KERMIT THE FROG'S REVIEWS IN THE NEW YORK TIMES

I WOULD GUESS (or hope) that there is some overlap between my readership and those who follow Jim Henson's Red Book on Henson.com. For those who don't know about that excellent blog, Jim Henson's Red Book, the actual physical book (or books), was a journal Jim Henson kept from 1965-1988 in which he made a one-line notation about what he did that day. The blog posts one of those notations every day, sometimes with historical information from the Henson archivist. Today's blog post reads: "5/2/1971 - 'Kermit reviews 11 frog books in NY Times Book Review." As my Google Reader tells me, this is "not a curated entry." But, what! Kermit the Frog reviews in the New York Times Book Review! So, I decided to dig up the actual reviews in order to see what it was all about. Of course, once I had the reviews I wanted to see if the books were available on Amazon, and then I thought, I'm not the only person who would want to see this list on Amazon, which meant a Listmania! must be made. So I made one. To see the froggy list with quotes from the actual reviews (as permitted by my 2000 character limit), check out With a Hop and a Croak: Kermit the Frog Reviews in the New York Times.

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HAPPY BIRTHDAY (BELATED)

THINGS HAVE BEEN QUIET at We Too Were Children, Mr. Barrie this month. So quiet that, while I've been watching the calendar in anticipation of this momentous occasion, I still missed the one year anniversary of WTWC,MB. It was yesterday. That's right, one year ago (from yesterday), I posted my very first post on James Joyce's children's book The Cat and The Devil. Since then I've written about the children's books of Chinua Achebe, James Baldwin, Graham Greene, Patricia Highsmith, Eugene Ionesco, Toni Morrison, John Updike, Virginia Woolf, and many others. Hopefully, I've surprised and delighted you with some of these (okay, ideally, all of these) revelations. All I know, as a fairly technologically ignorant blogger, is that Blogger stats tells me I've had over 30,500 hits in the past year, I have 92 Blogger followers, and 175 Google Reader subscribers. All I can say to that is thank you. Thank you for your interest, your support, and your patience. I've been collecting many, many images for a blog post I hope to get online before the end of the month, and there are many, many more authors on my list (which never stops growing). So here's to another year. Thank you.

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GUEST POST TODAY ON VINTAGE KIDS' BOOKS MY KID LOVES

 I GUEST BLOGGED TODAY (and got a very nice introduction) on the inimitable Vintage Kids' Books My Kid Loves. Check out my post here. And if you're not already following VKBMKL subscribe. Enjoy!

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JOHN UPDIKE: A HELPFUL ALPHABET OF FRIENDLY OBJECTS

IN 1957 JOHN UPDIKE PUBLISHED his first book, The Carpentered Hen and other tame creatures, a collection of poems that had appeared in The New Yorker starting in 1954. His second child David had been born the year before, and included at the end of the book is a series of poems collectively titled A Cheerful Alphabet of Pleasant Objects with the dedication "to David." What follows is twenty-six poems, one for each letter of the alphabet. Apple, Birdbath, Cog, Doily... Most are not subjects that would generally appear in a child's abecedaria--Ottoman, Trivet--and the poems are not really for children. From Ottoman: "Lessons in history: the Greeks / Were once more civilized than Swedes. / Iranians were, for several weeks, / Invincible, as Medes." There are cute observations and some concrete poems (see below), but overall the poems are weak, and Updike chose not to include them in his 1993 collection, Collected Poems: 1953-1993.

 From The Carpentered Hen reprinted in Verse (1965)

From The Carpentered Hen reprinted in Verse (1965)

Two years after Collected Poems, Updike published his final children's book, A Helpful Alphabet of Friendly Objects. This time, David, now forty-two and with a son of his own, provided the photographic illustrations, which are largely of Updike's grandchildren (with a cameo by Updike himself). This time the dedication is to the grandchildren: "For Anoff, Kwame, Wesley, Trevor, and Kai cousins all." With the exception of Apple, none of the objects from the first alphabet are repeated in the second, and now the traditional Bird, Cat, Dog appear. The verses are simpler too: "A bird has a beak, / a bright eye, / and wings. / In the sky, / it flies; / in the tree, / it sings." There is one concrete poem.

From A Helpful Alphabet of Friendly Objects (1995)

David Updike is an author in his own right, having published a number of short stories in The New Yorker, two collections of fiction, and several picture books, including a quartet of books about a boy Homer and his dog Sophocles, one for each season.

It is fitting that John Updike's writings for children started and ended with his own children and grandchildren.

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WARREN CHAPPELL WRAP UP

AS PROMISED IN MY LAST POST, I have now posted illustrations from the four remaining Warren Chappell music books on my Flickr. The true masterpiece is Peter and the Wolf, which I have posted in full. It is unclear whether the text for the book was written by Serge Prokofieff himself, although it seems doubtful. It does sport an introduction by Prokofieff's United States Agent Serge Koussevitzky. If you click into any of the links in this post, click into Peter and the Wolf. It really is superb.

To see all of the full page illustrations and some spot illustrations and adornments for the other titles in the series see: Hansel and Gretel, The Nutcracker, The Sleeping Beauty, and Coppelia. See also, my original post on John Updike's titles in the series. Enjoy.

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