by Roger Sutton
Note the tight focus all these board books purposefully keep — the minimal backgrounds in the illustrations; the hewing to familiar objects and concepts; the brevity of the texts; the physical humor or action; the familiar, comforting emotions. Full-size picture books that babies love follow a similar formula. Books by Byron Barton (Machines at Work; Dinosaurs, Dinosaurs) are surefire winners, with their direct, no-nonsense language (“Hey, you guys! Let’s get to work!”); simple, eye-catching illustrations, often in primary colors; and perennially fascinating topics (machines, astronauts, construction workers, dinosaurs). Look for tried-and-true children’s book creators Tana Hoban, Margaret Wise Brown, Donald Crews, Eric Carle, Anne Rockwell, Vera B. Williams, and Eve Rice and their successors Mem Fox, Emily Gravett, Leslie Patricelli, Kevin Henkes, and Wong Herbert Yee — all of whom seem to have a direct line to small children’s likes and dislikes, fears and joys. Satoru Onishi’s Who’s Hiding? is a virtual lineup of animals (eighteen of which stand in an array looking straight out at the reader) in which babies guess which one is facing backward, which one is angry, or which one is missing on a progression of spreads. The distractions are nil; the concepts are age-appropriate; the fascination level is high. Lynn Reiser and Penny Gentieu’s picture books You and Me, Baby and My Baby & Me couldn’t be simpler — just clear, wholly engaging photographs of babies from diverse backgrounds interacting with parents and preschool siblings.
For parents interested in giving babies the gift of a love of language, it’s never too early to introduce Mother Goose. To read Mother Goose rhymes aloud is to hear the music in language. A good Mother Goose collection is like that magic self-replenishing pot in the folktale: never empty, with something for everyone, for every mood, for every time of day. Shout the rambunctious “Jelly on a plate,/Jelly on a plate,/Wibble, wobble, wibble, wobble,/Jelly on a plate”; growl the swaggering “I’m Dusty Bill/From Vinegar Hill,/Never had a bath/And I never will”; whisper the lullaby of “Come, crow! Go, crow!/Baby’s sleeping sound,/And the wild plums grow in the jungle,/Only a penny a pound./Only a penny a pound, Baba,/Only a penny a pound.” (Joanna Rudge Long’s “What Makes a Good Mother Goose?” — a more in-depth look at this nursery essential — follows on the next page.)
Babies’ reading is no different from that of any other age in one important respect: it can be solitary as well as communal. True, a baby will get to know books first by mouth, and only later by eye and ear, and will need an adult to introduce her to the wonders they contain. But soon that same baby will be reaching out from her parent’s lap to turn the book’s pages, and then sitting by herself, poring over her book, turning the pages, and “reading” to herself. She will have taken the first steps toward a future of page turns.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that every English-speaking child is the better for an early friendship with Mother Goose — “early” meaning from birth, because nothing boosts language development better than those catchy rhymes and rhythms. Scholars and educators alike praise the virtues and resonances of these traditional rhymes. They are essentials of both popular culture and our literary heritage; they stimulate young imaginations; reading, saying, or singing them draws parents and children together in shared delight. Best of all, those beloved, familiar, playful, nonsensical verses are just plain fun.
Mother Goose rhymes have appeared in print for more than two hundred years. Since nineteenth-century illustrator Randolph Caldecott elaborated on verses like “Hey Diddle, Diddle” and “Bye, Baby Bunting” with his ebullient caricatures of English country life, hundreds of illustrators have adapted the rhymes to their own styles and sensibilities. A few of these collections endure; many more have fallen by the wayside, even such treasures as L. Leslie Brooke’s 1922 Ring o’ Roses.
