The first in a series of micro reviews of rare, great and unique children’s books from One Potato.net
I don’t remember more than a dozen or so picture books from my own childhood, and indeed that may have been all there ever were in the rotation. The best picture books are designed to be read over and over: sure, we know what happens in the end, but we still can’t believe how we got there.
Now, in this age of picture book plenty, with titles available from Norway to New Zealand, from yesterday and fifty years ago, used and new, for as little as a penny plus the cost of delivery, it can be tempting to want to briefly visit every one of these far-flung destinations, and yet I think it is also possible to rely upon the same small collection and come out all right. Maybe better than all right. Curious. Independent. With a sense of humor undeterred by reflexive pieties, and an attention span worthy of our position in the evolutionary chain. Both beloved in our little corner of the larger cosmic story, and determined to want to clear out a couple of those corners by ourselves.
There are no Greatest Books, only ones you would personally rescue from a flood. Here are one reader’s suggestions, today and next week, and the week after that.
Miss Rumphius by Barbara Cooney (Viking Books, 1982)
Here is a story also written by the classic illustrator of more than one hundred other books. A little girl living in a busy port city dreams of traveling to faraway places. Which she does – to a tropical island, to jungles, to snowy mountains – and remains single, and happy (“almost perfectly”), before finally retiring to a seaside village where she takes to scattering the seeds of blue and purple lupines, and setting an example for the neighboring children “to make the world more beautiful.” The Lupine Lady they call her, with no idea of the places she’s been, but they are attentive. This may sound overly reverential on the surface, and even old-fashioned, but Cooney tells this story – as always panoramically illustrated – without a hint of the sort of breathlessness that might have hinted at some Larger Meaning. Sprightly and self-sufficient, like the life that informs it.
—series photo by DarrelBirkett/Flickr