looking at something in a new way. Sometimes literally—as with his illustrations showing nostrils and feet from a non-canonical perspective.

The Holes in Your Nose

Yagyu is responsible for the majority of the books in Fukuinkan’s human body science series that wound up in English translation, including The Holes in Your Nose, my favorite. This ode is his most personal installment: He has said the unusual prominence of his nostrils embarrassed him as a child.

The standout of the book is a two-page spread on the fascinating shapes that nostrils make from below. Yagyu also finds a number of ways to incorporate design elements that recall the black, flat circles that make up the nostrils of his protagonist. (And those of the author’s self-insert, seen below in his coke-bottle glasses!) Here are some of the highlights:

All About Scabs

Though The Holes in Your Nose has become my favorite, but All About Scabs was the installment we first bought and loved. We were on the hunt for a preschooler-friendly book on the subject and found exactly one book, and luckily it served its public health purpose quite well. That said, I would say the visuals are a bit less inventive than some of Yagyu’s other books; perhaps because All About Scabs is the most goal-oriented of the series (don’t pick your scab!). Relevant if it’s relevant.

The Soles of Your Feet

Another of Yagyu’s unexpected topics is The Soles of Your Feet, our kids’ favorite of the series. Our children most appreciated the book’s suggestion to dip your feet in paint and stamp a sheet of paper to determine whether one has high or low arches. Luckily for me water on concrete also works.

Breasts

Rounding out the list of the English-translated books from Yagyu’s body science books in the Kaguku no Tomo series is Breasts. This is the only of the books that is neither available at my library nor scanned into my family’s go-to database for digitally borrowing out-of-print books, Archive.org. (It is, however, available for purchase second hand.)

So I am indebted to book maven Kate Humphreys of the online children’s bookshop Oly Oly Oxen Free Books to be able to share these images of the Breasts with the English text. If you see a copy, grab it! Humphreys recently sold the copy she had, sadly.

Incidentally the Oly Oly Oxen Free vintage and used books collection is full of treasures! A propos of anatomy picture books with charm: You can pick up from the shop right now 1966’s Straight Hair, Curly Hair—illustrated exuberantly by Ed Emberly, famous in our house for his instructional drawing books.

Here are some spreads from Breasts that give some clues to why this book might not be straightforward to shelve in the States, where there is no consensus on what body parts may be shown in children’s books, and how. Still, in my experience it covers many topics that children frequently comment or ask about.

Other translations of Breasts are circulating. The Spanish translation, Tetas, is currently available in the U.S. Or buy it directly from the independent Spanish publishing house Media Vaca!

Nanao and Hasegawa’s Contemplating Your Bellybutton

Written by Jun Nanao, illustrated by Tomoko Hasegawa (Kane/Miller, 1995)

The other body part books that made it to the U.S. from the Fukuinkan Shoten series were The Gas We Pass, written and illustrated by Shinta Cho, and Contemplating Your Bellybutton, written by Jun Nanao and illustrated by Tomoko Hasegawa. The Gas We Pass is still popular, but Contemplating Your Bellybutton is now out of print in English, though available second hand.

The bellybutton book is culturally perhaps the one in the series least in sync with American conventions in the directness with which it represents some unclothed children’s and parents’ bodies, including childbirth. Most English language bellybutton books are quite shy of showing much unclothed anatomy at all—many don’t even use humans, favoring cartoon animals.

Perhaps that is why the Children’s Library reviewer in 1995 called Nanao and Hasegawa’s work “crude and unsettling.” But to my eyes, the illustrations combine a fairly frank presentation of the bodily experiences of newborns and their parents with the warm feelings for babies one wishes to convey when explaining such a topic to one’s child.

There’s also a notably exuberant spread of the young child protagonist running and jumping around without clothes, which well captures the gleeful chaos of a certain era of childhood.

How the books got to the U.S.

Despite the commercial success of Everybody Poops from its publication in Japan in 1977, it was far from a foregone conclusion that the work would make it to the United States. For Gomi’s book to make it to American shelves, it had to wait until the 1990s, when it was taken up by a brother-sister team who were looking to foreign markets for picture books that could meaningfully expand American children’s cultural horizons.

Those siblings were Sandy Miller, coming off of founding Film Forum, and Madeleine Kane, a math teacher. They had started their publishing house, Kane/Miller, in 1984, with the goal of bringing the exceptional picture books from other countries to U.S. children. Not a totally dissimilar mission from Film Forum.

Everyone Poops became the pair’s unexpected bestseller and gave them financial security. Miller bought and renovated a church in Cobble Hill to move into (wonder which one?). Here’s an article about the book’s success from The New York Times in 1997 with a bit more on Kane/Miller’s story—including how they faced both dismissal and anger from some quarters for bringing Gomi’s book to the American market.

Kane/Miller went on to bring more books from Fukuinkan Shoten’s Kaguku no Tomo series into the United States, including The Gas We Pass, The Holes in Your Nose, Contemplating Your Bellybutton, The Soles of Your Feet, All About Scabs, and Breasts.1 The period of publication lasted from 1993 until 1999. Eventually Kane/Miller was purchased by a larger publisher and distributor, EDC, in 2008. Of the human body science books, only Everybody Poops and The Gas We Pass are still in print.

A new breastfeeding book to import?

Several decades on from when these Japanese books first landed stateside, Americans are still struggling to add to the corpus of stylish human body science picture books available for young children. As part of the remedy, it would be lovely to see someone translate for today’s kids a more recent Japanese entry in the genre, Oppai no Hanashi (roughly, The Story of Breasts). Despite its broad title, the book is primarily about the role of breasts in breastfeeding, as well as the breastfeeding relationship between the mother and child.

Published in 2009, the book has the advantage of illustrator Yuki Ainoya, whose dreamy, cheerful illustrations won her recognition in the U.S. for the Sato the Rabbit series. I wrote about Ainoya’s particular genius last week. Here’s the cover art; one imagines an American publisher might have to change it.

The book’s other most striking illustration shows a mother’s-eye-view shot of a chubby, red-cheeked baby as it nurses. The baby is partially obscured from view by the expansive orb of the mother’s breast—a breast that looks more like a planet. Perhaps a planet where only creatures as enchanted as Sato the Rabbit might live.

If you require convincing, please sample the most undeniable argument in their favor: they brought to U.S. readers the Japanese genius Yuki Ainoya, author-illustrator of the Sato the Rabbit series. Pick up the four-book bundle on sale!

What can I say about Ainoya. Her books remind me of the first time I stepped entirely inside the dome of a weeping willow.

The question the Sato the Rabbit series asks is: What if all you had to do to change the world was to see it differently. Sato sees the rain as glimmering ribbons, and so he can tie them together into lovely curtains for his party. He sees the reflection of the crescent moon in water as a fish, so he can pluck it out and eat it. And so on, and so on—Sato’s life into a series of fortunate events.

Sato follows in the footsteps of his spiritual cousin, Harold (with the purple crayon). But Harold makes something from nothing in a spare world. Sato makes the already-riotous world into something even more magical. (Incidentally, did you know Harold’s author Crockett Johnson turned to painting mathematically inflected visions later in life?)

Here’s a vignette from Sato the Rabbit and the Moon with Ainoya’s signature visual puns and joyfully tactile transformations.

When Sato plays with the world, the world plays along, as on this rainy day:

Recently I went on vacation and read a pile of books by women with very active imaginations, Eve Babitz among them. I see a spiritual affinity between Eve and Sato—two independent spirits committed to both costume1 and self-enchantment.

I did contact Ainoya to ask if the IRL Sato—a dreamy doll who stars in her Instagram—was available for sale. The answer is no. (For now; I hope someone like Manon Balberg partners with her.)

On another note: Ambiguity has been out of fashion for some time in the children’s section. Have we reached maximum displacement of the pendulum in the swing away from 1970s authorial absentee parenting? Not sure, but when you long to quiet today’s careful editorial voice, Japanese artist and author-illustrator Komako Sakai is one of the authors to turn to.

The grievances the little bunny airs in Sakai’s little dagger of a book, Mad at Mommy—which of those allegations mean Mommy should take a hard look in the mirror, and which suggest she needs to better articulate her own case?

