January 15, 2009
I guess I didn't grow up in an Anglophilic enough house, because I didn't know about Roger Hargreaves' Mr. Men and Little Miss series until the kid was born. [The wife, on the other hand, had them at school....
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Posted by greg at
10:05 AM
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Comments (7)
January 13, 2009
I'm a sucker for a good photographic picture book. And Three Potato Four has one. It's A Book of Snails, by Sally Moffet Kellin, with photographs by Martin Iger, published in 1968. Following the not-slimy trail backward, I see...
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Posted by greg at
10:16 AM
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Comments (1)
January 9, 2009
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } Rokuro Taniuchi 11, originally uploaded by A Journey Round My Skull. For nearly 26 years...
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Posted by greg at
12:41 AM
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Comments (0)
January 6, 2009
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } marianne thalmann 7, originally uploaded by A Journey Round My Skull. Turns out the Maurice...
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Posted by greg at
10:22 AM
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Comments (0)
Johnny Cash's one-armed man who can't cry and his laughing whore might have to move to the back of the Depressing Children's Book Bus. Because here comes Bertolt Brecht's The Three Soldiers who can't laugh--until they're lined up against a...
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Posted by greg at
8:41 AM
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Comments (1)
I want to fix the CPSIA, the CPSC's new lead testing law, and save all the various children's product industries from regulation-induced bankruptcy and collapse on February 10th as much as the next guy. But I would like to do...
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Posted by greg at
12:18 AM
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Comments (3)
January 5, 2009
It may have given up on the Feel-Good Die-Cut Children's Book Of The Year Award before it even went to press, but Scott Reifsnyder's The Man Who Couldn't Cry is still a contender for the Look-Good competition. Scott's beautiful,...
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Posted by greg at
3:28 PM
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Comments (0)
January 1, 2009
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } Gianni Franzoni, Child, Nothing, originally uploaded by A Journey Round My Skull. Add me to...
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Posted by greg at
9:53 AM
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Comments (1)
December 31, 2008
Hmm, look what else is in that New Jersey basement. An unopened Creative Playthings Playsack, which, as you could probably guess, is a giant paper bag that a kid is supposed to play in. The eBay description is intriguingly...
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2:57 PM
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Comments (0)
December 29, 2008
While I'm a bit nonplussed by the relentless, overpriced refinement of that Porsche sled, and the 911 footie pajamas aren't working for me, I have to say, this Porsche coloring book could actually be awesome. Instead of a typical...
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Posted by greg at
10:09 PM
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Comments (3)
December 21, 2008
From the late 1950's to around 1970 when his self-published collections of erotica kind of pushed his editors over the edge, Tomi Ungerer was an edgy, awesome, dominant influence in the children's book world. Even if the US market couldn't...
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Posted by greg at
11:20 PM
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Comments (3)
December 19, 2008
The rest of the economy may be tanking, but people who have their money tied up in original EH Shepard artwork for Winnie-the-Pooh books can take comfort from the results of the big sale at Sotheby's Wednesday. The results...
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5:29 PM
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Comments (2)
December 17, 2008
You're watching a trippy, old morphing alphabet animation from 1970's Sesame Street and you wonder why they don't make them like that anymore? No sweat, you're just looking in the wrong country. If you don't mind a few funny...
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Posted by greg at
12:40 AM
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Comments (1)
December 9, 2008
The kid loves her Miroslav Sasek book, This Is Paris, even if she'll be disappointed when she gets there to find the Metro has no first class car, and all the cape-wearing policemen on bicycles have retired. Grain Edit...
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Posted by greg at
9:11 AM
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Comments (1)
December 2, 2008
I wish I could forget how much I despise Ayn Rand. Things just published this excerpt from a 1971 collection of essays called, The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolutionwhere she tried to paint a horrific view of the world if...
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Posted by greg at
9:26 PM
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Comments (7)
December 1, 2008
Last year, photographer Raul Gutierrez introduced us to yakskin babywearing, Tibetan-style. This year, he's got a list of "non-obvious" picture books that are in heavy rotation in their house. The real find for me is one that feels like it's...
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Posted by greg at
9:30 PM
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Comments (1)
"Hi. I'm Dallas Clayton. This is my place. You're obviously here because you want to know more about me. I wrote a book. It's called, An Awesome Book. It's awesome. It's better than any book that's ever...existed. I don't...
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Posted by greg at
10:56 AM
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Comments (5)
November 30, 2008
Stanley Seeger and Christopher Cone have amassed and divested themselves of several major collections over the years: Picassos, early and mid-20th century art, and now Ernest Howard Shepard. In London December 17th, Sotheby's will auction off the couple's incredible...
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Posted by greg at
5:43 PM
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Comments (2)
I picked up a copy at the library sale of one of the stranger Babar titles I've ever seen: the 1965 Babar Comes To Amerca. Any history of the decline of children's culture into the pit of commercialism will...
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1:25 PM
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Comments (1)
November 25, 2008
Readers of the previous Ikea post may have the mistaken impression that I disapprove of the "shipping palette aesthetic." Pas de tout. I mean, just check out this insane kids room built by a dad somewhere in France sometime in...
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Posted by greg at
10:14 AM
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Comments (1)
November 24, 2008
So you want to prep yourself for Thanksgiving table discussions of the Overparenting Crisis, but, what with the baby yoga and Mandarin playgroups, you don't have time? No problem. Joan Acocella has summed it all up for you in this...
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Posted by greg at
9:04 AM
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Comments (3)
November 20, 2008
If you are a journalist who followed his wife to Burma for her Medecins sans Frontieres gig, and so you ended up being the one who took care of your infant son most of the time, and you ended...
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Posted by greg at
1:11 PM
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Comments (0)
November 12, 2008
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } 1700 JAPANESE BABIES -- Back in the Days When the Japanese Were Actually Having SEX,...
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2:09 PM
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Comments (0)
November 10, 2008
I'll admit it: the kid is hip-hop-deprived. the closest I've gotten to rapping for her is shouting out "Help the police! Help, help, help the police!" when I get pulled over, and chanting a few fragments of Tom Tom...
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8:07 PM
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Comments (1)
October 31, 2008
At the library the other day, I flipped through the children's books for sale, a usually motley shelful of discards, donated books, and junk. This time, though, there was a great old copy of Leo Lionni's Frederick; a nice...
