If the Name is (Barbro) Lindgren, the Books Will Be Fabulous

One thing I love about the old book hunt is the way a long-forgotten illustration or character will re-emerge, leaving me absolutely baffled. "Baffled" is not an expression that looks good on me, so when it happens I start with Amazon, move on to Abe, and have gone as far as Google's image finder. Recently I'd been having trouble with the tale of the bad baby, a title that should belong to Beatrix Potter. I searched everywhere; all I remembered was a disobedient, highly mobile baby falling into a toilet and beating up on the dog. You'd be surprised (I mean, really) at the crap "bad baby" turns up on Google. Or maybe you wouldn't. Here it is, the fruit of my searching...The Wild Baby by Barbro Lindgren, illustrated by Eva Eriksson. There are several other titles, The Wild Baby Goes to Sea and The Wild Baby Gets a Puppy**For those interested in collecting, the Wild Baby series is out of print and the title book is currently going for high prices in online sales.

Barbro Lindgren and Eva Eriksson also did a "Sam" series, still in print, with titles including Sam's Cookie, Sam's Potty, Sam's Ball, Sam's Bath, Sam's Teddy Bear. Sam is tres cute and has the same line-drawn, watercolored artwork as the Wild Baby, and if the names were the same we might assume Sam is the wild one grown into toddler-hood. If you have any of these books, hold on to them. Yawn.

Millions of Cats and Total Book Lust

My late night browsing revealed this wonderful post from the Children's Picturebook Blog about how to tell if you have a first edition of Wanda Gág's Millions of Cats or not. They estimate its worth at about $4000. Now I am suddenly salivating over this book. (Do owls salivate?) The blog authors write:

The historical importance of the book is underappreciated by the general public, however not so within the bibliophile hobby, as the steep market value will attest. The book is still in print today, which is quite remarkable for a children’s picturebook. How many other picturebooks from the 1920’s are still in print today?

For those of us who can't spring for the first edition, I still recommend it for building your library or your child's library. It's a classic story with fine woodcut (I think?) illustrations - imagine a million cats eating all the grass off a hill! You have to see it to believe it.

Classic Illustrators: Lois Lenski

I'm a huge fan of line art in chapter books - those little drawings that go along with the story, interspersed in the chapters. It's too bad that these illustrators don't often get as much recognition as picture book artists. Surely they have as much to do with how a reader imagines a story as anyone! Just think of Pauline Bayne's line art for the Narnia books. Those books have been through many sets of hideous covers, but fortunately there are editions in print that use Baynes's covers as well.

But the illustrator that really got me thinking about this topic is Lois Lenski. She did the interior art for the Betsy-Tacy series by Maud Hart Lovelace, as well as writing and illustrating many books on her own. I love the whimsical folk-art quality of her drawings. Here's one of Betsy, Tacy, and Tib:



The series are about a group of girls growing up in small-town Minnesota in the early part of the twentieth century. They're classics of the Midwest (Lenski was from Ohio) as well as just all-round classic books. And who doesn't love a series where the main girl wants to be a writer? If Anne of Green Gables got in a fight with Betsy...it's hard to say who'd win.

Lenski also did the cover illustrations for the original books, which the currently in-print editions of the books have completely abandoned:




Not only do the girls in the new series look like grown-up American Girl dolls, they're playing "he loves me, he loves me not." How boring and sweetly Victorian is that? By contrast, Lenski's illustrations conveys the sense of adventure and imagination that the characters in the books actually have. Hmmph. Maybe I'll up and join The Betsy-Tacy Society after all.

Fortunately the in print editions of the Betsy-Tacy books continue to use Lenski's line art in the interior.

And keep your eye out for the old editions and first editions of these books. They're starting to be worth quite a bit.