The titular character in the atmospheric Hannah’s Night who commits a series of forbidden acts while her family sleeps—should her behavior change? Should the rules?

Sakai limits her role to the crafting of the rich but economical portraits of young children’s experiences. The interpretation she leaves to the readers.

Sakai’s illustrations have peaceful, saturated tones and inviting textures well-suited for the calm reflection the books invite about the tensions between kids’ and adults’ perspectives they portray.

(Hannah’s Night is also an excellent way for long-suffering parents of early risers to take a moment to empathize with their own night wanderers. Who wouldn’t want to creep undetected in the blue splendor of that house, copping cherries and nicking big sister’s toys?)

Here is little Hannah sneaking downstairs pre-dawn, in a familiar act of rebellion:

Hannah’s Night is still available new on Amazon but the English-language publisher does not seem to be offering it for sale.

I first found Sakai because I was looking through the “S” section in the picture book shelves, and the title Mad at Mommy caught my eye. You know how I feel “spine out”—rather than “cover out”—as a display choice for picture books—but this book certainly makes that structure work to its advantage. And what do you know… Sakai had titles published in the U.S. with Yuki Ainoki’s publisher, Enchanted Lion.2 I would prefer if I could end such a sentence with the Sato-shaped punctuation Ainoya invented, but since I can’t I’ll leave you with this:

After I wrote about the enchanting photobooks for children by Jill Krementz (A Very Young Dancer and its sequels) I became curious why the children’s photobook or photo-illustrated book is so rare nowadays. I’m talking books where entire photographs are the stars of the show—not books where photographs are chopped and remixed, such as in the busy layouts of a typical children’s visual encyclopedia.

Turns out that type of photo-illustrated book never really was a true genre for children in the U.S.; more like a method that was employed from time to time due to unusual circumstances. Like, say, your father is a famous photographer (The First Picture Book for Children (1930)); you are an artist who has been photographing dolls and someone suggests putting a kid’s book together (The Lonely Doll (1957)); or you are adapting your own film (The Red Balloon (1967)).

If you’re interested in more on the topic of photo-illustrated books for children, the writer and photography curator David Campany discussed this type of book in Source in 2008. And here is an interview with the photographer Alex Soth, who collects such books.

In the case of Jill Krementz, the reason the photo-illustrated picture books came together was that Krementz, already an accomplished photojournalist, was interested in the world of children. And it so happens there is a Swedish series with a similar origin, well-known abroad but not in the States. It is called Children’s Everywhere, or Children of the World, and was illustrated with photographs by the Russian-born Swedish photojournalist Anna Riwkin-Brick.

As with Krementz’s books, each book in Children’s Everywhere follows an individual child and illuminates daily life. But where Krementz’s books featured real, “as told to” style first-person narration, the Children’s Everywhere series used fictionalized stories designed to educate children on daily life in other cultures. And where Krementz spotlighted talented children working on careers in the arts or sports, Children’s Everywhere focused on more typical experiences.

There was one point of notable overlap, though: Both series feature a child born into a circus family. Jill Krementz’s A Very Young Circus Flyer (1979); Anna Riwkin-Brick’s Circus Child (1960), with a story by Astrid Lindgren, the Swedish colossus of children’s literature. (You can read by Flyer and Circus Child free on the Internet Archive.) Of all the photo-illustrated books I discovered in my search after discovering Jill Krementz, Circus Child is my favorite.

Vintage copies of both books (now out of print) would make wonderful gifts for a young circus enthusiast. A Very Young Circus Flyer is aimed at a middle grades reader, dense with behind-the-scenes detail about the daily rhythms of the life of a circus performers. Their house is on a train! The book emphasizes the long preparation and training that goes into the circus acts, like fact that the lions must be fed with bottles when they are babies, to make them easier to handle. In case you were wondering: “It takes forever to teach a dog how to ride a motorcycle.”

Armando (“Tato”) Farfan, Jr., the boy who was the very young circus flyer, grew up, and stayed connected to the circus world. Now he is an artist and costume designer based in Las Vegas, with specialty in wings for Victoria’s Secret angels, Gaga, and other showgirls. His company is Living Art of Armando. They do custom work, should the Claire Danes Romeo + Juliet / Jules from Euphoria angel wings be a dream of you or a tween you know.

Speaking of showgirls, here is a down moment captured in A Very Young Circus Flyer that makes me curious about what didn’t make it into the book.

For the littler ones with big-top fever and the budding horse girls, Lindgren and Riwkin-Brick’s Circus Child is a charming option. The book has Lindgren’s trademark empathetic, realist perspective on children. It’s an underdog tale—five year old Lilibet (Sonja) dreams of becoming an circus equestrienne, but has a bossy playmate, Leo, who won’t quit telling her she’ll never be a rider. Will she overcome his put-downs? In her final, triumphant words: “Of course I can ride.”

If you’re looking to pair the books with another circus gift, you’ll have an embarrassment of riches these days. Our favorite maximalist dress-up shop is Tutu du Monde is doing a range of circus and harlequin options. The plastic-free, eco-conscious brands are also in on the game: German natural doll-makers Nanchen have an all-natural sweet clown doll and clown rattle; Grimm’s has a classic wooden elephant pull-toy in a striking blue; and Sarah’s Silks is selling a sweet circus gift set with a rattan circus-tent basket and solid wooden animal performers.

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• Of course there is the problem of how do you get those high books, especially when you’re little. What if the entire wall of shelves were climbable? This would suit middle grades kids so well. (In this case the architect created an oblique wall to oblige.)

• Still, at some point spine out is going to be necessary. It is hard to find shelves that are not overpowering, a tip risk, or made from fake wood—or all three! These Blu Dot solid wood and metal shelves let light through but can still actually hold books securely—thanks to the small rear shelf lip and the central placement of the slim wooden uprights. They are both attached to the wall and distribute weight through the floor via their uprights.

• In the librarian debates on spine out vs. cover out book display, you don’t see much discussion about the dearth of “cover up” displays that allow reading in place. But large, heavy books will live much longer in this way—particularly for very young kids. (My toddlers destroyed so many oversize visual encyclopedias and atlases.) The custom octagonal shelf and the slanted display table in Lisbon’s Good Company are lovely.

• Here’s a piece that could accommodate cover out display and double as a reading surface for a heavy book.

• On the opposite end, warmth-wise, is the rotating wooden book stand that Thomas Jefferson made famous. Modern examples are named after him. This woodworker will talk you through the construction.

• Finally: Jefferson five books on rotation not enough for you? Consider the Renaissance bookwheel. My new obsession!

Jólabókaflóð is a fancy way of saying that Icelanders exchange books as presents on Christmas eve, in time to feast upon the books in their warm beds through the dark winter nights. The tradition is said to be rooted in restrictions on imports during WWII which covered many consumer goods but not paper.

These days, the Icelandic Publishing Association sends the entire country a holiday book catalog each year, like a national version of the Scholastic Book Order. (Most titles in Iceland are released in the Christmas season.) The print copies for the Christmas 2025 catalog are being distributed now; here is a digital download of the catalog for 2024 for my Icelandic-speaking readers.

Our family makes the tradition into a daytime affair to accommodate our morning lark offspring: We dress festively, hit our local hot chocolate and candy shop, then the library and the book store, then head home to snuggle under blankets with stacks of books beside us.

• Speaking of excuses to enjoy Scandinavian sweets! The Lakrids by Bülow licorice and chocolate advent calendar is a justifiable late-purchase for a family with two kids who like licorice. The advent calendar industry doesn’t often meet the demand for a gift two or more children can enjoy; this one has two pieces of candy for each day.

• How to stay warm during all this reading? There’s Icelandic eiderdown—not only wonderfully light and warm, but also collected without harming birds. (What happens to the birds’ would-be predators is another story.) The process is this: Icelandic eider farmers create seaside sanctuaries for eider ducks to nest. Mother ducks insulate their eggs with down they pluck from their own breasts. When the fledglings have hatched, the farmers gather the down. Here’s a $5,900 eiderdown twin duvet with cashmere-cotton casing from Icelandic brand Hraun á Skaga; organic GOTS certified cotton casing is available on request. Icelandic Down has a baby duvet starting at $2,744; available with silk casing.