Illustrations for Mother Goose come in several flavors. The most widely accepted are often the sweetest; Kate Greenaway and Jessie Willcox Smith set the tone with their pretty children in the rural, period settings many people associate with nursery rhymes. More stimulating to young imaginations is the kind of rambunctious vigor initiated by Caldecott, carried on by Brooke, and adapted with idiosyncratic verve by such luminaries as Roger Duvoisin, Raymond Briggs, Amy Schwartz, and Michael Foreman — vigor that reflects the outlandish characters and shenanigans in the verse itself. Editions for different audiences have always appeared in different shapes and sizes, from board books featuring single rhymes to the eminent folklorists Peter and Iona Opie’s scholarly tomes. Those for the youngest may contain just a few familiar verses, copiously illustrated. Older children can explore fat volumes with hundreds of rhymes, including additional, often omitted verses for well-known rhymes. Smaller volumes may have a particular focus. In To Market! To Market!, Peter Spier sets a score of rhymes in the early nineteenth-century market town of New Castle, Delaware. Leonard S. Marcus and Amy Schwartz celebrate the foolish, the disappointed, and various miscreants in a merry take on Mother Goose’s Little Misfortunes. Robert Sabuda’s virtuoso pop-up, The Movable Mother Goose, features arresting graphic design as well as extraordinary paper engineering. With We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy, Maurice Sendak turns two hitherto unrelated rhymes into a fantasy on urban poverty, social responsibility, and compassion. Versatile Mother Goose provides a rewarding venue for many such creative endeavors.
Each of these books is a world unto itself; to enter one is to go to a place both rich and strange, whether pretty and placid or comically offbeat. Mother Goose is read, reread, chanted, and pored over with a special imaginative intensity.
The collection my children almost wore out was Raymond Briggs’s The Mother Goose Treasury. Robust, earthy, and sporting more than four hundred verses, Briggs’s book features clean, uncluttered pages with lots of spot art; sequenced vignettes for longer dramas; colorful, action-packed full-page art; and a marvelous array of characters — seedy or cranky, feckless or determined, often mischievous, rarely prim.
Now, though there’s a plethora of Mother Geese in print, Briggs’s isn’t among them. It’s well known that the swing from the verbal to the visual within the last generation has remodeled not only tastes but the very way children perceive. No longer is it acceptable for color to alternate with black and white; children today expect all color, all the time, and are accustomed to a more generous supply of illustrations. Busy parents are content to settle for a relatively brief collection, perhaps supplemented with picture books spun from single verses.
Fortunately, in this new climate, there are still good choices, big and small, sweet or silly or pungent or all three. Iona Opie’s My Very First Mother Goose (along with its companion volume, Here Comes Mother Goose), illustrated by Rosemary Wells, is a lap-friendly charmer, with large type, ample dimensions, and bright colors. Though some characters are human, more are animals, especially cats, mice, and bunnies. “Little Jumping Joan” is a black, rope-skipping rabbit who doubles as the narrator of “I had a little nut tree” — who better to “skip over water, dance over sea”? Mischievous, anxious, earnestly hardworking, gleeful, or affectionately cuddly, these appealing animal characters will be familiar to readers of Wells’s many popular picture books. Also, using them is a tactful way to sidestep the issue of racial balance.
An illustrator of Mother Goose has many such choices, each a chance for creative interpretation. For example, Wells’s “brave old duke of York” — a benevolent-looking gent, pajama-clad and portly — watches his toy soldiers march up and down a hill built of fat books. (Observant tots may notice that the march ends in a wastebasket; see the following illustration.) The pussycat who says he “frightened a little mouse under [the queen’s] chair” is evidently fibbing — it’s the cat who exhibits alarm here, while the mouse, clearly a privileged personage, sticks out her tongue at him. Just about every verse has such nifty details to discover in successive “readings” of the pictures.
With just sixty-eight rhymes, most of them short (or without their final verses), My Very First Mother Goose is a fine p
lace to begin. Eventually, however, the well-read child will need a more comprehensive collection. An example is Mary Engelbreit’s Mother Goose, one hundred rhymes visualized in Engelbreit’s old-timey greeting-card style, the round-faced characters reliably cute and pink-cheeked (even the lambs and unicorn). The selections, chosen with the help of critic Leonard S. Marcus, are excellent, as is his introduction, peppered with such sage insights as “It is one of the happy truths about Mother Goose verses that it is absolutely impossible to sound too foolish while saying them” and “These days, the first rhymes most children know are those . . . in television commercials. Against this backdrop, wise old Mother Goose holds out a refreshing, life-enhancing alternative: equally irresistible rhymes with nothing to sell.”