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1:45 PM
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Comments (1)
October 25, 2008
Jim found a 1983 coloring book, On The Road With Mr. T in a thrift store. "The captions were incredibly boring," he says, "so I rewrote some of them." And how. I cannot, for the life of me, imagine...
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8:47 AM
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Comments (2)
October 23, 2008
I can't quite figure out what Jean Réal's new book, Mots Animaux, actually contains. And though I get that it has something to do with animals, this artsy animated trailer of abstracted animals in reverse alphabetical order doesn't help...
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1:36 AM
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Comments (1)
October 20, 2008
The magazine, book publishing and TV show didn't work out, so ex-New Yorker editor [seems so long ago] Tina Brown launches a website, The Daily Beast, which "sees itself as a must-read for hipsters in news, politics and pop culture."...
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Posted by greg at
10:26 PM
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Comments (6)
October 13, 2008
I like context, backstory, credits, and yes, the occasional "put in shopping basket" link, so I don't like random web collections of sheer eye candy. But for this 500 image-and-counting flickr pool, I'll make an exception: This artist, Ric Hugo,...
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Posted by greg at
10:30 PM
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Comments (1)
October 11, 2008
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } A Peaceable Kingdom, The Shaker Abecedarius, originally uploaded by Hillary Lang. I backed into this...
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Posted by greg at
10:00 AM
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Comments (0)
October 2, 2008
A couple more interesting-looking vintage children's books from The Memory of The Netherlands: Hi Ha Canada is a sweet, modernist celebration by graphic artist Mart Kempers of the liberation of Holland by Canadian and Scottish troops in World War II....
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Posted by greg at
10:27 PM
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Comments (0)
Did you know it's actually pronounced "KEE-koh", not "Chee-koh"? Just one of the many things I learned from Pamela Paul's book, Parenting, Inc. One thing that's not in the book: the Italian word for pacifier. Succhietto. [SOO-kyee-Etto] And I...
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Posted by greg at
8:49 PM
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Comments (0)
October 1, 2008
Make no small web plans. The ambitiously titled site, "The Memory of the Netherlands" combines nearly 400,000 objects from 67 different collections, including selected scans of nearly 700 illustrated books from 1810 to 1950. The 1925 Nieuw Indisch ABC...
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Posted by greg at
11:50 PM
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Comments (1)
September 29, 2008
I just stumbled onto Nancy Willard's interesting-sounding book of poems for children by a kind of circuitous route, while researching the illustrators, Alice and Martin Provensen. See, they'd done a sweet and simple version of Robert Louis Stevenson's A...
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Posted by greg at
7:10 PM
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Comments (4)
September 27, 2008
Just got my copy of the 2001 edition of Peter Drijver and Johannes Niemeijer's How to construct Rietveld Furniture; it's pretty sweet. There are designs and plans for 38 pieces, including four kid-specific designs: two high chairs and two toys,...
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Posted by greg at
3:04 PM
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Comments (0)
September 19, 2008
One of the biggest losses of my recent hard drive crash was the interview I did a while back with Pamela Paul about Parenting, Inc., her awesome and revealing book on the Baby Industrial Complex. See, rather than try to...
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Posted by greg at
4:20 PM
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Comments (3)
My Dad's Pick, Barack Obama by some happy kid in Michigan [image chris carlson/ap via daylife]...
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Posted by greg at
12:42 PM
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Comments (3)
September 18, 2008
Has is been four years already? Then it must be time for a long, brainy-seeming thinkpiece on the deeper cultural significance of Babar. In 2004 it was Alison Lurie in the New York Review of Books with the supposed evils...
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9:43 PM
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Comments (1)
We really like Dr. T. Berry Brazelton's Touchpoints books; they present research findings and what Brazelton looks for in child development in a very approachable, useful way. Now it turns out Brazelton ["and his colleague Dr. Josh Sparrow," gotta plan...
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1:10 PM
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Comments (0)
September 15, 2008
Remember the 1980's, when Iran and Iraq were fighting a bloody, nearly decade-long war? Yeah, neither does anyone else, now that the two countries are all curled up in bed together with the Shi'ites tucked under their chins. [sorry,...
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Posted by greg at
2:17 PM
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Comments (1)
September 8, 2008
Was 1992 really so long, long ago? That's when Ellen O'Shaughnessy, a teacher of retarded special ed mentally disabled special needs kids wrote her PC heart-bearingly titled children's book, Somebody Called Me a Retard Today ... and My Heart Felt...
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Posted by greg at
9:51 AM
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Comments (3)
September 5, 2008
If there's an daddy who knows his way around type, it's conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner. Since the late 1960's, he's been using text--and language and actions and instructions, even punctuation--as a medium. He's best known for his wall installations,...
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9:05 PM
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Comments (1)
September 1, 2008
I don't know what the Journal of Social History has been working on for the last three years, but they're finally getting around to reviewing Robert Darby's groundbreaking historical book, A Surgical Temptation: The Demonization of the Foreskin and the...
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Posted by greg at
11:59 PM
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Comments (0)
August 30, 2008
Awesome. Paris-based artist Eric Tabuchi spent four years collecting the photographs for his latest project, Alphabet Truck. He's exhibited them in combination to make words and phrases. [I don't know if there are signed editions of the individual prints...
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Posted by greg at
10:25 PM
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Comments (0)
August 28, 2008
After her bush baby characters appeared on the cover of another author's book, and in a series of popular booklets, Australian illustrator May Gibbs published The Tales of Snugglepot and Cuddlepie in 1918, during the country's Armistice celebrations. For...
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Posted by greg at
7:58 AM
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Comments (4)
August 18, 2008
I was just saying to Andy, sometimes having another kid feels like Groundhog Day; it only dawns on you slowly that you're going through the exact same ordeals as you did before [e.g., kid fighting her naps like crazy; or...
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Posted by greg at
4:09 PM
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Comments (3)
Bah! Kids and their dads' iPhones! Back when I was a boy, the phone was on the wall, and we weren't allowed to play with it. We had a toy phone made of wood, that made some ringing noise, and...
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Posted by greg at
7:22 AM
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Comments (5)
August 14, 2008
Maybe it was the throwback, sexist conservatism of the 1960's ruling class. Or maybe it was the Hamptons. Or maybe it was that little Campbell McCoy asked her dad the exact same question as Shelby. But discovering Michael Braude's series...
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Posted by greg at
7:26 AM
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Comments (1)
August 13, 2008
See? Not everyone riffing on Sanjay Patel's awesome little Little India Hindu deities is knocking them off. Plush artist Leeanna Butcher went to art school with Patel, and he recently asked her to create this plush incarnation of Kali,...