• It’s not so simple to locate Icelandic children’s books for your book flood if you’re an English speaker. One exception is the middle grades eco-fable The Story of the Blue Planet, written by Andri Snaer Magnason and illustrated by Áslaug Jónsdóttir. It tops many Icelandic children’s literature recommendation lists. For littler ones, I like Áslaug Jónsdóttir’s character illustrations in Jónsdóttir’s Little and Big Monsters series, but translations only exist in languages other than English.

• Readers looking for romantic fairy tale illustration of Scandinavian (not just Icelandic) folktales are spoiled for choice. In Iceland, Guðmundur Thorsteinsson (1891-1924), called Muggur, is known for his paintings and illustrations of Icelandic folklore, but those are not collected in a child-oriented edition. Muggur did write and illustrate The Story of Dimmalimm, a classic with a blunt message about good things coming to a girl who is sweet and well-behaved. It’s out of print in English but available for purchase second-hand. Read for free on the Internet Archive.

• Here are some English-language nonfiction or “informative fiction” picture books about Iceland my kids have enjoyed: Betsy and Ted Lewin’s Puffling Patrol follows Icelandic children as they participate in a rescue mission for recently hatched puffins who have strayed into the town instead of finding their way to the sea. Ted Lewin’s dramatic, detailed paintings are well beyond what children are normally treated to in the science section. In Stranded!, ÆVar þÓr Benediktsson recounts the “mostly true” story of a time his grandfather almost perished when stuck on a newborn volcanic island. (Both bird rescues and volcanos were big in our house last year.)

• At some point one will have to get the blood moving. How about falconry, one of the only ways to give a small child an intimate encounter with a bird of prey. (You only have to be six or seven!) This one at West Coast Falconry can go with a trip to Tahoe, but I imagine googling your area will yield something within a moderate distance.

Buying children’s classics is more laborious than buying new releases or vintage books that exist in only a couple of editions. One is tired out by the number of decisions to make about book design, vintage, craftsmanship—not to mention which translation or illustrator to select.

Perhaps that’s why ones shelves often contain a fair number of random, unsatisfactory copies of classics. Copies that do nothing to convince a child to give the less than completely fashionable a chance. The silver lining is that these hurdles are why something from the children’s canon can be such an excellent gift.

I’ll start with The Little Prince, because I dote on a boy whose hair reminds me of a wheat field.

If the child doesn’t read French, then the first consideration is which translation.

The main circulating English version of The Little Prince now is by the late poet Richard Howard. His version unseated the original by Katherine Woods. Howard’s work is considered by some more faithful to Saint-Exupéry’s simple, accessible prose, and is viewed by admirers as less stiff. (Also, Woods’s translation has one of the most famous translation errors.) By others, Howard’s translation is viewed as a failed assassination attempt. Howard foresaw this:

Katherine Woods’s translation is particularly dear to many as it came out alongside the original French text in 1943. Saint-Exupéry (Saint-Ex) had written the work in New York while in exile from occupied France. Both French and English editions were published in New York. (They were not published in France until after the war, by Gallimard.) The Woods translation remained the standard for half a century in the English-speaking world. Her reign was coextensive with the book’s exuberant reception by anglophone audiences and its eventual canonization among English-language classics.

How you feel about the Woods vs. Howard controversy may turn in part on how you feel about the following comparison, made by another Francophone American writer, Matt Kim:

Woods’s version includes French-to-English translations like “spring of fresh water”, “primeval forest”, and “tippler”. Howard translates the same words as, “water fountain”, “jungle”, and “drunkard”.

But the story of Woods’s romantic flourishes vs. Howard’s straightforward choices is not the only one that can be told (even in this example, we have drunkard, rather than drinker). If you’d like more raw material to understand how the two versions sit on your palate, here is how Woods and Howard interpreted the closing paragraph of the book’s first chapter:

The French original:

Quand j’en rencontrais une [une grande personne] qui me paraissait un peu lucide, je faisais l’expérience sur elle de mon dessin numéro 1 j’ai toujours conservé. Je voulais savoir se elle était vraiment compréhensive. Mais toujours elle me répondait : «c’est un chapeau». Alors je ne lui parlais ni de serpents boas, ni de forêts vierges, ni d’étoiles. Je me mettais à sa portée. Je luis parlais de bridge, de gold, de politique et de cravates. Et la grande personne était bien contente de connaître un homme aussi raisonnable.

Woods (1943)

Whenever I met one of them [a grown-up] who seemed to me at all clear-sighted, I tried the experiment of showing him my Drawing Number One, which I have always kept. I would try to find out, so, if this was a person of true understanding. But, whoever it was, he, or she, would always say: “That is a hat.” Then I would never talk to that person about boa constrictors, or primeval forests, or stars. I would bring myself down to his level. I would talk to him about bridge, and golf, and politics, and neckties. And the grown-up would be greatly pleased to have met such a sensible man.

Howard (2000)

Whenever I encountered a grown-up who seemed to me at all enlightened, I would experiment on him with my drawing Number One, which I have always kept. I wanted to see if he really understood anything. But he would always answer, “That’s a hat.” Then I wouldn’t talk about boa constrictors or jungles or stars. I would put myself on his level and talk about bridge and golf and politics and neckties. And my grown-up was glad to know such a reasonable person.

Primeval forest vs. jungle (for forêt vierge)? Clear-sighted vs. enlightened (for lucide)? Should one raise Woodists or Howardists?

My own nostalgia for Woods’s translation notwithstanding, my recommendation would be “both,” because The Little Prince is an excellent candidate to be a child’s introduction to translation itself. You might begin with a discussion of how to translate fauve, the poor creature staring into the jaws of death in the book’s memorable opening page. Fauve has no direct analog in English; it is rendered as “animal" for Woods, “wild beast” for Howard, and even “wildcat” from the default Kindle Edition we downloaded.1) « Le langage est source de malentendus », as the fox counsels the little prince.

Then there’s the question of how best to enjoy the author’s illustrations. For a copy with strong reproductions, I recommend the Folio Society release, which aimed to restore faithfulness to the original colors. The Folio Society release also includes a commentary volume from former Morgan Library curator Christine Nelson, who took care of the Little Prince manuscripts for several decades. This companion volume includes reproductions of parts of Saint-Ex’s handwritten drafts and preliminary sketches.

The Folio Society used the Richard Howard translation. So it pairs well as a gift with a vintage copy of Katherine Woods’s now out-of-print translation. Here’s a guide to collecting first editions from the fabulously thorough Little Prince Swiss collector and general allumeur de réverbère Jean Marc Probst (his detailed collection site is worth perusing). Thanks to Probst, I now know that the first 1943 French editions, unlike the English, bear “the mark of the raven.”

Here’s a handsome early edition of The Little Prince for sale—lacking dust cover—at $1,250:

Less extravagant would be to buy a vintage copy from the later Harcourt era (Harcourt absorbed the original publisher, Reynal and Hitchock). Finding the Harcourt-era Katherine Woods translation is easier if you restrict the time period to before 2000, when Howard’s version was published (here’s a search).

Some further items to sweeten your gift or peruse at your leisure:

• Gallimard sells a facsimile edition of the original manuscript (59€).

• Over the years The Little Prince has been illustrated many times by new interpreters. Very few tempt me as a collector, but Probst created a nice gallery that will allow you to see if any “third party” illustrators catch your eye. I am an admirer of the Italian-born, France-based illustrator Beatrice Alemagna, and am partial to her edition.

• A book is best given with a doll; and that doll in turn is best given with its own miniature book. Thanks to the cottage industry around The Little Prince, you have a lot of mini options for both a large companion like the Nanchen doll above, dollhouse scale, or in between. This miniature one looks to be the full-text Katherine Woods translation. This one is for recreating in the dollhouse your child’s grandparents’ mustiest shelves. I am against the ones with blank pages, as I’m sure will be the borrowers who live under your floorboards.