Two of the best of the more comprehensive volumes still in print came out in the 1980s. With its quaint, innocent-looking figures and childlike drawing style, Tomie dePaola’s Mother Goose (with 204 rhymes) is immediately appealing. But there’s much more going on in dePaola’s art than the casual reader may notice at first. His figures — so decorative, so comfortably arrayed in their ample white space — are also subtly expressive; his sophisticated juxtapositions of light, bright colors are unexpectedly harmonious; his elegantly balanced compositions include just enough action and detail to inspire young imaginations to fill out the stories for themselves. Arrangement of the rhymes, from an unusual fifteen stanzas about Mother Goose herself to a series of bedtime entries (closing with two prayers), is coherent. All in all, it’s a book to have early and enjoy through childhood and beyond.
For somewhat older children, The Arnold Lobel Book of Mother Goose (306 rhymes; formerly titled The Random House Book of Mother Goose) is especially rich in variety, story, and visual imagery. Old standards with a full complement of extra verses; variants on the familiar plus much that’s unfamiliar; couplets, riddles, limericks, ballads — all are grouped by subject (rain, say, or chickens), or by more tenuous links, and set to good advantage among a wealth of spot art, spreads, and vignettes. A string of small pictures may narrate a single story or multiple rhymes share a setting (the sea, rooms in a house, the moon). Borders sometimes fence the action, but elsewhere it escapes into large, dramatic vistas. Each freely drawn illustration is neatly self-contained, yet all are marshaled into exquisitely designed spreads. Characters are as lively and varied as all humanity, mostly comic or amiable but sometimes unexpectedly dark (a tiny Wee Willie Winkie issues an urgent warning among towering, angular buildings; the cow sweeps over the moon in an awesome celestial phenomenon). Creative touches abound: the crooked man is a cubist portrait; it’s mice who like “pease porridge cold . . . nine days old”; London Bridge is a vertiginous, patched-together conglomeration. All in all, this is an ample and robust volume, vibrant with the many human conditions that gave rise to the rhymes in the first place: quirks, incongruities, injustices, nightmares, absurdities, laughter, hopes, dreams.
There’s always room for another fresh take on the old favorites. In Leo and Diane Dillon’s new Mother Goose: Numbers on the Loose, these gifted illustrators bring twenty-four rhymes to life in richly detailed mini-stories of their own invention. Like many a Mother Goose, it’s a book for multiple ages: for preschoolers to enjoy the dancing rhymes and rhythms; for primary-age children learning their numbers; and for the older ones, who can appreciate and weave together the many imaginative pictorial details to tell the old stories anew.
So how do we choose among these treasures? As to illustrations, they should create an intriguing world, one to lure a child again and again. For the littlest, it’s important to have durable pages, open format, clarity of design, and a preponderance of familiar verses to revisit until, ineluctably, they’re learned by heart. These funny, often enigmatic verses beg for visual elaboration — look for illustrators who’ve made the best of their opportunities. Comparing the illustrations for a favorite rhyme in several collections is a good way to get to know different illustrators, to evaluate their styles, skills, and imaginative strengths, and to discover which ones suit you best.
As to content, a more comprehensive collection can be a grand conglomeration of thumbnail portraits and delicious nonsense, the lyrical and the raucous, sorrow and glee, the witty, the tragic, or — intriguingly — both at once. Tampering with texts is usually a bad thing, though there are exceptions (as those who remember the earlier version of “Eeny, meeny, miny, mo” will acknowledge). If there’s much that’s unfamiliar, a note on sources shows good faith on the part of the compiler. It’s also good to have an introduction, such as Iona Opie provides for My Very First Mother Goose. Hers is an inspirational celebration, concluding with a playful alphabet of attributes. And who better than Opie herself to give us these last words, some of them as absurd as Mother Goose herself:
Mother Goose will show newcomers to this world how astonishing, beautiful, capricious, dancy, eccentric, funny, goluptious, haphazard, intertwingled, joyous, kindly, loving, melodious, naughty, outrageous, pomsidillious, querimonious, romantic, silly, tremendous, unexpected, vertiginous, wonderful, x-citing, yo-heave-ho-ish, and zany it is.
Just so does Mother Goose continue to engage those tiny “newcomers.”
