A Different Stripe

Guest Post: Pamela Dean on the magic of Carbonel

Pamela Dean is a writer of books for children and adults. She is best known for her  contribution to Terri Windling's Fairy Tale Series, a modern retelling of the Tam Lin story (which Publishers Weekly called a "quintessential college novel, anchoring its fantastic elements in a solid, engaging reality.") and for her Secret Country Trilogy, inspired, in part, by the Carbonel books. We thank her for sharing the story of how a Midwestern girl became enamored of a royal cat.

I found The Kingdom of Carbonel in the St. Louis County Public Library when I was about ten years old. I didn't know that there was an earlier book. I didn't know what had happened to Rosemary and John in Carbonel: The King of the Cats. I knew nothing about life in England in the 1950s, either. I was growing up in a brand new suburb in Missouri, one not unlike the hastily built towns spreading like ribbons across Carbonel's world.

It might be more correct to refer to Carbonel's worlds, for there were two: The everyday world of England, where schools broke up rather than letting out, where war widows had a hard time making ends meet and twig brooms and patched cauldrons were sold in street markets; where the change from braids and sandals to ponytails and flats signaled a girl's growing up and suddenly refusing "to play anything sensible"—a fate that at the time I was very keen to avoid, however it might present itself. To Barbara Sleigh's British readers at least, that was the mundane world. The second world would have been as astonishing to them as it was to me, for this was the world of Cat Country, which appears when darkness falls and all the straight lines of wall and house redraw themselves into wilderness, there streams run with milk that has had herring boiled in it and every chimney pot is a tree or bush. C.S. Lewis talks about a sensation that he calls "Joy," which can be derived from many sources, but which I experienced reading fantasy. Lewis connects it with the divine, but I don't go so far; I merely record it. The moment when Cat Country first made itself known in The Kingdom of Carbonel gave me that flash of wonder, of entering into a larger world. Books that do this are to be cherished. 

After all this, you'll be thinking that the Carbonel books are quaint, old-fashioned things, good for training aspiring writers but perhaps not much good for actually reading. But that's all wrong. They are excellent stories, imbued with wonder and practicality in equal measure, dry humor, and a clear-eyed and sometimes sardonic love of cats. They have a healthy interest in food and a ruthless interest in the logical working-out of the implications of magic. Luckily, since Rosemary is still in the pigtails-and sandals stage, the gender-role differences are not as pronounced as they might be. Both children get into trouble and make mistakes, but they also both get to be competent and clever, they get to try to reverse the trouble they've caused others, however inadvertently. They even feel sorry for the people who mean them ill. And in The Kingdom of Carbonel, Rosemary gets to do the ultimate good deed, by giving up something she loves very much for something else she loves very much.

These books have moved me to laughter and tears, as a child, and again as I write this, even though I am just recalling rather than rereading them. I'm very, very glad that they will be in print in the United States.

      

All three books in the Carbonel Series are currently on sale
at 30% off the cover price.

Jenny Linsky's first days at school

The start of the school year got us thinking about Jenny Linsky's first days at school, and how scary they were for her. As you know, the most common word used to describe Jenny Linsky is "shy"—so it wasn't easy for her to adjust to life at the boarding school she went to when the Captain was "obliged" to go away to sea. At first Jenny was intimidated by all the things the other cats already knew. For instance, this little tune:

"If you will learn manners,"
The dear Teacher said,
"Then you shall have Catnip
Before going to bed."

"Oh give us our Catnip,"
The kittens insisted.
"Without any Catnip
Our Manners get twisted."

"Untwist your best Manners,"
The kind Teacher said,
"For you shall have Catnip
Before going to bed."

and they all lined right up for their catnip before Jenny had any idea what was going on.

To make matters worse, that brash creature, Pickles the Firecat (who might be familiar from his own book) picked on Jenny mercilessly, as you can see from the pages below. 

We don't want to give anything away, but in the end, Jenny does manage to gather courage, and make new friends at The School for Cats—including the formidable Pickles.

The School for Cats was originally published in 1947 and the design of the title page below has a surprising Bauhaus flavor. Look at that use of Futura, which complements Averill's simple drawings and at the same time suggests a schoolroom ABC chart. Someone very hip must've been designing children's books for Harper (Jenny's original publisher) back then!

Ounce Dice Trice, a collaboration between poet Alastair Reid and artist Ben Shan

We've been sitting on this preview of Alistair Reid and Ben Shan's Ounce Dice Trice for a while now. And even though the book isn't on sale yet—we've only just received a few advance copies this week—we couldn't resist sharing some choice pages. The only problem was, figuring which pages to choose, since almost every one contains something delightful. Alastair Reid, who for many years worked at the New Yorker, drew on "odd notebooks" for wonderful, private, obscure, mouth-bending words. He addressed his young readers in a very short introduction to the book:

"And if you grow to love words for their own sake, you will begin to collect words yourself, and you will be grateful, as I am, to all the people who collect odd words and edit odd dictionaries, out of sheer astonishment and affection."

An aside: A few months ago, Vicky Raab just happened to run into Mr. Reid on the subway, and she wrote about the chance encounter at the New Yorker's Book Bench blog.

Commonplace: From the bathroom wall

 "The Professor was silly enough to think that if doctors had to pass examinations before they could cut out his appendix, then members of parliament ought to pass examinations before they could rule his life."