It’s always nice when small children put on a musical actually suited for them, rather than struggling through the likes of I Can Show You the World as their parents shift in their folding chairs.1

Maurice Sendak partnered with Carole King to bring us just such a musical: Really Rosie, a show about bored Brooklyn children staging a show under the (mostly) benign dictatorship of the most charismatic girl on the block.

Key numbers the children perform are drawn directly from the four stories in Sendak’s miniature Nutshell Library collection. The standout is the fable Pierre: A Cautionary Tale, in which the titular character is stuck in a kind of rebellion verging on nihilism (he can only say “I don’t care”). Eventually he chooses what could be termed suicide by lion.

Luckily, Pierre can be shaken free of the lion’s stomach. Unlike in the case of the biblical Jonah, who learns the lesson of obedience after surviving the whale, Pierre learns to care.

Pierre, detached and defiant to the point of being “pathologic” (Sendak’s words) is a foil to the character of Rosie, who cares a lot. Rosie, “the enchanted one,” is on a mission to bring wonder into this world of suffering. And it doesn’t hurt that this wonder will prove she is as glorious as she knows she was born to be.

Sendak himself thought quite a bit about brilliance, the power to “create a passion in other people,” and whether he had what it took.2 The show is a realist, but loving, portrait of a diva who had it.

Sendak has said Rosie was based on a girl living across the street whom he observed from his window as a teenager in the 1940s in his Brooklyn apartment. Recalling the tale to the Today Show’s Gene Shalit, he called the proto-Rosie the local “Fellini,” someone who had enough pizzazz to go around for everyone on her block, corralling them into performing. Sendak first brought the magnetic Rosie to life in a book, in The Sign on Rosie’s Door (1960). In the book, Rosie both performs and orchestrates the fun for the whole block.

The dedication to The sign on Rosie’s Door read:

Remembering Pearl Karchawer

All the Rosies

And Brooklyn

Sendak made friends with Pearl Parchawer as a child on a family vacation at a kosher Catskills hotel, of the mold made famous to girls in later generations by the movie Dirty Dancing (1987).3 The next year, Sendak received a letter that Parchawer had died at age 12.4 He called the event his initiation into the comprehension that children die; his personal “Anne Frank”—another exceptional mind.

Partnering with songwriting genius King, riding on post-Tapestry glory, was not only a coup—it also had a meta quality. King, like Sendak and the girl he based Rosie on, had been raised in the war years in Jewish Brooklyn, though a little later. Like Rosie, she’d also had her eye on stardom from a young age.

Sendak tended to describe himself as a child as plagued by anxiety; King, a former teen star, has described her younger self as “fearless.” She signed a record contract at age 16 (releasing “The Right Girl” as her first single in 1958) and began her career making other people giant hits as a teen. The first number #1 she wrote was The Shirelle’s “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” when she was 19.

Rosie is also another of Sendak’s protagonists who are wild and transformed, like the wolf-suited Max of Where the Wild Things Are. In this case, Rosie dreams of her own thrilling escape (the number “Avenue P” conjures up Brooklyn as a jungle). But it’s not enough just to dream it; Rosie needs to make others feel it too—and she does.

The first version of the show (and best, in my opinion) is how it was born: As a short animated musical Sendak wrote and directed for CBS. The animation follows the templates set by Sendak’s charming illustrations. No suitable child singer could be found, so the story goes, so King wound up singing the full soundtrack—stroke of luck for us!

The only version that I can find of the tv special is the grainy recording from the TV on YouTube below.5 Children deserve a proper release of this work.

Later Sendak expanded the special into a stage musical that played off-Broadway. And is now available for Rosies-in-training at musical theater camps and impromptu front-stoop productions the world over.

A nice Hanukkah or any type of gift would be this deluxe homemade Really Rosie set:

• Screen the Really Rosie musical animated tv special

• Point them to the Really Rosie animated musical soundtrack on Spotify (or buy them physical media if you roll like that; this post has my CD and cassette player recommendations. The Really Rosie soundtrack vinyl album, all performed by Carole King, was reissued for the 50th Anniversary of the TV special this year. It did well impressively well on the Billboard charts on its initial release.)

• Buy these books:

  • The Sign on Rosie’s Door (1960).

  • The Nutshell Library (1962) containing the books Alligators All Around, Chicken Soup With Rice, One Was Johnny, and Pierre.

  • Maurice Sendak’s Really Rosie Starring the Nutshell Kids (a picture book version of the animated musical).

  • And if the gift recipient is a true theater kid, also get them the Really Rosie musical acting edition (I did).

Finally, Halloween season is here. Steal your mom’s red dress, grab a floppy straw hat, and don’t forget your boa!

//

Dedicated to our little divas

the unforgettable S.B., the “Rosie” of the 1990s Children’s Aid Society located at 219 Sullivan St. (fittingly, she directed us in rousing reenactments of crossing in steerage to the new world. She taught me the word “schmatta.”)

and all the Rosies, Anne Shirleys, Jo Marches, and other creative instigators.

Children lived in pre-history a few thousand years longer than adults—their fingerprints more apt to linger on the whitewash walls than the historical record.

So it was pleasing to recently discover the child-focused work of photojournalist Jill Krementz, who set herself to documenting children’s experiences in a series of books starting in the 1960s. I am writing about these books because now are mostly out of print, and in danger of fading even further into obscurity as the Gen X girls who grew up with the cult-classics among Krementz’s oeuvre age out of writing nostalgic posts online.

Krementz’s books can be divided into a few projects:

• Drawing the public’s attention the beauty and details of day to day life in overlooked cultural spaces, as she does Sweet Pea: A Black Girl Growing Up in the Rural South (1969).

• Providing insight into the everyday experience of children on the fast track in arts and athletics (A Very Young Dancer, which was followed by more “Very Young” books, including Rider, Gymnast, Circus Flyer, Skater, Skier, Musician, Gardener, and Actress).

• Giving the floor to children who have experienced difficulties from which society often averts its eyes (How It Feels When a Parent Dies, How It Feels to Be Adopted, How it Feels When Parents Divorce, How It Feels to Fight for Your Life).

Though I could not find detailed statements on her process, in each case of these books it seems Krementz embedded herself alongside her subject, for weeks or as long as a year. The narratives are written in the first person, giving the impression that they are condensed transcripts of ongoing interviews of the child subjects. I couldn’t find any statements from Krementz on what editing, or possible creative license, she allowed herself.

In other words, these books read nearly like raw interviews for ethnographic case studies. This might be why you hate them—or why you love them.

The same kind of child that adored the early The American Girl catalog’s crypto-scholarly discussion of girlhood culture may fall into the latter bucket. (I could not find evidence that Pleasant Rowland, born a year after Krementz, publicly stated having been influenced by Krementz’s books, but you one can see a connection—not least in the “Christmas” as unifying American cultural experience theme.)

Perhaps Krementz’s children’s work with the largest cultural footprint is A Very Young Dancer. Ballet was after all the hobby for girls in the late 20th century, inspiring more intensity than piano and Girl Scouts. Also, this book had a trump card: The ten year old it follows gets chosen to play Clara in the Nutcracker at Lincoln Center… by the gentleman she calls “Mr. Balanchine.”

Clive Barnes, a New York Times dance critic, raved about the book in his review of Dancer on December 26, 1976, pointing the book’s chief appeal to adults—the voice of its protagonist:

It is quite the best ballet book ever written for children, partly because it is not really a ballet book but a book daringly written in the first person about enchanting girl called Stephanie.

The Stephanie in question was lucky in ways that are apparent (though not in others, more on that below). And she is seen working harder at her hobby than most children ever do. But she is not what you would call… preternaturally focused.1

It’s the tension between Stephanie’s excitement and boredom, love of ballet and perhaps stronger love of ponies, dedication and minor acts of rebellion that give the book its juice. Not to mention that Krementz, like many artists, is invigorated by the visual opportunities backstage.

The book confronts the reader in its opening lines with Stephanie’s ambivalence:

I also appreciate that Krementz lets the sometimes-awkward content of the child mind simply sit on the page. Narrating what it was like to dance the scene in the Nutcracker where the Christmas tree grows huge, Stephanie recalls:

Tina [Stephanie’s best friend and fellow dancer in the scene] told me that she would smile at me if I was doing good and if I was bad she would frown. That afternoon she forgot to do anything, but I smiled at her.