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Posted by greg at
5:21 PM
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Comments (2)
August 12, 2008
So great. Favell Lee Mortimer was one of the best-selling children's book authors in 19th century England. Her first book, a sadistic-sounding Bible primer for toddlers titled, The Peep of Day; or, a Series of the Earliest Religious Instruction the...
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Posted by greg at
3:14 PM
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Comments (0)
August 11, 2008
More finds from the history of children's books that used photography instead of illustrations or paintings: I discovered Let's Go Outdoors in a used bookstore in St. George, Utah a couple of weeks ago. It was Harriet Huntington's first...
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11:52 AM
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Comments (0)
August 8, 2008
Wow, after 26 months of wrestling with infertility, blogger and DT pal Matthew M.F. Miller and his wife got the big news: the positive pregnancy test. Even more awesome: they found out just as he was doing a podcast to...
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Posted by greg at
11:25 PM
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Comments (0)
August 5, 2008
And no, the burglar hiding in the restroom didn't steal it, or Jason Polan would have included it in the comic book retelling of the burglary. "Breaking And Entering: Jack Spade Comic Book by Jason Polan [racked]...
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Posted by greg at
8:04 AM
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Comments (0)
August 1, 2008
In the 1960's, at the height of the Cold War, and just as their country needed them to fight the Communists in Southeast Asia, America's Youth were abandoning the ideals their parents had fought so hard for, turning into...
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Posted by greg at
9:50 AM
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Comments (1)
July 31, 2008
St George, Utah, a sleepy Mormon pioneer town in the desert my in-laws just retired to, has all grown up. It even has a great used bookstore run by friendly, rainbow stickered Subaru-driving Obama supporters, which is where I...
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Posted by greg at
11:03 AM
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Comments (0)
July 22, 2008
Huh. Here's an Amazon commenter's description of the 2004 politically minded reinterpretation of a classic children's book, Pat The Bunny. It's called Pat the Politician:See what is inside Bush II's head (nothing), touch Bill Clinton's underpants, pull Barbara Bush's...
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Posted by greg at
12:53 PM
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Comments (0)
July 21, 2008
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } Brahma, Kali, Ganesha, originally uploaded by daddytypes. So we were driving around Salt Lake City...
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Posted by greg at
11:43 PM
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Comments (4)
Wow, The Morning News is back from vacation, and how. As if in answer to my offhand Facebook Generation [sic] question, Kevin Fanning and Kean Soo have created Baby's First Internet, a boardbook in slideshow format. It is awesome:...
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Posted by greg at
10:24 AM
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Comments (1)
So Saturday we flew out from Washington, DC to Utah for a couple of weeks to see various grandparents--and the Spiral Jetty, of course, but that won't be until next week. No matter how many times we do it, flying...
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Posted by greg at
12:14 AM
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Comments (14)
July 13, 2008
When you're a dad-to-be with a nursery to outfit, the most important thing is to go with a name you can trust. That's why Ortho, a division of the Chevron Chemical Corporation, and the maker of Round-Up, America's favorite herbicide,...
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Posted by greg at
3:55 PM
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Comments (1)
It was Spring 2006 when I demanded more parody versions of Goodnight, Moon. And now that the most jaw-droppingly awesome, hilarious, and politically charged parody has hit the shelves, not only do I not get credit for its inspiration,...
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1:26 PM
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Comments (0)
July 9, 2008
Dear Buyer Of It Now for this rare, unmarked copy of Timothy Leary's 1967 History of the Psychedelic Movement Cartoon and Coloring Book: If you're not planning on publishing a facsimile version, please at least post a set of print-quality...
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Posted by greg at
8:47 PM
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Comments (1)
July 4, 2008
The NY Times has tiny, Zagat-style reviews of five backpack carriers, four new, and one ratty old Chicco, which still does just fine. Whatever the results, the product list reads like some sort of shroom-fuelled branding poem: Deuter Kid...
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Posted by greg at
9:52 AM
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Comments (3)
If you loved Buffy, but you didn't notice it went off the air until a year later, or if you grew up wanting to be Samantha, but you were surprised when someone told you last year there were two Darrens...
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7:49 AM
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Comments (1)
June 27, 2008
Alec Soth is a photographer of the studied mundane, a Minnesotan inspired by folks like Robert Frank or William Eggleston, whose images create a sense of overlooked place. When he and his wife went to Bogota, Colombia to pick...
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Posted by greg at
8:31 AM
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Comments (0)
June 25, 2008
I just got my copy of Ogden Nash's The Bad Parent's Garden of Verse; it's pretty wordy. But here's one short, sweet, cautionary poem for dadbloggers:My Daddy I have a funny daddy Who goes in and out with me And...
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Posted by greg at
11:57 PM
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Comments (1)
June 23, 2008
I saw this in the paper this weekend, illustrating an article about the Federal Reserve. It's awesome, as if Eric Carle illustrated The Economist. The actual artist, Philip Anderson, has a very nice-looking portfolio, but I can't find any...
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Posted by greg at
2:13 PM
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Comments (1)
June 20, 2008
In her new book, ARE WE THERE YET?: The Golden Age of American Family Vacations Susan Sessions Rugh says Ford had an ad campaign selling their cars as "America's schoolhouse on wheels." Which reminds me that I have to finish...
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Posted by greg at
12:29 PM
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Comments (1)
Neal Pollack writes in Salon about doing salvia [salvia divinorum, a still-legal-in-some-states hallucinogen that provides a very short, very intense high] a couple of times a year, in his basement, after the kid's asleep. Neal's right that salvia videos are...
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Posted by greg at
10:25 AM
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Comments (1)
June 18, 2008
Thanks to CBS News, we all know there's a reading crisis in America. An NEA survey shows that barely half of adults read a book in 2004. Reading proficiency is dropping dramatically in every age group. [Except for 9 year...
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Posted by greg at
7:33 AM
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Comments (10)
June 17, 2008
Sheesh, NonToxicReviews makes me feel so unproductive. I don't know what you did last weekend, but Mr. Stinkhead created PDF's and howto's for two awesome DIY kid's books in the course of just three days--and the one day he...
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Posted by greg at
10:25 AM
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Comments (2)
June 16, 2008
Staging the Renegade Craft Fair in the Pool at McCarren Park Pool is a great way to crystallize the cultural divide that is Williamsburg: you walk through thousands of Hispanic families camped out under every tree in the park,...
