Is there no justice?! Jon Agee's Terrific

I love working the afternoon shift. You know the sort--the kind where I come in to a desk piled high with issues (hint: file under "sarcasm".) Today I found a pile of payment forms for lost materials. I give these the once over to see if there's anything I need to replace. Sure enough, I notice that Jon Agee's Terrific has been lost (sob!) So, as I'm debating whether to order 1 copy or 2, I stumble upon an inconvenient truth: it's no longer available. Surely B&N are pulling my leg. I check Baker and Taylor: Permanently out of Stock. Amazon: available from these sellers (a.k.a. Not Us.) I grab my head and do my best Edvard Munch Scream impression. How can this BE?!?! Terrific is only one of my all-time favorite story time books (and not just because it allows me ample opportunity to do my parrot impression.) Terrific is necessary to children's books in the same way that Oscar the Grouch is vital to Sesame Street--so that kids know its okay to have bad days and foul moods and they will still be lovable. Terrific was written by the sublime Jon Agee, who keeps finding new ways to have fun with language and make it accessible to young readers. So why is this book no longer available? I mean, look at all the awards it has won:

ALA Notable Book

The Horn Book, Fanfare 2005

New York Times Notable Children's Book of 2005

Publishers Weekly, Best Children's Books 2005

Bank Street, Best Children's Books 2005

Child Magazine, Best Children's Books 2005

Chicago Public Library, Best of the Best 2005

Parent's Choice Award Winner for Picture Book

Book Sense, Top Ten Best Children's Books 2005

California Commonwealth Club, Best Juvenile Fiction, 2005

Junior Library Guild Selection

The book is only 5 years old. Is the publishing world operating in dog years, where a 5 year old book is actually 35 and consequently ancient? Couldn't it at least qualify as a classic under those conditions? I can only hope that there is a shiny new release on the horizon. Heck, I'd take a paperback edition.

Just for Fun

So I, like many people, am totally addicted to Facebook. I'd probably be a better blogger if I wasn't constantly searching for Easter eggs, or sending goofy messages to my friends, or even updating my iread account.

But in an attempt to make my Facebook experience slightly more professional, I've set up a group called Children's Books That Deserve to be Republished. So if you are also a Facebook enthusiast, and you have some favorites that you would like to see back in print, then drop on in and leave it on the wall.

Bedtime Stories

Skippyjon Jones in Mummy Trouble (Schachner, Judy)
Wilfred the Rat (Stevenson, James)

I'm not a fan of Skippyjon Jones, the Siamese cat who insists that he is a chihuahua, but I have to admit that I liked this outing. Maybe it's because he wasn't as willfully naughty as he has been in past books. Maybe it was Judy Schachner's narration (I confess, we listened to CD, rather than test my cold-plagued voice) and her funny little accent and rolling of her R's. Maybe it was the reference to the "Under Mundo" and the fact that The Night Tourist was still fresh in my memory. Whatever it was--I liked this one. Skippyjon decides that he wants to visit Ancient Egypt. And, despite the warnings of his own Mummy (warning that he will get scared,) Skippyjon escapes to his closet and sets off on adventure with his band of Chimichangos. There are plenty of silly worditos, as in the previous books, which I think is part of the appeal.

And continuing my efforts to highlight any book with favorable representations of rats, I present Wilfred the Rat. James Stevenson, for all of his wry brilliance, is rapidly approaching Lost Treasure status. His Worst Person in the World books are pretty hard to come by, as are his Monty stories. "Wilfred" tells the story of a rat who finds himself at an amusement park abandoned for the winter. While there he befriends a squirrel and a chipmunk who show him the pleasures of a pleasure park when there are no people to chase them away. These are Wilfred's first friends, and when he has the opportunity to chose between fame or friends, the choice is easy. You can add "loyalty" to the list of fine ratty qualities!

Lost Treasures #3--John Patrck Norman McHennessy-the boy who was always late, By John Burningham

John Burningham is one of those authors that I did not discover until I was an adult. Had I grown up in his native England, it would have been a completely different story. But here in the States he's just another respected import. His classic, Mr. Gumpy's Outing, is listed by Anita Silvey (talk about gurus!) as one of the 100 best books for children, but other than that his droll little windows into a child's psyche seem to come and go. A quick search on Amazon.com shows that of three pages of titles, only half a dozen or so are still in print. Again, it's a different story in the UK, but American fans need to catch his books in the initial print run.