Just the sort of plan two girls of that age would make (half-baked). And a typical amount of follow through (none).

Krementz’s children’s books are now nearly all out of print but widely available secondhand. A starter collection I’d recommend as a gift to a nine-year-old girl would be: Sweet Pea: A Black Girl Growing Up in the Rural South (1969); A Very Young Dancer (1976), A Very Young Rider (1977), and A Very Young Gymnast (1978). I also think children should read the How It Feels series with their parents, such as How It Feels to Fight for Your Life.

Some further context on these books

• Something to consider discussing with your child before they read the book if they have access to Google: Stephanie Selby, the subject of A Very Young Dancer, had depression and died at 56, due to complications from an attempt to take her own life. She has also spoken about struggling under the shadow cast by her early fame, fueled by the book. Stephanie was profiled in The New York Times in 2011. The Times also ran her obituary.

• (The Times writer of the Stephanie Selby profile had a daughter also went to SAB like Selby. That daughter, Paulina Jamieson took behind the scenes photographs of ballet dancers as a teen and continues to make art.)

• The Very Young books inspired both love and hate at the time, as flattering stories of lucky people or high-achieving children often do. As for the love side: The internet is thick with post of women reminiscing about their attachment to these real life idols from the Very Young as children. “Where is the girl from A Very Young _”-style searches will yield ample reading. The gymnast (Torrance York) grew up to a be photographer and speaks out about living and making art with Parkinson’s. The rider, Vivi, grew up, too; her mother, Vivien, is still in the horse world.

• And then there’s the hate side for the Very Young books. The hostility centered on certain elements of the girls’ luck (physical, financial) making for unhealthy idols, or questioning the wisdom of saddling young children with fame. Eden Ross Lipson wrote a doozy of a pan of A Very Young Gymnast in The New York Times that felt personal enough on its attack of the subject that her girlfriends from the gymnast’s private school (Spence?) wrote a letter, noting: “Miss Lipson pretends to be writing this review out of consideration for the feelings of children, but the review itself is cruel to one particular child who is a good friend and a nice person.” It’s worth reading both the review and the letter, along with Lipson’s response.

• In 1969, Charlayne Hunter of The New York Times reviewed Sweet Pea: A Black Girl Growing Up in the Rural South. Hunter objected to the book vigorously on the grounds that the girl seemed too happy, leading to potential misinterpretation that would undermine the case for improving conditions in the rural black south. “[O]ne never really gets a feeling of just how horrid the whole existence is,” wrote the reviewer. I wonder if Sweet Pea then, or Sweet Pea once grown, would agree with the reviewer? I couldn’t find articles about how Sweet Pea’s life unfolded, though it’s been written she stayed friends with Jill Krementz and she did visit NYC with her family on the book’s publication. She calls NYC “wonderful” (one gets the sense in Krementz’s book that Sweet Pea may be a born diplomat). But the reporter catches Sweet Pea with what they take as a “wistful” glance to her mother while stating she doesn’t mind sleeping in her own bed (instead of sharing like she does back home).

• Another New York Christmas connection: The late Stephanie Selby, who played Clara in the Nutcracker in Dancer, was granddaughter to the heiress and artist Lina Hines Howard, who donated her collection of 18th century Neapolitan crèche figures to Metropolitan Museum of Art. Decorating that tree at the Met was a family tradition. In 2014 the Met discontinued the practice of letting the family have a family’s hands-on role in arranging the display, over the family’s protests. Linn Selby collaborated on a lovely book on Christmas display, presenting the scenes alongside biblical passages, as well as a discussion of the art history context. It which would make a nice Christmas present. (It’s out of print; find The Angel Tree used here.)

• Stephanie Selby’s elder sister Andrea (also pictured in Dancer, and a fellow student at the School of American Ballet) does live sketches of events. You can hire her to sketch your event.

Further reading by and about Jill Krementz.

• Krementz’s output as a photojournalist and portrait photographer was extensive. I especially enjoy her writer’s portraits, collected in the now out-of-print books The Writer’s Image: Literary Portraits and The Writer’s Desk, among other places.

• Now in her mid-eighties, Jill Krementz is contributing content to the The York Social Diary. Some of her pieces are annotated discussions of her extensive photo archives. I love this one, portraits of notable 20th century figures in their kitchens: Jill Krementz Photo Journal: Kitchens — The Room Where It Happens.

• Jill has been subject of writers and photographers as well. The New York Times Style section ran a piece on her in 1982, Jill Krementz Carves a Niche. The reporter accuses her being part of the city’s most glamorous literary couple. Krementz mentions wanting children and having had a miscarriage—a taboo-breaking, very Krementz insertion in what could otherwise be a pretty cookie-cutter piece.

• Krementz and Vonnegut adopted a daughter around that time, Lily Vonnegut. Lily’s younger son was in treatment for years for childhood leukemia. Recently, Vonnegut posted a quite remarkable short memoir written by her 11 year old son Jack about the wrenching experience of having a chronically ill younger sibling. Read it somewhere you can cry. One feels the resonance with Krementz’s dedication to spotlighting experiences that society often shies away from in books like How It Feels to Fight for Your Life. Lily Vonnegut celebrated her younger son’s end of cancer treatment in 2024. Jill Krementz documented her grandchildren’s trip last year to New York on The New York Social diary. (Containing the caption: “Kids love posing and the grownups love taking photographs.”)

• Finally, in 1985 Jill shared with The New York Times an eccentric approach tofashion that I associate with Jeff Goldblum’s character in The Fly (as a child with horror, and later with admiration). Some of us live this way:

Its true that some people consider them strange, even eccentric. But they don’t care. Their position is that if other people want to run around constantly searching and shopping, let them. They know better. When they see something they like, they not only grab it, they grab them. They are the men and women who buy in quantity when they find a style they like.

…. “You’re talking to Miss Multiple,’‘ said Jill Krementz, the photographer and author, who is married to another writer, Kurt Vonnegut.

‘“When it’s comfortable, and it suits me, why not?” she said. ‘’It saves a lot of time.’‘

Miss Krementz’s working uniform is loose coveralls, which she wears with a blouse and tie shoes. The coveralls are made by Laura Ashley and she has 14 [Ed. ] pairs in the same style, in different colors and varying fabrics from corduroy and cotton to chintz. The five blouses she wears with them are identical, as are her four pairs of working shoes. Other duplicates in her wardrobe include a Norma Kamali turtleneck dress, in white, green, olive and black.

“I buy everything in quantity,” she said. “When I find a lipstick color I like, I buy six of them, for the bathroom, my handbag, the summer house, my camera case and I can’t remember where else, but I use them all.” (emphasis added).

And, finally, keep the summer energy going a little longer with Krementz’s annotated photo archives of Long Island summers past.

The experience of a few industrious hippie moms in my world suggests that involving children in creating kitchen gardens can lead to increased vegetable uptake. But then, they would say that.

The shock-and-awe version approach to this is a self-contained hydroponic kitchen garden. I can’t recommend it, but Zooey Deschanel and her ex-husband selling a $1,000 gleaming white “indoor farmstand.” That model is similar to one I’ve seen heavy with lettuces at a friend’s. A simpler option is a set of their amber counterstand grow vases, which might make you feel less like you’re living with a prop off the A Clockwork Orange set.

More charming: The Polish eco-artist Alicja Patanowska makes porcelain elements to support small-scale hydroponics. You nestle them in your choice of abandoned goblets and glasses. This won’t yield as much as the industrial set ups. But it can start your kids on an affinity to say, spring onions. Patanowska offers four models for different plant root shapes. For inquiries you can email her. You can also pick them up at the London Terrariums shop.

Ed Spurr and Amy Hall Browne sell propagation vases for avocados and acorns under the name Ilex. They have a London shop and are also carried by MoMA’s store. (They also make the Branch handmade beeswax candles at their London location.)