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Posted by greg at
8:22 AM
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Comments (0)
June 11, 2008
Over the weekend, two major comic artists, Art Spiegelman and Gary Panter, discussed their inspiration at a symposium organized by NYU and The Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art. Via Artforum's report:The letters L, S, and D rolled off their...
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Posted by greg at
12:41 AM
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Comments (0)
June 3, 2008
If you're a fan of Charley Harper's trademark 'minimal realism,' but you're not itching to drop a thousand dollars for a vintage copy of his magnum illustratus, the 1961 Giant Golden Book of Biology - An Introduction to the...
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Posted by greg at
8:46 PM
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Comments (2)
May 21, 2008
Now I love me some Yoshitomo Nara. Maybe not as much as Takashi Murakami loves him, but still. I just wonder if the mischievous-bordering-on-evil-looking little kids he paints are really appropriate for children. If you want to find out,...
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Posted by greg at
11:25 PM
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Comments (0)
May 20, 2008
From the Boston Globe's profile of early childhood development researcher Nancy Carlsson-Paige, all I can figure about her new book, Taking Back Childhood: Helping Your Kids Thrive in a Fast-Paced, Media-Saturated, Violence-Filled World, is that kids should cut back...
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Posted by greg at
8:05 AM
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Comments (4)
May 7, 2008
I was up too late watching the primary returns, so I couldn't go stand outside the Today Show this morning while Heather talks about our book, Things I Learned About My Dad (in therapy). But I think I'll be...
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Posted by greg at
7:11 AM
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Comments (2)
April 30, 2008
And by "our," of course, I mean "Dooce." Way back, Heather Armstrong invited me [1] to write an essay for her anthology on fathers and fatherhood, Things I Learned About My Dad (in therapy). The book was just released yesterday,...
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Posted by greg at
7:39 AM
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Comments (4)
April 28, 2008
David & Kelly Sopp's Safe Baby Pregnancy Tips has been around almost as long as their Safe Baby Handling Tips. But sometimes it takes someone posting damn near the whole thing online before it really sinks in. Though it's...
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Posted by greg at
11:56 PM
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Comments (0)
April 25, 2008
Pixi Books, or Pixi Bücher, are the German equivalent of Golden Books. Since 1953, the Vaterland's Kindershelves have been filled with over 1,500 identically sized titles, [10x10cm], and all grouped and numbered in little series with German precision. I'm sure...
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Posted by greg at
10:15 AM
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Comments (3)
April 21, 2008
Ferdinand the Bull was published in 1936. It was a bestseller, so much so that Walt Disney produced a color, animated version of the story in 1938, which won the Academy Award for best animated short in 1939. [They're...
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Posted by greg at
10:09 PM
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Comments (2)
April 16, 2008
My Beautiful Mommy is a new book by Dr. Michael Salzhauer, a plastic surgeon in North Miami Beach. It helps kids understand why mommy is getting a tummy tuck and a nose job, but it doesn't mention anything about...
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Posted by greg at
3:05 PM
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Comments (26)
April 14, 2008
It's not perfect, but it's a perfect artifact of the era: The 1973 collection of poems by Swedish poet/writer/school teacher Siv Widerberg was published by The Feminist Press under the title, "I'm Like Me: Poems for people who want to...
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Posted by greg at
11:56 AM
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Comments (0)
While the wife and K2 were in NYC, the kid and I went to the book sale at the library over the weekend. It was in unusually good form: seven books for an embarrassing $1.40, including Bruno Munari's Zoo;...
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Posted by greg at
12:01 AM
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Comments (6)
April 9, 2008
I'm re-reading Calvin Trillin's 1998 book, Family Man, and it's rather more interesting now that I'm a dad. Jim's right, he's the godfather of all typing daddies, not just those who make a big deal about changing tables in the...
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Posted by greg at
8:49 PM
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Comments (3)
March 31, 2008
Well, that didn't take long. BabyGap Home went live on the gap.com site today, and first impressions: not bad, for a total chickfest. It's definitely a small, tightly edited collection of brands and stuff; the BabyGap flagship product seems...
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Posted by greg at
11:37 PM
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Comments (6)
I've been trying to finish Parenting, Inc., the new book about the baby industrial complex and the commercialization of parenting by Time magazine reporter Pamela Paul. So far, I'm about 3/4 through, and my review copy is marked up and...
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Posted by greg at
11:25 AM
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Comments (0)
March 25, 2008
Popup by Marion BatailleUploaded by jacques_faciale I swear, when I posted about "V is for Viagra: An ABC Pop-Up Book" yesterday, I had no idea that the design/geek blogworld would be getting so aroused at that very moment over a...
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6:10 PM
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March 24, 2008
It's a little librarian-nerdy, but every once in a while, I like to get my fix of The Horn Book, the venerable trade magazine of the children's book business. It's like reading KidScreen, the kids TV industry magazine, only slightly...
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Posted by greg at
10:37 PM
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Comments (1)
March 18, 2008
Clearing the ol' browser tabs: The NY Times used a new Central Park playground as a slightly irrelevant hook for discussing a new book from Rutgers University Press, Designing Modern Childhoods: History, Space, and the Material Culture of Children. Apparently,...
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9:31 AM
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March 13, 2008
In the NY Times, Tony Scott rips Jim Carrey's dismal performance as Horton, but this line almost makes me want to see the movie anyway:All kinds of extraneous elements are added to the story. The Mayor of Who-ville, voiced by...
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9:08 PM
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Comments (4)
March 4, 2008
Did you know the slippery slope applies to posting about oddball coloring books, too? Once you've posted about a few, you're stuck. And when something like Erik Ruhling's The Torture Device Coloring Book comes along, with its cheesy rhymes...
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12:36 PM
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February 22, 2008
As if Peter Rabbit weren't anachronistic enough, what with all the "presentlys" and cucumber frames and fortnights and whatwhat, a couple of Egyptologists at the British Museum have translated the text faithfully [sic] into hieroglyphics. The sign for "whom"...
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7:42 AM
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February 21, 2008
Finally, Mr. Stinkhead has figured out what to do with his massive Playmobil collection while his son is still in the Serious Choke Hazard Stage. he set up little dioramas, took some pictures, and made a little book called,...
