Vol. 19: #15 • Some Favorite Children's Books • (4-9-2023) Tidbits of Coachella Valley

• The day starts out badly for a young boy in Judith Viorst’s 1972 book Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. Having gone to bed chewing bubble gum, he wakes up with it stuck in his hair. Arising from his bed, he trips on his skateboard. In the bathroom, he drops his favorite sweater in the water-filled sink.

• At school, his teacher points out his poor performance in front of the class. The dentist finds a painful cavity. He falls in the mud. Lima beans are on his plate for dinner. In a world of “happily ever afters,” we might expect the boy’s day to improve… but it doesn’t. The lesson for kids? Life isn’t always pleasant, and everyone has bad days now and then.

• Author Laura Numeroff released If You Give a Mouse a Cookie in 1985, a story that goes round and round until the end when it brings the reader back to the original request. A boy named Oliver gives a cookie to a mouse named Quinley, which sparks the request for milk, which leads to a straw, which in turn triggers a successive cycle of requests, all ending back with the cookie.

Her mouse book spawned a series of 17 more books, including If You Give a Moose a Muffin, If You Give a Pig a Pancake, and If You Take a Mouse to School.

• Pippi Longstocking has her roots in Sweden, where her story was first published in 1945 in Swedish as Pippi Langstrump, which literally translates “long stocking.” Her full name is Pippilotta Delicatessa Windowshade Mackrelmint Ephraim’s Daughter Longstocking. The name was created by author Astrid Lindgren’s daughter Karin, who had been confined to bed with a long illness. Her mother invented bedside stories about the nine-year-old freckled redhead with sideways pigtails, who lived alone in an old house with her monkey Mr. Nilsson and her horse.

• Pippi had great wealth due to a suitcase of gold pieces left to her by her father, who had been lost at sea. She was also gifted with supernatural strength. Publishers rejected the first manuscript in 1944, but it was accepted by another, and three chapter books were published from 1945 to 1948, followed by short stories and picture books. The stories have been translated in 76 languages, including Japanese, in which Pippi is known as Nagakutsushita-no-Pippi.

• Eric Carle was working as a graphics designer and illustrator in the late 1960s, when he provided the illustrations for a colleague’s book Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? On a day when he was bored with nothing to do, he started fooling around with a hole punch, punching holes in sheets of paper. He conceived the idea of a bookworm chewing his way through words on pages, and proposed the idea of A Week with Willi Worm to a publisher.

• The editor didn’t find the character appealing, so the pair brainstormed until they came up with a caterpillar and a butterfly. This led to Hungry Little Caterpillar, who eats his way through various food items, including apples, pears, plums, strawberries, oranges, pickles, cheese, salami, and cupcakes, giving him a stomach ache from those that are unhealthy. Carle used die cut holes in the pages as the caterpillar progressively ate his way through the book.

• Immediately popular upon its publication in 1969, The Hungry Little Caterpillar has sold more than 50 million copies, with a copy sold every 30 seconds. It’s been on the Publisher Weekly’s bestseller list for over 1,100 weeks, and has been translated into 60+ languages. Carle, who died in 2021 at age 91, wrote more than 70 books that have sold over 170 million copies.

• The much-loved bedtime story Goodnight Moon, written by Margaret Wise Brown, was published in 1947, experiencing poor initial sales of just 6,000 copies at $1.75 each. (It’s now estimated to have sold 48 million copies.)

• The story consists of only 130 words and was written in just one morning. Brown told the tale of a bunny’s ritual of bidding good-night to all the things he sees in the “great green room,” including a red balloon, a brush, a bowl of mush, and the moon. After authoring more than 100 books under four names and seven publishers, Brown died from a blood clot at the young age of 42. She left behind more 70 unpublished manuscripts, thirty of which were published after her death.

• Harold and the Purple Crayon was the first of a series of ten “Harold” books written by cartoonist and illustrator David Johnson Leisk, under the name of Crockett Johnson. Johnson had already gained fame for the comic strip “Barnaby” from 1942 to 1952.

Harold came along in 1955. The four-year-old boy creates a world of his own with his magical purple crayon, drawing a path and a moon in order to take a walk in the moonlight, among many other adventures. The books were adapted into a 13-episode HBO series in 2002, which won an Emmy award.

• Jack Kent was an artist and author of numerous children’s books, who wrote and illustrated the tale Socks for Supper, a cute little story about a poor old rural couple who had only their own home-grown turnips to eat. Weary of their monotonous diet, the wife decided to knit a pair of socks to trade for some food from their farmer neighbors who had a cow. But the only yarn they had was from her husband’s wool sweater, so she used that. The neighbors gladly traded a bucket of their milk and a wedge of cheese for the socks, and the poor couple at last had a delicious meal on their table at suppertime.

• But the milk and cheese soon ran out and they again had only turnips to eat. So the wife decided to knit another pair of socks, unraveling more yarn from the old man's sweater, and again the neighbor’s wife gladly accepted them in trade for more milk and cheese. They continued to barter this way until the man’s sweater had only enough yarn left to cover his neck -- only enough to knit one more sock.

• The old man returned to their neighbor’s farm hoping this time to trade half a pair of socks for half a bucket of milk and cheese. To his surprise the farmer's wife was delighted, saying one sock was exactly what she needed to finish the sweater she had been kitting for her husband for Christmas, using the yarn she had unraveled from all the previous socks. She took the last sock and gladly gave him the usual amount of milk and cheese.

• But when she had finished the sweater and presented it to her husband, she was dismayed to see that it was far too big for him and didn’t fit at all. Now feeling badly that the old man no longer had a sweater of his own, the lady came to the old couple's home and gave the sweater to him. He happily tried it on -- and it fit him perfectly. □