Then there’s involving children in the production of the food. Perhaps that should come before one moves into intergenerational agriculture, my husband suggests. Gear can put everyone in the proper mood: The old standby knife brand Opinel based in the French Alps makes a gift set of a child-safe knife and finger guard and the same, but with a peeler. Our kids were delighted to come into the possession of knives. Opinel also understands that packaging can make the gift. (Incidentally, we met a young whittling enthusiast this year who gave me the idea to obtain a starter whittling set when the kids are older.)

Not all plants will grow in hydroponic conditions of course. For potted plants, we’re longtime happy customers of The Sill, founded by my husband’s cousin Eliza Blank. How about bay laurel or rosemary the children can harvest themselves to help them understand that seasoning is with them, not against them. Bonus that they can also create home-harvested laurel crowns for academic milestones, like modern-day Italians and Scandinavians, or go as Caesar this Halloween.

Then there’s how to teach children about kitchen gardening and cooking. A little goes a long way here.

For this purpose, I’ve fallen for Christina Björk and Lena Anderson, a pair of Stockholm natives who wrote books in the 1970s and 1980s preparing city children to grow and cook their own food. The charming books are hand-illustrated and framed around child-narrators sharing what they have learned. This allows the books to deliver loads of information but with a gentle narrative current to carry the reader along. The cooking and kitchen gardening books in the series are out of print, but can be had on eBay.

Let’s start with horticulture: In Linnea’s Windowsill Garden a young apartment dweller teaches you what she’s learned from her green-thumbed neighbor. (He encourages her by telling her her thumb is “pale green” to start.) Perhaps a part of Linnea’s charm is that she was modeled on Anderson’s daughter, Nicolina. (Re: daughter-muses: Alice Waters wrote a few food books from the perspective of her daughter Fanny Singer, with a sprinkle of Eloise seasoning; Fanny has a Substack on cooking for kids now.)

Readers may recognize Linnea because she enjoyed a period of fame due a later book that road the wave of 1980s exuberance for French impressionists in the U.S.: Linnea in Monet’s Garden. The gentleman who would bring Linnea in Monet’s Garden back into print in the U.S. recalled selling copies out of a box when his store was closed, such was the appetite after locals had seen the book recommended in The New Yorker for Christmas 1987.1 What a perfect gift from a grandmother who lives in walking distance both to the Met and a dedicated children’s bookstore. Sadly, the bookstore in question, Eeyore’s, closed in 1993, citing “chains.”

As for how to cook the soon-to-be-abundant home harvest: Wouldn’t you know it, Linnea lives in the same apartment building as a boy named Elliot (Linus in the original Swedish version), who is home alone rather a lot. At first, Elliot is a bit at sea when it comes to food. Then a kindly neighbor, Mrs. Delight, initiates him into the world of humble yet delicious home-cooking.

You can tell Björk and Anderson are serious because they start with things you actually need to know, like exactly how to fry or boil potatoes. No one has anything to prove here, nor is there any of the preciousness that drags down a lot of contemporary food culture.

Also: I can’t recall the last time I read a children’s book with an invitation to explore a bibliography of adults texts; nor one with such varied entries as The Joy of Cooking and Animal Factories by Jim Mason and Peter Singer.

During her period of fame, sweet, soft Linnea dolls were produced. These are available secondhand and would round out a gift of the Linnea and Elliot series, which includes:

• Out of print, available secondhand on sites like eBay:

  • Linnea’s Windowsill Garden (secondhand)

  • Elliot’s Extraordinary Kitchen (secondhand)

  • Linnea’s Almanac (secondhand) (includes more recipes, crafts, and outdoor activities)

• Back in print: Linnea in Monet’s Garden (in print from Sourcebooks)

(I’ve also written about the the best picture books gifts for newborns and math picture books; even if you’re not math-y, consider Mitsumasa Anno.)

In case of the presence of a strong-willed child: Personality researchers make it their business to identify traits that are important dividing lines among humans. One trait axis widely agreed upon to matter is agreeableness-disagreeableness. On one end, a child who one can shape like a pipe cleaner. On the other, a child who welcomes a guiding hand as readily as a freshly-burst xenomorph does someone grasping at its tail.

I’d call Martin and Lillian Hoban’s Frances series low fantasy for the parents of the disagreeable child. The fantasy being: The parents of such a child maintain an unblemished record of tender and measured responses to pronouncements such as, “[T]hings are not very good around here anymore” (when a baby sister arrives). Thank you to my sister for making this line famous for us as an embodiment of juvenile tactlessness.

Regarding the formation of an agreeable child: In A Chair for My Mother, a single mother and her supportive daughter dream of possessing a comfortable place to sit. (Their furniture burned in a fire.) I grew up with no tables and chairs in my home, and can confirm that such a lack is preoccupying.

Certain illustrations encountered in children’s books continue to flash in one’s mind into adulthood. This book produced more than its fair share of such images for me. The giant glass jar of change where the mother saved her tips, with coins fat as Nilla wafers! And the print on that chair!

Something I only thought about as an adult reading this book to my children is that there are scant picture books in our culture making the case for filial piety. (Five Minutes’ Peace is in the ballpark.) My mom had A Chair for My Mother; she also deployed the famous example of Elvis’s reverence for his mama, embodied by the pink Cadillac that Elvis gave to her.1 It’s a coincidence that the Cadillac replaced one lost in a fire, just as the Chair characters lost their furniture. But not that both the manifestations of devotion in these stories were pink.

Sometimes toddlers need a concept book. I’m fascinated by the late polymath Ellen Raskin, best-known for The Westing Game, who loved a book premise that she solved like a puzzle. Raskin had a notable career in book design before turning to picture books and young adult novels. Many of her picture books are out of print, but possibly still in circulation your library. A place to start is Spectacles, about a girl whose poor vision allows her to imagine wonderful scenes in the place of the everyday things she encounters. Spectacles can be had on eBay.

It’s frustrating to me that interactive books are a side-show in the U.S. But— American children can benefit from the stronger interactive book tradition in France in part thanks to Christopher Franceschelli, a children’s book publisher and editor. I hadn’t realized until researching this post that this man has been an éminence grise for my children’s library without our realizing it. (I looked up a bunch of our favorites, and found he was behind many of them.) For one, we have him to thank for bringing us Hervé Tullet’s Press Here, a case when commercial success and delight coincide. I can’t speak for any of the flood of Tullet follow ups.

Beyond Tullet, Franceschelli is responsible for bringing selections from the French children’s imprint Éditions Tourbillon to the US, under the imprint Twirl.2 I’ve written before about Twirl’s “Ultimate Book of X” nonfiction collection: Well-crafted non-fiction “movable books” on topics like construction sites and vehicles.3 Their information riches provided us a welcome break from the endless “books” that merely list vehicle types or animals, as if someone wrote a dictionary and forgot to include the definitions.

One of the main creators in the “Ultimate Book of X” series is France’s Anne-Sophie Baumann, whose Instagram is a useful source of places of interest for day trips with children. She alerted me to “La Maison Picassiette” where you can step inside a 3D mosaic. Also George Sand’s house, where you can visit the marionette collection of Sand’s son, who wrote under the name Maurice Sand. Maurice wrote and staged puppet shows, collected puppets, and chronicled both puppetry and commedia dell’arte (he seems to have had a thing for taxonomy; he was also an entomologist).

Finally, Franceschelli also brought our country Xavier Deneux’s minimalist finger-traceable alphabet book that my kids loved, as a part of the TouchThinkLearn series. For multilingual toddlers, it is enjoyable to point out the differences in parallel copies of alphabet books that have localized illustrations. In Deneux’s English-language book, B is for Bird, but in the French-language version, B is for Bonhomme de Neige. A case in which toddlers are truly easy to please.

My children also loved the series of polyglot “sound books” made by Cali’s Books. Playlists without screens! Let this abundantly tressed French lad demonstrate how they work. We bought much of their catalog back eight years ago when our first born was little, and the children played the songs all the time, poring over the written lyrics. Back then Cali’s produced multiple books of nursery rhymes in both French and Spanish, which was just right for us. They’ve expanded considerably since, including to other languages (e.g., Greek, Mowhawk) and to audio-enhanced picture books. The company is based in LA but the founder is French, naturally.