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Posted by greg at
10:02 AM
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February 19, 2008
Dr. Karp, the sultan of swaddle, soothe and swing, has a new book out an August pub date for the revised edition of his 2005 book [huh? -ed.] The Happiest Toddler On The Block. Because apparently, "Logic and persuasion, common...
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Posted by greg at
8:55 AM
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Comments (7)
February 16, 2008
Holy Moley. The woman who runs the whimsical world from her 100-acre Connecticut farm, Sandra Boynton, has just one assistant, that's it. She has sold a half billion copies of over 4,000 greeting cards. If they were stacked on...
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8:21 PM
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Comments (8)
While poking around the Jim Flora Store on eBay, I found another interesting, new release that's worth a mention in these here nursery-friendly parts: modern silkscreen editions of a rare promotional booklet that Flora did in 1954 for CBS...
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6:41 PM
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Gotta figure out a way to break into the cabal of illustrators who got early word on this incredible print by the late, great Jim Flora. It's an archival reissue of an original multicolor woodblock print of Manhattan from...
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5:17 PM
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Comments (1)
February 13, 2008
Lifelong New Yorker Helen Levitt is one of the masters of street photography, the kind of candid, revelatory imagemaking that, as a NYT reviewer once wrote, "combine[s] intuition and intellect to forge sophisticated, lyrical compositions from commonplace events." If...
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10:54 AM
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Comments (0)
February 11, 2008
Global war on terror harshing your buzz? Ever thought what it'd be like if, like, all the jihadi Muslims were actually just the figment of some galactic giant's imagination? Or maybe they're, like, atoms on the fingertip of some...
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Posted by greg at
10:35 AM
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Comments (3)
February 7, 2008
It's my kid in a box, baby! From the 1946 advice book, Mother and Baby Care In Pictures, comes this cardboard box done up as a crib:An improvised bed made from a corrugated carton by an ingenious father. Not...
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Posted by greg at
7:06 AM
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Comments (3)
February 4, 2008
What could you write about at your Lolita bed/desk? In the United Kingdom of the aliterate, the Wikipedia reader is king. Woolworth's has pulled the Lolita Midsleeper Combi, a writing desk/loft bed for young girls, after a heated, if...
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Posted by greg at
10:21 AM
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Comments (5)
February 1, 2008
The Graffiti Coloring Book featured here last fall, which was put out by the Fakeproject Corporation of America, has its strengths. It provides eager young taggers with truck- and mailbox-shaped tabulae rasae on which to practice their craft. But...
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Posted by greg at
11:21 AM
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Comments (1)
January 24, 2008
It's been out for a couple of years, but Safe Baby Handling Tips is a classic. It's by Kelly and David Sopp, the founders of Wry Baby, and its helpful instructional diagrams will provide literally minutes of raucous, entertaining...
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Posted by greg at
11:02 PM
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Comments (3)
January 23, 2008
I'll give her one thing: Laura Ingraham has a sweet gig. She travels the hopelessly liberal media world, plucking up random bits of news and op-ed for souvenirs, which she takes home and buffs to an inflammatory sheen. Then she...
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Posted by greg at
7:52 AM
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Comments (2)
I've been an admirer of Elisha Cooper's writing since I first got a copy of his book, Crawling: A Father's First Year from his publisher Pantheon in 2006. His stories of taking his newborn daughter to Chez Panisse cracked me...
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Posted by greg at
12:05 AM
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January 19, 2008
There were some exceptions, but in the photos in Edward Steichen's massive 1955 exhibition, The Family of Man, they liked their women nursing or pregnant, and they liked their black people naked, maybe holding a spear. As Louis Kaplan...
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Posted by greg at
9:32 PM
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Comments (7)
January 18, 2008
You know, if the German children's author Rotraut Susanne Berner had actually faced criticism or censorship for depicting a tiny sculpture with a tinier penis in one of her books, I'd be on the front lines defending her and...
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Posted by greg at
2:24 PM
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Comments (1)
January 11, 2008
From Edward Steichen's exhibition, "The Family of Man," this photo of a dad holding his newborn baby is by Dorothea Lange, which I would not have guessed. Lange's Google Image search results were overwhelmed long ago by her photo,...
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1:17 PM
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January 10, 2008
Train your headlights on these tantalizingly ample developments in the lactivists' global battle against the ringleader of Big Formula, Nestlé. Lactivists got to Sean Taylor, the author of When A Monster Is Born, which won gold medal in the 2007...
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Posted by greg at
11:10 AM
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Comments (2)
January 9, 2008
"When a mommy and daddy love each other very much, the daddy wants to give the mommy a special gift. So he buys a stay-at-home server. Then he installs it. It's easy! He does it all by himself." That's...
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Posted by greg at
1:52 PM
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Comments (1)
January 8, 2008
Something's been bugging me since visiting the otherwise over-the-top awesome baby department at Takashimaya [remember the $50,000 white lacquer Richard Meier-ian playhouse?] In a corner, there was a little stack of framed "vintage Babar lithographs, c. 1930's, by Jean...
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Posted by greg at
8:46 AM
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Comments (1)
January 7, 2008
He was a crazy dude, but I love me some Richard Scarry illustration, both his cartoony Cars and Trucks and Things That Go style and his more traditionally watercolor style, like his wonderful paintings for Ole Risom's I Am...
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Posted by greg at
10:21 PM
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Comments (1)
I made a mental note a couple of months ago to look up Toni Frissell's photos in The Family Of Man, the landmark photography exhibition Edward Steichen curated at the Museum of Modern Art in 1955. The show featured...
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Posted by greg at
9:26 PM
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Comments (5)
January 6, 2008
One of the kid's best Christmas books was a Hannukah book which barely got here in time for Christmas. McSweeney's just published Lemony Snicket's The Latke Who Couldn't Stop Screaming at the end of October. Despite having recently bought piles...
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Posted by greg at
3:52 PM
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Comments (3)
Soledad Bravi is apparently the Sandra Boynton of France, if Boynton also worked for Elle Magazine in addition to drawing cutesy-sweet children's books. DT's European travel correspondent Darren and his crew picked up a copy of Le Livre des...
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Posted by greg at
2:40 PM
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Comments (2)
December 31, 2007
In an excellent Boston Globe article, writer Tom Scocca lays out what you already kind of suspected: the burgeoning crop of parenting advice books is designed to lock you in with a combination of authoritativeness and anxiety. Also, yes, the...