John Patrick Norman McHennessy-the boy who was always late (we'll call it JPNM for short) is a frequent bedtime favorite at our house. It's the simple story of a boy making his way "along the road to learn." Each day he meets seemingly insurmountable hurdles (a crocodile leaping out of a drain, a lion sneaking out of the bushes, a tidal wave washing over a bridge) yet he vanquishes them all, only to come up against a higher hurdle--his teacher's disbelief. The teacher is straight out of the Oxford Don book of fashion, with a log black coat, four-point cap, and a total lack of imagination. Various punishments are meted out to JPNM--standing in the corner, writing out "I must not tell lies" 500 times, solitary confinement, and even the threat of a good thrashing. The teacher not only discredits JPNM's stories, but he gets unreasonably irate about the loss of a glove, torn trousers, and the fact that the boy arrives sopping wet (which is to be expected when you've nearly been washed away by an unexpected tidal wave!) But revenge is sweet, and by the end of the story we see that JPNM has not been traveling along the road to learn for nothing.

I find that children have an amazing capacity for magic while understanding the world in completely literal terms. If JPNM said a lion sprang out of the bushes, well of course it did, even if that's not supposed to happen. John Burningham's books wonderfully capture this dichotomy, and it makes them great fun for the adult reader.

Lost Treasures #2--Pig Pig and the Magic Photo Album

This entry is completely biased, because I am a HUGE fan of David McPhail. So of course I can't imagine how a book as imaginative as Pig Pig and the Magic Photo Album could possibly go out of print. But it has! It seems strange, since David McPhail is such an active and respected author. Which just goes to show that there are no guarantees in publishing. Pig Pig has his own series of books and was already a well-appreciated--if not beloved--character by the time this entry came along. (It has always proven a winner in story time.) The story is deceptively simple: Pig Pig is waiting to have his photo taken. While the photographer fiddles about with his camera, Pig Pig is idly flipping through a photo album, practicing saying, "Cheese!" He looks at a picture of a church, says "Cheese!" to himself, and Voila! Pig Pig is hanging by his suspender strap from the very church steeple in the picture! Pig Pig proceeds to "Cheese!" himself from picture to picture, in and out of trouble, until he finds himself back in his very own living room, covered in chocolate, but safe. Characters hopping in and out of pictures has been covered in James Mayhew's "Katie" series, and the outstanding The Incredible Painting of Felix Clousseau (Agee, Jon.) And the "Zoom" series (Banyai, Istvan) turns the process in on itself by revealing each page to be a smaller detail from the following page, to the extent that the reader has the feeling of jumping into the pictures by pulling back from them. (It's very clever.) As in Mole Music and Drawing Lessons from a Bear, McPhail studies the transforming nature of art--in Pig Pig's case, quite literally! Plus, Pig Pig's picture hopping gives McPhail the opportunity to draw a number of humorous scenarios which would otherwise be completely random and unrelated. Now doesn't that sound like just the sort of book that should be reissued?

Lost Treasures--The Church Mice books by Graham Oakley

One of the many joys of my job as a librarian is, of course, the opportunity to work with books. Although every book is sacred, to borrow a phrase from Monty Python, there are times when I have to do what's known as weeding--get rid of old, dirty, and (sadly) unread books. Weeding hurts but, like digging out a splinter, is necessary (and, like the laundry, seemingly never ending!) Who wants to borrow a filthy book that looks like it's contagious--and I don't mean with the love of learning. Some books are worn out because they are so popular and have been read and adored by countless patrons. These are pulled out with a clean conscience, safe in the knowledge that they are books which have served their purpose and had a satisfying book existence. You order a new copy. All is right with the universe.

Then there are those books that have been loved to pieces, and really need to be replaced, but--oh no!--they are out of print. What to do? There are only so many times you can glue and tape and recover and rebind a book before it really has to go. At that point you pray to the book gods that someone in their right mind will see fit to reissue that book, so that such difficult decisions need never have to be made again.

The Church Mice books are just the sort of books I am talking about. PLEASE! Somebody reissue them!

If you have not yet read the Church Mice books--quick!--get yourself to your local library and look for them, before they fall apart from years of love and have to be withdrawn. Because I guarantee these books have not been sitting on the shelf ignored for the last thirty years. The inaugural volume, The Church Mouse, tells the story of Arthur and Sampson, a mouse and a ginger tabby cat who live in the vestry at St. John's Church, Wortlethorpe, England. They are soon joined by every mouse in the city. Despite the fact that cat and mouse are mortal enemies, they are all good friends, because Sampson has listened to so many sermons about brotherly love that he would never dream of harming the mice--although it is just such a dream which nearly proves to be the rodents' undoing in one of the many hilarious, detailed picture sequences later in the book. These books are jam packed with droll humor in one of the most successful marriages of words and images in the history of Children's Literature (I kid you not!) Picture books are so often reduced to ABC's and 123's and considered "for babies." Not so in this case! These stories are to picture books what BBC comedies are to TV. They are a joy to read and a joy to look at with more hidden treats and puzzles than a Where's Waldo anthology. The Church Mouse and its sequels elevated the craft of the picture book to a level of sublimity not often seen in the age of celebrity books and cartoon knock-offs, and if there is any justice in this world, they will be reissued sometime soon. Let the campaign start here!