It is Tuesday, July 1st, and here are some parts of kid culture we’ve enjoyed recently. Today’s theme is: Risk!

“London Bridge is Burning: Great Fire of London” (Disastrous History podcast)

It is a human talent and compulsion to contemplate the worst that could happen. Indeed, a cottage industry caters to this impulse in children, as the ambivalent parents of fans of the popular I Survived series can attest. Our five year old shares this common interest. What’s less common is his bottomless appetite for detail. His preferred way to take in natural disasters is intravenously, that is to say, nonfiction tales of actual disasters with supranormal levels of detail.

If you recognize this in your child, a place to begin is with the Disastrous History podcast, brought to you by an Omaha-based mom and pop team. The pop in said team is reportedly a first responder and fire investigator for insurance companies, lucky for us.

This fire expert really shines on the episode our five year old has had on repeat this past week, “London Bridge is Burning: The Great Fire of London.” This is the episode to start with in my opinion. The year was 1666, the buildings were wood, the waterproofing was pitch, and the roofs were thatched. Finchum memorably likens the buildings to a birthday cake for a fire.

Chernobyl (HBO miniseries)

(Sites like IMDB and Letterboxd will tell you other places it is streaming)

Speaking of the worst that can happen! We “echo babies” in the USA were in for quite an alarming set of first impressions of nuclear technology in the 1980s. Our grandparents were among those building the first bombs and constructing the first reactors. Our parents had been inheriting the attendant opportunities and responsibilities. The results were mixed. We came into consciousness of the wider world at the time of some of these mixed results were at the fore: Notably 1979’s Three Mile Island nuclear accident and 1986’s Chernobyl reactor explosion.

There’s the question of how our children will come to learn the more sobering parts of what they need to know about nuclear technology. I can tell you what I do not recommend: Letting young ones watch the likes of The Pepsi Syndrome, the Saturday Night Live parody sending up 1979’s The China Syndrome and the Three Mile Island incident. Certainly it wouldn’t do to let the young ones watch this sort of SNL skit as little Sophie did, without an emotional Hazmat suit.1

In contrast, Chernobyl could be a worthy thing to show older children under the right circumstances. (It’s from 2019, but I just caught up on it.) The miniseries is a loosely-based-on-a-true-story account of the process of handling the horrendous outcomes of the disaster. And of preventing far worse things from following on. The story follows the bureaucrats and scientists tapped with this life-shortening and soul-altering assignment. This is entertainment and there are heroes on an arc; but the story is usually restrained in this regard, and often is equally concerned with problem-solving and process. (Like how Michael Mann’s Thief (1981) is partially a tragedy, but also very much about the metallurgy and logistics of breaking into high-end safes.)

I didn’t show Chernobyl to our kids because it’s too intense, but a tween with roughly grade-level self-regulatory skills and the proper context from their parents could get a lot out of it. Not least a vivid sense of what it really means to take on problems at this scale. It’s not always deploying space-age tech (they can’t even get the a good lunar rover). It’s also: Clumsily shoveling radioactive graphic trying not to take any extra seconds (which would mean death). Not to mention euthanizing abandoned, contaminated farm animals and pets.2

For the littles out there, who take their disaster history without the strong brew of dramatization or moving images, you may want to put this on your list: “Stop the World and Melt with You,” the Disastrous History episode on a series of accidents at a nuclear weapons facility in Rocky Flats, not far from Denver. That one’s on my personal list.

Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson

Since we’ve been focused on human-made disasters, let’s end on a note about the risks of not building and inventing things. For a time recently due to one of my book clubs, the Abundance audiobook was serving as drive time radio for the kids and me. The five year old instantly took to Abundance, requesting the penicillin chapter in particular again and again. The book is a natural water slide into the pleasure pool of wonkery for little ones, since it’s told in a series of historical vignettes.

The little guy brought Abundance up again this morning, suggesting he’d benefit from having more titles in rotation. Before this I hadn’t been seeking out adult nonfiction audio books for the kids. Not for any substantive reason, since we already know that adult podcasts work well.3 Now that we know better, Nudge and Scarcity are on the shortlist (plus The World According to Star Wars—once they’re allowed to watch the films).

• Counting. If there’s a single best counting picture book, it’s perhaps Anno’s Counting Book by Japanese legend Mitsumasa Anno. Unlike most counting books, this one rewards careful study, with more than one thing to count on each page and a set of wordless visual narratives to follow about a town’s growth and seasonal change. (Should these seasonal stories with illustrations that reward focused exploration charm you, pick up Rotraut Susanne Berner’s definitive seasonal wimmelbooks collected in In the Town All Year Round1; also The Year at Maple Hill Farm by Alice and Martin Provensen). The next time you’re with the kids in Kyoto or Osaka, you might want to spend a few hours on a day trip to Kinosaki (“the best onsen town in Japan”2), which houses the Mitsumasa Anno museum.

  

• Shapes. Last post, I recommended indie math creator Christopher Danielson’s careful books on counting and shapes. (The counting one is a nice complement to Anno’s book, since it is primarily focused on shifting perspectives about what is countable.) Danielson’s unusual shapes book is based on the game Which One Doesn’t Belong?, where a group of items are presented, and players identify the odd one out. In the book, he lays out groups of four shapes, and asks the reader which is the odd one out. There is no single right answer; the point is to be able to recognize the many properties by which shapes may vary. The accessible design also makes it easy for the littlest sibs to have a chance to run with the big dogs. (A book is particularly useful for playing Which One Doesn’t Belong? with shapes, since it is difficult to convey precise differences in angles and lengths to small children by hand.) Danielson also made a teacher’s guide3 and poster versions fit for a nursery wall (buy).

  

• Estimation. If you’re intent on someday congratulating your child for winning a jelly bean jar guessing contest, procure 2006’s one-of-a-kind Great Estimations, by Bruce Goldstein. It’s a brief introduction to estimating the quantities of objects perfect for sharp preschoolers. Pleasing to see someone take on a neglected topic and execute with focus. Furthermore, a child simply enjoys photographs of large quantities of candy and rubber bugs. I can only find the hardcover used. New softcover is currently on backorder.

  

• Exponents. The book we used when we were introducing exponents to our little ones was Two of Everything (1993), written and illustrated by Lily Toy Hong. In it, an elderly couple come to possess a magic pot that doubles anything that goes inside it. It doesn’t take them long to figure out that doubling, then doubling the result again, then doubling that result yet again, and so on, and so on, is a particularly useful sequence of operations to do on coins (and a somewhat ambiguous one to do on spouses). (The marshmallowy volumes and neotenic characters made me think of Kirby’s Adventure, which as it happens was also a product 1993.)

• Factorials. The Two of Everything-style book about superlinear growth is in fact a micro-genre of children’s tale.4 Our Mitsumasa Anno, former classroom math teacher that he was, went beyond exponential growth to some deeper cuts. One is a tale of factorials, called Anno’s Mysterious Multiplying Jar, in which within one scale-defying jar there is one island, containing two countries, each endowed with three mountains, each mountain featuring four walled kingdoms, each kingdom containing five villages, etc., etc. The book contains a clear final section that teaches the math embedded in the story explicitly, with arrays of dots to represent the astonishing growth (reminiscent of How Much is a Million?’s star-spangled pages representing of 100,000).

• Big numbers. The aforementioned How Much is a Million? is more of a mainstay than others on this list, but should be even more popular. The book’s goal is to deepen children’s familiarity with the scale of big numbers by walking the reader through various ways to conceptualize them, such as in arrays, numbers of days, or lengths of stacked units. The illustrations will invoke some nostalgia for anyone raised on the dense, goofy illustrations of 1970s and 1980s that in my mind met some of their best nonfiction matches with The Magic School Bus series and this book.

My biggest takeaway from researching this post is that it’s a shame that Mistumasa Anno is out of print in the U.S. His books are calling out for a hardcover “Treasury of” style compilation. (What’s the point of our age of rapidly-cycling onslaughts of things like “Japandi aesthetic” if it doesn’t deliver this type of revival?) If you’re in children’s publishing and understand what the barrier is, I’d love to know!