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Posted by greg at
8:05 AM
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December 30, 2007
The men of the south Ndebele tribe of South Africa are responsible for building dried mud house compounds for their families, while the women are charged with decorating it with the tribe's distinctive, bold geometric patterns. Inspired by this...
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Posted by greg at
12:01 PM
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December 28, 2007
After discovering these cool-shaped Stump Books series published by Anthony Treherne two turns of the century ago, I thought, wouldn't it be awesome to buy one? If only it didn't cost $750 and/or wasn't full of wildly offensive racist stereotypes......
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Posted by greg at
12:59 PM
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Comments (5)
The kid is familiar with the work of Jacob Lawrence. He's the rectangle guy, duh. And Ellsworth Kelly is the square guy, and Jenny Holzer is the diamond girl... One of the 60 paintings in Jacob Lawrence's masterpiece, The...
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Posted by greg at
8:39 AM
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Comments (1)
December 26, 2007
Somewhere along the way, South Korean photographer JeongMee Yoon noticed that her 8-year-old daughter refused to play with or wear anything that wasn't pink [ya think?!], and so she began the Pink Project and the Blue Project, in which...
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Posted by greg at
9:33 PM
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December 21, 2007
Last week, while following some links from Things Magazine ["the spectre of roaming, near-feral children" ring a bell?], I came across a 2005 Japanese university library exhibition of the Opie Collection of Children's Literature, over 20,000 titles, works of art,...
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Posted by greg at
10:17 PM
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Comments (4)
What have I ever done to Saks, hmm? I mean until their Club Libby Lu started shaking their Baby Paris moneymakers in my face, I never had a bad word in my life for them. And I've been a...
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Posted by greg at
2:38 PM
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Some things spotted around the web: Even though they're tacky and kind of insipid--well, the World Wildlife Federation was, the one for bigger kids, from National Geographic, is not that bad--the kid absolutely loves getting her magazines. It's mail! For...
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Posted by greg at
1:37 PM
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December 14, 2007
I bought that 1944 Toni Frissell edition of Robert Louis Stevenson's 1885 classic, A Child's Garden of Verses I wrote about recently. It's pretty good, but not headsmackingly great; Frissell's photos are a nice change from cutesy pastel drawings, but...
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Posted by greg at
5:29 PM
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Comments (5)
December 13, 2007
Colin Ward? Graham Greene? Adventure playgrounds? creeped out West Village parents? There are like five things I want to link to in it, so instead, I'll just say click over right now to Things Magazine's thoughtful essaypost about how...
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10:50 AM
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And this is the Audi TT Roadster that Eric drove from Miami to extensively remodel the house that The Hungry Caterpillar built. And these are the abstract acrylic collages which replaced the white paper on the Ingo Maurer chandelier...
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Posted by greg at
7:32 AM
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Comments (1)
December 12, 2007
Oops, I didn't know that "the most outstanding children's bookstore in the nation" was in Washington DC. Old Town Alexandria, actually, where a book-passionate couple with no business sense threw popular events, gave away books at storytime, had Harry Potter...
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Posted by greg at
12:24 AM
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Comments (3)
December 10, 2007
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } Saul Bass - Henri's walk to paris c1962, originally uploaded by Grain Edit. Nice. Word...
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Posted by greg at
11:43 AM
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Comments (1)
This is awesome. I love the idea of telling stories with something other than a book. Los Angeles-based artist Geoff McFetridge and his daughter made up a story about a boy who draws monsters which start making other monsters....
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Posted by greg at
8:48 AM
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Comments (0)
December 9, 2007
In 1963, Isaacs was contacted by a University of Chicago child psychiatrist, who wanted to provide individual work/play/living/storage spaces for handicapped and disabled children in state institutions. The resulting design was two 35 5/8" plywood cubes with storage spaces...
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Posted by greg at
7:34 PM
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December 6, 2007
I've been a fan of animation artist Sanjay Patel's take on Hindu's greatest deities and heroes since he first published his book, Little India, in 2005. [The book was greatly expanded last year and published by Penguin as The...
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Posted by greg at
4:13 PM
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Comments (2)
December 5, 2007
Worlds converge, and now maybe I can close some of the twenty-odd browser tabs that I've accumulated. The topics: children's books with photographs instead of illustrations, why our current parenting environment is the way it is, and how different it...
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Posted by greg at
12:31 PM
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Comments (2)
December 4, 2007
Posse Comi-WHAT-us? I can hear you! The kid's been coloring her way through the assembly instructions for Ikea furniture and our new kitchen shelves, so when my dad brought the kid an NSA CryptoKids coloring book a couple of...
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Posted by greg at
10:36 AM
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Comments (2)
Obviously, it's no substitute for an actual sitdown with a real book, but it might be a nice way to watch the computer together. And it though it doesn't have the selection of an airport bookstore yet, much less ye...
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Posted by greg at
9:42 AM
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Chris and his wife Carey feel it's important for their kid to learn Spanish. The lessons of wife-subjugating and child-beating that come with the traditional Mexican nursery rhymes in her little bilingual book are just an added bonus. Lost...
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Posted by greg at
7:35 AM
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Comments (1)
December 3, 2007
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } Where are all the hippie visionaries when you need'em? In the 50's and 60's, designer...
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Posted by greg at
8:27 PM
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Comments (0)
November 30, 2007
One of my ongoing complaints with the Children's Book Industrial Complex is how few titles are illustrated with photographs instead of painting or drawing. Though there are some sweet exceptions, it feels like the whole modern photography world just...
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Posted by greg at
1:02 PM
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Comments (3)
Alright, now that DT reader Rebekah has revealed the secret handshake for accessing the Beinecke Library's children's book collection online [search for "Shirley"], I may have to clear the calendar of any actually useful tasks and posts. Check out the...
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Posted by greg at
9:28 AM
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Comments (2)
Some of the analysis bugs, but Emily Bazelon and Erica Perl ultimately get high fives from me for their Slate slide show on the history of children's books. The reason: they introduced me to Caroline Ketcham Eaton's incomparable 1890...
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Posted by greg at
12:38 AM
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Comments (2)
November 29, 2007
Ouch. You've gotta feel for the budding children's book artist who introduces her meticulously translated, true-to-Grimm, three-color labor of love retelling of Snow White & The Seven Dwarfs in 1937, the year Walt Disney revolutionized cinema with his own...
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Posted by greg at
11:57 PM
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Comments (2)
November 23, 2007
One title that's been on my "must find" list for a long time is Inflatocookbook, a 1971 self-published manifesto and how-to manual for inflatable architecture by the San Francisco-based art collective known as Ant Farm. I just found a...
