A Different Stripe

"Pet cats, he believed, did nothing but behave badly."

Hotel Cat Tom isn't happy about Jenny Linsky, Edward, and Checkers ending up in his hotel.

The blood of the hotel cat boiled....
    "What a guest!" thought Tom. He's probably a spoiled pet accompanying his master on a pleasant little journey. Pet cat! Bah!"
    Tom hated all that he had ever seen of pet cats. Back in the days when he was a hungry kitten living ln the streets, he had climbed fire escapes and looked through windows. And often he had watched those darlings turn up their noses at platters of fine food and go off and scratch some furniture. Pet cats, he believed, did nothing but behave badly.

The Hotel Cat
Story and pictures by Esther Averill

The Evolution of Edie

The illustrator Eric Hanson has a madcap style, reminiscent of the work of Ben Shahn, so we were very pleased when the opportunity to have him bring to life the anarchic Edie Cares, heroine of Terrible, Horrible Edie (clearly she had no part in the naming of the book). Eric recently sent us some of the early ideas for Edie, and we thought we'd share them with you.

By the way, Eric Hanson doesn't just have a blog and illustrate books (though he's just done the cover of John Waters's memoir, making Mr. Waters and Edie siblings of sorts), he's also written a book. It's called A Book of Ages, and will help you realize that you haven't done much with your life, no matter how old you are.

          

  
 

 

 

 

     

Preview of Edward Gorey's illustrations for Three Ladies Beside the Sea

Choreographer and opera director Rhoda Levine collaborated with Edward Gorey on the charming children's book Three Ladies Beside the Sea in 1963. It has been unavailable since that first Atheneum edition went out of print. So without further ado, here's a peek at few of the interior spreads.

 

Multimedia Midweek: Daniel Pinkwater edition

We've been incredibly fortunate to have found a friend in the writer Daniel Pinkwater, who, among other occupations, recommends children's books on NPR's Weekend Edition every so often. It was only a few months ago that Mr. Pinkwater sang the praises of Alastair Reid's Ounce Dice Trice—and almost exactly a year to the day before that he'd talked up The 13 Clocks by James Thurber. So when he asked to see an early copy of The Bear that Wasn't, we were pleased, but didn't think it likely that the book would be one of his special picks. Well, wouldn't you know, our cup runneth over. This Saturday we were treated to a dramatic reading of this most delightful of children's books (if you find the tragedy of the human condition delightful).

Scott Simon and Daniel Pinkwater did a bang up job of reading a condensed version of the book, but naturally, the illustrations were missing from the rendition. Tashlin had been an animator for Warner Bros., Screen Gems, Disney, you name it. And he was known to integrate inventive filmic angles into his, say, Porky Pig story lines. That Loony Toons lineage is in evidence here, but so is a certain elegant 1940s line of the sort unlikely to penetrate that thoroughly middle-American institution.

(Scroll down for the links to the audio recordings of all three sessions)

Listen to Scott Simon and Daniel Pinkwater read from The Bear That Wasn't

 

 

Listen to Scott Simon and Daniel Pinkwater read from Ounce Dice Trice
Listen to Scott Simon and Daniel Pinkwater read from The 13 Clocks

Chuck Jones also made an animated version of the book in 1967. Boris Karloff (whose animated voice might be recognizable from How the Grinch Stole Christmas) Paul Frees narrated. According to an interview Tashlin did with Michael Barrier, he was not involved in the production of the film, nor was he pleased with it:

Well, that was—I guess maybe in recent years, with the exception maybe of your best girl friend running you over in your own car, that was just about the worst experience I ever had, the making of that cartoon. . . Well, they destroyed the cartoon with one little thing. I saw that, I almost cried. I never talked to Chuck about it, I've never talked to him since. It was a terrible thing.

Read the interview to find what so dismayed Tashlin about the film. 

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.