When I’m with a newborn, my taste in story runs to quiet and philosophical.

Illustrations should show a bit of restraint but still be splendid.

The narrative should be very short. Sweet is also welcome.

There must be some narrative, though, this is no time for visual dictionaries, their enduring popularity notwithstanding.

If your or your gift recipient’s tastes run along the same lines, here are some ideas.

Arnold Lobel

Unlike many authors of canonized children’s books, Arnold Lobel never had a word out of place.

And his illustrations are as gentle on a parent’s bleary eyes as a bed of decomposing redwood droppings is under the tread of a hiker.

If you’re the person to buy the full four-storybook compendium of Frog and Toad for a first-born child, we’ll call that a win.

(Unfortunately publishers have a tendency to mar Lobel’s illustrations with poorly suited graphic elements on the covers in order to announce their reading level. To avoid that, consider the out of print complete four-book “Treasury” collection. Our favorite is used here. Giving a set of the individual books in hardcover would be more entropic but easier on a wrist.)

The Arnold Lobel that’s most fit for time with newborns, though, are several Lobel did in “Early Reader” format: Mouse Tales, Mouse Soup, and Owl at Home.

A parent can hold these paperback readers up in one hand while enclosing the babe with the other.

One chapter of each containing a standalone story is just the right dose.

Lobel had a knack for turning recognizable situations that often go undiscussed in everyday life into miniature stories with satisfying conclusions.

In the case of “The Bath”’, Lobel turns his eye to the unrepentant, selfish mindset induced by a warm bath.

The following scene takes place after the mouse has flooded the whole town with his overflowing bathwater.

(Some of Lobel’s other early readers, like the meditation on grief Uncle Elephant or the exploration of strangers’ alienating behaviors in Grasshopper on the Road, look similar to these books but are serialized (Elephant) or are thematically incongruous with the newborn-parent dyad (both). Eventually both will be needed in every home library, though.)

Margaret Wise Brown, Clement Hurd, and Leonard Weisgard

There’s something calming about inhabiting a world sprung from the brain of just one person, as when one is in the hands of polymath author-illustrators like Lobel or Tove Jansson.

But the marriage the right writer and with the right illustrator can produce a hybrid vigor.

Goodnight Moon is sleep incantation from a writer (Margaret Wise Brown) and an illustrator (Clement Hurd) who were both both adept at rendering the serious moments of a child’s life.

All new parents should own that hypnotic book and The Runaway Bunny, Wise Brown’s other collaboration with Hurd.

The hitch is that they also often do own these.

So for a Margaret Wise Brown you may have more luck giving The Little Island.1

The book is about being alone while being interconnected.

Like Goodnight Moon and the Runaway Bunny, the story concerns a tiny creature and a calmly powerful figure (in this case, the titular island).

The book doesn’t insist that your heart grow three sizes at the following passage, but if your heart does, the book will take it in its stride:

A tale befitting the strangeness of cradling new life.

Verse

Illustrated books written in verse for infants almost never find their mark.

The ones I have a soft spot for don’t exactly call out to be advertised beyond my threshold.

There’s no reason not to read poetry to a newborn, though.

The aubades of, say, John Donne concern the self-contained world conjured by two souls in bed at odd hours.

Not wholly dissimilar from the newborn-parent experience, but dissimilar enough to be a bit of a relief.

Board books

Let’s skip board books because newborns don’t need those.

Unfortunately once the future alert and active era comes, aesthetic pleasure for adults and utility for the child also firmly part ways, and only rarely interjoin again for a good few years.

Song books

I’ve come up short in my years of looking for lyrics collected into well-made books, and rarer still seem to be such books where the editor gave free rein to an ambitious illustrator.

A certain type of family, though, would benefit from a copy (or several) of 1988’s Rise Up Singing.

Particularly if they like to sing or play to the little one, but don’t carry the lyrics of around in their heads.

The editors of Rise Up cleared the rights to 1,200 songs, the Times reports. Some of those calls must have been something.

I’m partial to Take this Hammer2 (p. 104) and Goodnight Irene (p. 132) for babies, but that kind of thing is personal.

A nice thing to do if you get this book as a gift would be to also send along the 5-CD Lead Belly Folkways Collection from the Smithsonian. And a CD player. If it must be vinyl, Folkways has a other selections.

Some parting words from Leonard Weisgard

Here’s something Leonard Weisgard, the illustrator of The Little Island, said about the island that inspired The Little Island:

How can I start to explain that I don’t see black separated from the realm of color? Nor objects in terms of outlines? How can I describe my reactions to the shades of night?

I can’t tell you in the language of the fish from the Little Island, how all the land is one land under the sea. Perhaps I can try to explain how pictures for The Little Island and Golden MacDonald’s [Ed.: the pen name of Wise Brown] text grew right up out of the water. This is a real little island off the coast of Maine belonging to a group of other little islands called Vinalhaven.

I saw this island grow tall and squat as the tides rose and fell. I’ve watched the mists blow in and hide the little island, sometimes leaving only the pine tree tops exposed, hanging in space. I rowed to and from the little island with the seals spawning below the surface of the water. I’ve seen the sun rise and make a golden island for just five seconds in an early morning sea.

Everything is fast and fleeting around the little island; the sea is never still, the clouds fly quickly into different shapes, the colors change from sunlight to mistlight, the trees are moving and the birds are always flying and screaming.

This active little island was too elusive for me to catch in its own time. It was easier to put as much of it as I could wherever it is you store such things, take it home to Connecticut, and remember it all in my own time.

And after all this I don’t believe I could really tell you of illustrating or bookmaking, certainly not of the poetry of living and dying, nor of little children.

Read more in Weisgard’s 1947 Caldecott acceptance speech here.

No rush, you’ll have time enough at last… when the nest is empty again.

No matter how much of a nerdparent one is, there is far greater nerdparent power in the world out beyond one’s own newsletter.1

So a key part of this blog’s project will be sharing the wisdom of you, the readership.

Enjoy the first reader-submitted idea post, and keep the recs coming!

The Best Gift for Geography Buffs

Separate readers with impeccable taste spanning two of the earth’s foremost continents wrote in to recommend the M. Sasek “This Is…” series that spotlights famous cities around the world.

Though it’s famous to some, it’s not exactly Goodnight Moon-ubiquitous, so I’m re-sharing!

Miroslav Šašek, who wrote under M. Sasek, was an artist born in Prague whose books are love letters to places.

Here’s a little peek under the covers, in a collage posted by Dutch illustrator Annette Fienieg.2

New Yorkers may do as New Yorkers do, and fret: Will This Is New York do my city justice, unlike so many discarded board books before?

Well, what do you think of his ode to the city’s linguistic pluralism below?

It’s a shame the late historian and lover of postwar places and metaphorically naturalized citizen of New York City Tony Judt didn’t write about Šašek (that I can find). One gets the sense the post-Czech-conversion-era Judt would have been just the right connoisseur of context for Šašek, a chronicler of worlds born into the aftermath of the Hapsburg Empire

One is dying to know Judt’s opinions of the books. Did he use them with his kiddos? Did he add margin notes to gently correct, augment, or mock?3

This recommendation is especially for anyone who was intrigued by Belgian author-illustrator Tom Schamp in the Gift Guide.4 (Schamp incidentally is another illustrator born into a multi-ethnic European experiment!)

If you’re like me, a few glimpses of the art are enough for you to take a flyer on the Šašek books.

But if you wish to feast on a bit more context, here are a few more courses:

• Deborah Cohen wrote about the books in The Atlantic in 2018.

• The Sasek Foundation

• An elaborate elaborate, defunct Sasek fan site preserved in an internet archive.

For maximal coziness, consider thematically-linked parallel reading with your little ones:

They snuggle up against you with a Sasek in their hot little paws, while you take a Swiss train to Judt’s Memory Chalet, a one of a kind memoir centered on mid-century places.

Judt wrote the memoir after being diagnosed with a motor neuron disease, which would spell the too-fast end of his physical travel. But NOT the end of the imaginative kind. ●