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Posted by greg at
12:05 AM
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Comments (1)
November 21, 2007
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } The little polar bear - rudolf lukes c1964, originally uploaded by Grain Edit. When the...
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Posted by greg at
7:54 AM
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Comments (0)
November 19, 2007
When Shrek the merino sheep first fled the flock in the year 3 B.L.O.T.R. [ie., 1998], New Zealand was best known for, uh, kiwi fruit? Dancing rugby players? Having more sheep than people? Frankly, I can't tell you. But when...
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Posted by greg at
11:39 PM
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Comments (2)
Hello, slightly random-looking, e-ink-based, wireless, e-book reading device from Amazon. Amazon wants to sell you a Kindle for $400, then sell you digital books and subscriptions to magazines, newspapers, and blogs [?!] to read on it. The content is delivered...
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Posted by greg at
2:27 PM
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Comments (8)
I tell you, you gotta watch out for the robots, they're turning up everywhere. This toy cardboard robot named Danbo was commissioned by Amazon Japan from Azuma Kiyohiko, the creator of the manga character Yotsuba-chan who lives with her...
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Posted by greg at
11:27 AM
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Comments (0)
November 13, 2007
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } fractured fables, originally uploaded by mimulus7. It's amazing what's changed design-wise since 2000, when illustrator/designer...
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Posted by greg at
10:38 PM
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Comments (2)
I'll probably add a couple of items to this retail scoutabout, since two of them aren't really retail: Befuddled Citydweller Baby Gift Alert Marilyn Singer and Carll Cneut's countdown to naptime book, City Lullaby, got a pretty glowing writeup in...
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Posted by greg at
2:50 PM
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Comments (1)
November 12, 2007
This is so sweet. One of my biggest gripes about the whole DK My First Whatever Book series is the ridiculous absence of logos. I know exactly why it's the way it is, but it still bugs; it just...
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Posted by greg at
7:47 AM
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Comments (1)
November 11, 2007
I hate to judge a book by its cover, but even though I can't find any information on the just released Otouto no Oppai, I think I have an idea of what it's about. [The artist/author is Miyanishi Tatsuya,...
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Posted by greg at
9:41 PM
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Comments (2)
November 5, 2007
Alright, I notice there is no comprehensive list of all 25 celebrity doll patterns in Carol Meldrum's book, Knitted Icons: 25 Celebrity Doll Patterns. So I've compiled what I can from the various write-ups, which only make me wonder...
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Posted by greg at
9:01 AM
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Comments (3)
October 27, 2007
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } Japanese toy designs k, originally uploaded by peacay. From the always spectacular BibliOdyssey comes Unaru...
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Posted by greg at
9:37 AM
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Comments (4)
October 26, 2007
It's one of the things that bugs me most about DC: the graffiti in our neighborhood just plain sucks. No style at all, just one nervous hoodlum's crappy black spraypainted tag on every newspaper box. If I thought it'd...
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Posted by greg at
12:53 AM
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Comments (5)
October 25, 2007
You know, I thought the clincher of the story was the UK factory worker dad who spent a year getting his full back tattoo saying, "I’ve always liked Dumbledore – just not in that way." But then I see...
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Posted by greg at
1:56 PM
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Comments (2)
October 18, 2007
New York Magazine says they have read Dave Eggers' and Spike Jonze's script adaptation for Where The Wild Things Are, "…and it is really, really good." Except for Max, of course, whose dad apparently has gone AWOL, which is the...
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Posted by greg at
2:12 PM
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Comments (0)
October 16, 2007
Since I don't watch Oprah and I didn't read the big NYT article about picky eaters, I have to get my Jessica Seinfeld cookbook news from Gawker. And it sounds completely ridiculous. No one but the housekeeper should have to...
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Posted by greg at
11:45 PM
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Comments (18)
When I explained to the kid that I was going to Miami for a couple of days, she drew a blank. Then when I told her it was where the Malfi Playground was, she freaked out. And now I...
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Posted by greg at
9:26 PM
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Comments (4)
October 14, 2007
Recovergirl sets book traps and game traps for her sons, and they apparently always work:you can use book traps to divert your children to different parts of the house. I needed to clean the boy’s room but I knew...
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Posted by greg at
8:30 PM
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Comments (2)
October 10, 2007
My mom gave the kid Maurice Sendak's Nutshell Library for Christmas last year, and at some point, it totally clicked with her. Not just because of the stories, but because of the scale. They're a box set of tiny little,...
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Posted by greg at
7:53 PM
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Comments (4)
October 7, 2007
I love these kinds of discoveries. While poking around Dreams of Space, a compendium website of the history of space-related artwork in children's books, Ward Jenkins found this incredible, obscure 1964 children's book, Space Alphabet is by Irene Zacks,...
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Posted by greg at
4:29 PM
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Comments (1)
October 4, 2007
This was on BabyGadget a little while ago, the FYS Finish Your Self Junior chair made of recycled cardboard--oh wait, no, it's "100% recyclable"--by David Graas, an Amsterdam designer interested in environmentally sound products, or as he puts it...
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Posted by greg at
10:46 PM
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Comments (0)
From the Aug. 2006 DT review of political consultant Jeremy Zilber's children's book, Why Mommy Is A Democrat: Zilber's only consolation--though it's one that won't help Why Mommy's sales--is that the "competition," Help, Mom! There Are Liberals Under My Bed...
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Posted by greg at
1:22 PM
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Comments (1)
October 2, 2007
BoingBoing linked to video of an appearance by Run DMC on a mid-1980's episode of Reading Rainbow. Well, I'll see your book-rapping Run DMC, Xeni, and raise you one circa 1992 hip-hopping Levar Burton, dressed in an apparent homage...
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Posted by greg at
8:33 AM
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Comments (3)
October 1, 2007
Haha, of course, who else but Samuel Beckett could make sense of the first four months of parenthood? Here's mom/blogger Stephany Aulenback talking about the boardbook she conceived [heh], Beckett for Babies:Beckett's work is bleak yet comic, much like...
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Posted by greg at
8:48 PM
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Comments (1)
September 29, 2007
Awesome:I hate Thomas. These stories, written from the 1940s by an apparently rather crusty old vicar, seem to me to constantly harp on about how all the little engines should be obedient and "really useful" to the corpulent rich...
