I haven’t seen the movie of Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax yet, but seeing it advertised reminded me of what was my very favorite Seuss book when I was a youngster. Yes, it’s that one up there, The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins. Oddly enough, it wasn’t written in rhyme. I enjoyed the hats getting fancier […]
I’m always happy to add an annotated children’s classic volume to my library. So far I have: The Annotated Hunting of the Snark and The Annotated Alice by Lewis Carroll, The Annotated Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum, The Annotated Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame, and The Annotated Peter Pan by J. […]
This corner wall in my library is a good place to spend a day. Top row, left to right: Perrault’s Fairy Tales, Hans Andersen’s Fairy Tales, painting of the lavender witch’s edible cottage in Danken Wood, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, East of the Sun and West of the Moon, The Arabian Nights. Bottom row: 8 of […]
I recently added this volume to my collection of Andrew Lang Fairy Books. I now own the blue, the green, the red, the pink, the yellow, the violet, the brown, and now the crimson. So far, ‘Little Wildrose’ is my favorite tale in this volume. Why? Because of the first sentence – Once upon a […]
Orange at the base, white at the crown, this pumpkin turned to coach will head to town carrying Cinderella in her fine ball gown.
Each pumpkin secretly hopes to be the scariest one you’ll ever see.
Trees are important in many a folk and fairy tale where the action often takes place deep in a forest or wood. The tree below is in my front yard, but I can imagine the shy woodlock from my story, THE WOODLOCK, scrambling up a similar tree trunk in the Woods Beyond the Wood of […]
This is the beginning of the little book C. L. Dodgson designed and wrote in his own hand for Alice Liddell and presented to her one Christmas. It is a story he made up on a summer outing with the Liddell children and was urged to write down by Alice. He called it ‘Alice’s Adventures […]
I nominate this fellow as the greatest villain in all of literature. He stalks and dominates the pages of the first two volumes of the surreal medieval Gormenghast Trilogy by Mervyn Peake. His name is Steerpike. “His face was pale like clay and save for his eyes, mask-like. These eyes were set very close together, […]
Scraps, the Patchwork Girl, drawn by John R. Neill, is prominently featured in Ruth Plumly Thompson’s 1927 Oz book, The Gnome King of Oz. I borrowed Plumly as a name for the Earth girl Bekka meets later in her chronicles because I particularly loved Ruth Plumly Thompson’s Oz books when I was a young fellow. […]