When our son Drake was on the way, certain policies and principles regarding his childhood scarcely needed to be spoken — indeed, to mention them aloud would have seemed coarse, even insulting. For example:
WE WILL NOT CENSOR BOOKS AND TOYS.
But because Bruce has been through this business twice before (with Alex, now twenty-four, and Spencer, fifteen), he might have winced a bit at such a declaration. He is aware of something he calls the “Berenstain Loophole,” first invoked shortly after Alex’s second birthday. On that occasion, one of Alex’s pals (with witless parents, obviously) slipped a wrapped package of two Berenstain Bears books in among the other guests’ gifts of Hot Wheels racers and Playmobil emergency vehicles. Alas, Bruce — naif that he was — had no idea such . . . printed matter existed, so he failed to pounce and destroy until it was too late: Alex got his mom to read him the books several times in the next couple of days.
A disaster unfolded. One of the books related that Sister Bear was afraid of the dark. Her drippy terror played out in lurid imagery, to be solved on the last page by the purchase (suggested, of course, by that nonpareil of homespun wisdom, Mama Bear) of a night-light.
Until this point in his life, Alex was indifferent to the fact that something called the Dark even existed. It had never crossed his mind that the relative luminescence of his room was attached to a value system. Sometimes you could see everything, sometimes you couldn’t — you went with what you got. Ah, but chez Berenstain, things were differently ordered, so for two weeks Alex decided that there was a Dark, and maybe he ought to be afraid of it. Bruce was finally subjected to the infamy of following the lead of Mama B.: he bought Alex a night-light.
So, functionally, Ginee-and-Bruce’s new rule might read:
WE WILL NOT CENSOR BOOKS OR TOYS UNLESS THEY ARE TOTAL CRAP.
Alas, this rule does not take into account adoring relatives, babysitters, friends of babysitters, pediatricians, and the nice man at the Rite Aid on Seventh Avenue. Even one’s otherwise faultless friends can fall prey to a Thomas the Tank Engine beginner set — and après that, the deluge: the book-with-wheels cannot be far behind. So you do the inevitable (especially when the gift giver is present). You gamely read the thing in question, which may or may not have appendages and emit funny noises. You hope that will do it. But your child appears enchanted. “More?” he inquires, and then you are in for it, doomed to read the thing through at least three more times before suggesting an alternative (“Let’s read Freight Train!”) or a distraction (“Let’s have a sugary snack!”). Later, at your leisure, you wrestle: Should I put this back in his book pile, or do the unimaginable and throw it away? A book. In the trash. Like the Nazis and the Branch Davidians.
Here’s the thing that every newish parent quickly understands: very youn
g children have inclinations that defy categorization or comprehension. It takes talent to recognize this and speak to it; when those forces are brilliant or at least benign, you end up with books like Goodnight Moon; Good Night, Gorilla; and Blue Hat, Green Hat. When those forces are greedy and malevolent, you end up with Tinkle Tubsies or non-Henson Elmo or Lord-knows-what beaming character concocted by market research and focus groups, an incubus guaranteed to make serial killers of your kids. This realization, of course, then wreaks havoc on the rash corollary to the second rule, which is:
WE WILL PERSONALLY PURCHASE ONLY THAT WHICH WE COULD IMAGINE MAKING OURSELVES (I.E., WRITING OR EDITING) AT OUR VERY BEST (WE ALL HAVE AN INNER CRAP ARTIST).
But here is the humbling thing: children, especially young children, have strong irrational likes and dislikes, and some of the books they love best are, frankly, a mystery. For example, Spring Is Here by Taro Gomi. This was a gift from friends who have a daughter two years older than our son, and it baffled us at first. Don’t get us wrong; it’s a lovely book, just . . . weird. It’s a celebration of the seasons in which a calf metamorphoses into fresh earth, growing grass, and the changing seasonal landscape, only to change back into an older calf at the end of the story. You would not be amiss in thinking it sounds a bit like a short Japanese animated film in board-book form. You would therefore think that it wouldn’t be appealing to a developing human unable to say spring, let alone anime or Miyazaki. Yet this quickly became one of Drake’s favorite books (and other children’s as well; we noticed the book was in its seventh printing).