—T.H. White, Mistress Masham's Repose, p. 155

Photographed in the bathroom of Community Bookstore in Park Slope, Brooklyn, where L.J. Davis read to a standing-room-only crowd last night. If you missed it, swing by Book Court on April 14th. Davis will read from A Meaningful Life and then discuss the book with Jonathan Lethem.

L.J. Davis and Jonathan Lethem at Bookcourt in Brooklyn 4/14

Commonplace: The Wonderful O at The New Yorker

"[Thurber's] anger increased when The New Yorker ultimately refused to publish The Wonderful O because Thurber wouldn't approve the magazine's condensation of the story and he couldn't cut it enough himself to suit the editors. In a letter...Thurber mocked the note often placed at the end of New Yorker book reviews, ' The Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad, was first printed in this magazine in a shorter version under the title The Aorta of Darknes.' "

—from Remember Laughter: A Life of James Thurber, by Neil A. Grauer

The Wonderful O(bama)

Not to be confused (please!) with another book of the same title, James Thurber's follow up to The Thirteen Clocks, The Wonderful O, which looks like this:

and is being re-released by The New York Review Children's Collection next year.

Peter Carey and The Magic Pudding

Image: The Pudding himself in Lavender Bay, Sydney; by  SpacePotato via Flickr

How did we miss this? A character in Peter Carey's novel Theft has a thing for Norman Lindsay's Magic Pudding. For him it is a shibboleth, an internalized text constantly throwing up references the way earlier generations were everywhere reminded of tales from the Bible. Carey was asked about the connection between the two works on Australian National Radio's Book Show:

Ramona Koval: Peter Carey, finally, what is The Magic Pudding doing in the book? It's a favourite of Hugh and Marlene's; is it a favourite of yours too?

Peter Carey: I do love The Magic Pudding. I think everywhere...and I've travelled around a lot and I seem to lose my copies of The Magic Pudding and get new ones, and the truth of the matter is things find their way into your books because...a word might come into a book because of something someone said at dinner last night and it isn't the dinner that you're interested in it's the word and you pick it up and you love it and you use it, and The Magic Pudding I was rereading when I was writing the book. But Hugh does seem very much...I do think The Magic Pudding is one of the great Australian works, and Hugh somehow seems to fit...Hugh having an affection for The Magic Pudding just seemed right to me, and there are things that it just gives you an excuse to celebrate and put in the book that said something about Hugh's character, it celebrates the book, it's a very distinctive Australian book which I love.

Pooh has left the building, but where will you comb your hair?

As the Fuse # 8 blog reported (and documented extensively) Winne-the-Pooh (aka that Silly Old Bear) and his friends have been removed from their home in the Central Children's Room at the Donnell Library (right across the street from the Museum of Modern Art) in Manhattan. The library itself will exist in a much smaller form after the building it's in is torn down to make room for a luxury hotel. Read more about the move here.

The residents of Hundred Acre Wood are being moved to the library's main branch on 42nd street. Where the Central Children's Room will end up (if it exists at all in the future) is anybody's guess.

I wonder what will become of the great signs that hang in the Donnell Library's bathrooms, looking very much like 1955 (the year the library opened, and presumably the year these were printed up)?

Soundtrack to this post: "I am the Sub-Librarian" by Piano Magic

Nikki McClure's Midnight Folk

The Midnight Folk, the companion book to John Masefield's Box of Delights, isn't coming out till next September, but—the necessities of publishing being what they are—we already have the cover in house.

Nikki McClure, whose paper-cut illustrations are all done by hand, and who illustrated the cover of the earlier Masefield book (and kept us in line, reminding us that wolves weren't really evil—no red eyes!—and that metallic inks are environmentally unfriendly) has outdone herself here with a suspenseful image of Kay Harker and his rat pal shrinking in a basement corner while the witchy Sylvia Daisy Pouncer and her coven march down the steps.

 

We've been fans of Nikki's ever since noticing her work (including her yearly calendar, which has a cult following & which has been spotted around town at several of our favorite shops) at Buy Olympia.

 

Last year Abrams brought out a book collecting the works in all of the previous years' calendars.

Some of us in the office, though, have been aware of Nikki's work since prep-school days, and  one of us is even the proud owner of an early rare work, Sent Out On The Tracks They Built: Sinophobia in Olympia, 1886, which she collaborated on with Sarah Dougher in a more rocking incarnation.

 

Read and interview with Nikki McClure here.

Additions to the Jenny Linsky Gallery: Knit Edition

    "Captain Tinker, who was an old sailor, liked to make things and many years ago had learned to knit. He knitted a woolen scarf for Jenny—a bright red woolen scarf to go with her black fur and yellow eyes.
    "How Jenny loved that scarf! How brave she felt when she was wearing it!"

from Jenny and the Cat Club

Jenny is not the only one lucky enough to have someone knit her a bright red woolen scarf. The proprietor of the Phila*craft blog got a request for a scarf like Jenny's from her son, and—

which led to another knitter at The Runcible Bin mentioning this—

—a vest based on a drawing of Jenny done by her daughter.

Both of these make lovely additions to the small collection of Jenny Linsky-inspired photographs we've been collecting. Who could forget Lucius Monkey's spirited interpretation of the Cat Club's signature dance, the Sailor's Hornpipe?