crooked house

Taschen's The Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm

Sara just alerted me to the existence of this book and it is definitely going on my wishlist. The Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm contains 27 fairytales and lots of vintage illustrations from the 1820s to the 1950s. They are STUNNING. You can leaf through 100 pages of the book here.

 

Sylvie and the iPhone

Over the weekend, Sylvie discovered the iPhone, which, up until now, has been monopolized by her brother (when it is not being used by yours truly). She particularly likes Animatch (currently her favourite), the Itsy Bitsy Spider, Wheels on the Bus, Old McDonald, and Draw and Tell from Duck, Duck Moose, Monkey Preschool Lunchbox, and the e-picture book The Monster at the End of this Book. (That book is over 30 years old and seems finally to have  found its true medium. Everyone in the family loves it.) Do you have any favourite iPhone apps for kids?

For some reason, every time she plays on the iPhone she has to wear her Anne of Green Gables hat. We are now calling it her iPhone hat.

Babies in Literature: Troll Babies

From the fascinating D'Aulaires' Book of Trolls:

[The troll children] screamed and yelled from morning to night, and that was just the time when the trolls wanted to sleep.

No wonder the troll-hags looked with envy at the good little babies on the farms down in the valleys! They did their crying at night and slept peacefully during the days.

Whenever a troll-hag had a chance, she would snatch an infant from his cradle and put one of her troll-brats in his place. Then there was just one way for the mother to get her own child back. She had to take the ugly changeling behind the barn on a dark Thursday night and spank him soundly. If she was lucky, his howls would melt the stony heart of the troll-hag and she would come running back, toss the human child to his mother, grab his own and storm back into the mountain with him. If this did not work, her poor mother had to live for the rest of her life with a troll in her house.

Alice in "Underland" Shoes

Vivi has officially switched her allegiance from Dorothy to Alice, as evidenced by the fact that she now wears black Mary Janes all the time instead of ruby slippers. She's also been toying with headbands. Time to purchase a blue dress with a white apron coverall. Do you think she got all those cuts and bruises falling down the rabbit hole?

Portrait of a Small Boy Reading

By Gluyas Williams via Heidi Robbins.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

 

A gorgeous new edition of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland with artwork by Yayoi Kusama. Via Sophia Whitfield, thanks to Sara O'Leary.

 

Alice Illustrated

I get the Dover Pictorial email sampler and this week they shared some images from Alice Illustrated: 120 Images from the Classic Tales of Lewis Carroll. I'm adding it to my wishlist.

Harvey Potter and Harry Potter

Last night Luke asked me to read him a book he had picked out himself at the library called Harvey Potter's Balloon Farm by Jerdine Nolen. I was surprised by the name "Harvey Potter" and wondered if it was meant to be some kind of parody of the Harry Potter books. It wasn't -- it was simply the story of a man named Harvey Potter who grew crops of magnif'icent balloons on his farm instead of more mundane crops. The narrator, a little girl, spies on him and discovers he does this with the help of a magic "conjurer stick" in the middle of the night. The story is quirky and fun and Luke absolutely adores the illustrations by Mark Buehner -- we had to spend quite some time on the pages devoted to the fields of balloons.

According to the publication date of the book on Amazon, it came out in 1994.  J. K. Rowling didn't finish the first Harry Potter book until 1995, according to Wikipedia at least, and it wasn't published until 1997. How weird. The books are completely different except for their central, similarly-named  characters who also happen to be magic. Imagine Jerdine Nolen's surprise at the stratospheric success of the Harry Potter books. If I were her, I might entertain the notion that Rowling had seen the book and perhaps inadvertently borrowed the name for her own character, but I'd be more likely to chalk it up to coincidence. Or I just might think I was psychic!

You can see more of Harvey Potter's Balloon Farm here.

Illustrator Virginia Lee

This illustration is a perfect description of my relationship to winter. I am thinking of buying a print. I found Virginia Lee's website after happening upon a book she illustrated -- Persephone -- on Amazon.

Else-Marie and Her Seven Little Daddies

Nathalie Foy recommended  1001 Children's Books You Must Read Before You Grow Up so we recently borrowed it from the library. Of course a lot of the books in it are familiar classic titles but it has suggested a few treasures that are completely new to us. Else-Marie and Her Seven Little Daddies is one of them. It cracks me up. It's like Heather Has Two Mommies but with a sense of humour.

Heather Has Two Mommies was, I believe, the first children's picture book to openly address gay and lesbian-parented families. Even though Two Mommies author Leslea Newman grew up in a Jewish community, she never saw  Jewish families on television or in picture books and so felt that her family was somehow "wrong." Her book, which sparked a controversy when it first came out, was an effort to make a difference for this emerging minority of children.

Seven Little Daddies is a sort of  blanket version of Two Mommies, covering all minorities precisely because its fantastical premise doesn't apply to any particular real-life one -- unless of course there is an actual polyandrous subculture involving little people in Sweden, where the author Pija Lindenbaum is from.

In the book, Else-Marie is alarmed by the fact that her seven little daddies are going to pick her up from school instead of her mother. She is worried that other people will think her family is strange -- but of course everything turns out just fine in the end.

This is my favourite illustration, which is accompanied by the text: "I sigh and lean my head against my mother's shoulder. Isn't it lucky that my daddies are so little that we can all fit in my mom's lap?"