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Posted by greg at
10:51 PM
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Comments (0)
September 27, 2007
I just finished a very enticing account in PingMag of the Bologna Children's Book fair, which is held every spring [the 45th installment is coming in 2008.] It's more than a little breathless and boosterish. And as the title...
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Posted by greg at
4:08 PM
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Comments (2)
Artist and designer Bruno Munari may be best known for the beautiful children's books he published with Edizioni Corraini [He began making children's books for his son Alberto.] But Munari also created furniture and lighting designs and art. This...
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Posted by greg at
2:13 PM
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Comments (1)
September 16, 2007
The kid's sick, the laptop battery was dead, so when I curled up with her [the kid, that is, not the laptop] for a little Sesame Street Therapy this morning, I grabbed a copy of the Dutch/LES design journal/zine...
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Posted by greg at
5:11 PM
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Comments (1)
September 6, 2007
I hope it's obvious to people when a Daddy Types post is based on hands-on personal experience and when its based on just seeing something online. As a general rule, I discourage companies from inundating DTHQ with product samples or...
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Posted by greg at
10:42 AM
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Comments (3)
September 3, 2007
William Hunter became one of the most famous anatomists and obstetricians in 18th century Europe. Over the courser of 30-odd years, he worked with the artist Jan van Rymsdyk to produce what's considered one of the greatest achievements in...
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Posted by greg at
9:51 PM
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Comments (0)
August 27, 2007
Our approach to thwarting the Disney Princess Industrial Complex is simple. I think. Oh, who'm I fooling? They're complicated and doomed to failure as soon as the kid has a sleepover party, but whatryagonnado? Here's the plan: The movies...
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Posted by greg at
5:38 PM
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Comments (10)
August 25, 2007
My second reaction to Freakonomicist Steven Levitt's strategy of focusing on teaching his kids the things they won't automatically pick up at school, like creativity, instead of math and reading: brilliant. [Note: for purposes of Freakonomics, "Creativity" is defined...
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Posted by greg at
1:20 PM
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Comments (1)
August 24, 2007
I found out about The Story of Ferdinand author Munro Leaf's other book[1] last summer during the DT Bizzare Book Contest. DT reader Chris had submitted the 1938 classic, Safety Can Be Fun for its awesome combination of clean graphic...
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Posted by greg at
9:49 PM
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Comments (1)
August 23, 2007
So the kid and I just read Mister Tall, one of the Roger Hargreaves books, and I know some old man at the Wall Street Journal will harrumph when I say it, but the book's just too damn long and...
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Posted by greg at
11:37 AM
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Comments (15)
August 17, 2007
You know how, around the beginning of the year, Babble was launching at the same time Neal Pollack's book was released, and Babble's reviewer kind of threw a hissy fit, as if there was only one seat left in the...
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Posted by greg at
1:10 PM
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Comments (2)
August 16, 2007
So we're waiting at the OB's office for the 20-week ultrasound visit yesterday, when I spy this Newsweek blurbicle with Brooklyn novelist Jonathan Safran Foer, whose "My Five Most Important Book" list was topped with, "The Holy Bible: Genesis."...
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Posted by greg at
3:19 PM
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Comments (20)
During WWII, the Royal Air Force deployed thousands of barrage balloons over British cities and factories to run interference with low-flying, divebombing German fighter planes. In 1941, someone decided a bit of backstory might help English kids understand what...
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Posted by greg at
11:10 AM
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Comments (0)
August 1, 2007
When I wrote about artist coloring books last summer, the new RxArt compilation coloring book, Between The Lines, had been announced, but it wasn't actually ready until December. Now it's for sale to help raise money for the arts-in-hospitals...
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Posted by greg at
11:46 AM
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Comments (1)
I swear, I can't believe this hasn't been on DT yet. Robert Amft graduated from the Art Institute in Chicago in 1940; he was from a family of commercial artists, but he also made his own art, photography, collage,...
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Posted by greg at
8:29 AM
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Comments (0)
July 31, 2007
Discerning richly contrasting black-and-white visual stimuli is one of the most important characteristics of early childhood sensory development. One of The Getty Museum's greatest collecting strengths is photography. When considered together, the solution is obvious: put infants to work...
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Posted by greg at
11:51 PM
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Comments (1)
July 25, 2007
There's no chance one blog post can do justice to the silkscreen work of Sister Mary Corita Kent, an artist and nun who combined pop, modernism, collage and appropriated advertising, with poetry, inspirational and religious content, and social and...
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Posted by greg at
1:21 PM
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Comments (2)
July 18, 2007
Haven't seen much coverage of this, even though it's been around since 2003. That's when Takashi Murakami illustrated a story by the Japanese musician Yujin Kitagawa about a kind, friendless creature named Keba Keba. The result was an exhibition,...
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Posted by greg at
2:22 PM
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Comments (0)
July 16, 2007
So German children's book author/illustrator Rotraut Susanne Berner--who illustrated that Sylvia Plath children's book I mentioned yesterday--was in talks with a US publisher [the not not-edgy Boyds Mills Press] to release her latest series of seasonally themed picture books....
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Posted by greg at
8:46 PM
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Comments (3)
July 14, 2007
Forget it, it's too hard to write anything offhand about Sylvia Plath. She did her most amazing writing at the same time she was having and raising two kids. [Frieda was almost three, and Nicholas was one when Plath...
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Posted by greg at
11:39 PM
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Comments (1)
July 13, 2007
It's a travel day; the kid and I are flying back from Gram's house to our house, and so I was packing the crayons in the plane bag, wondering what the kid'd color on. Fortunately, the UK Guardian's website...
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Posted by greg at
9:48 AM
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Comments (4)
July 6, 2007
Japanese graphic designer Katusmi Komagata began creating books for babies and children when he became a father himself. Like Bruno Munari, whose iconic childrens' titles no doubt serve as an inspiration, Komagata's books are actually designed objects, with die-cuts,...
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Posted by greg at
4:12 PM
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Comments (5)
July 2, 2007
I never go to Hoopty Rides looking for kid-related enlightenment, but when I find it there, it's always superlative. Of a Missouri amusement ride company's recent liquidation auction, Mister Hoopty wrote:One assumes that intellectual property [being sold] includes the...
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Posted by greg at
12:27 AM
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Comments (0)
June 22, 2007
Yes, movie publicists, I will eagerly publish even just one "leaked" still--as long as it's from an adaptation of a classic children's book by a director whose involvement offers at leaset the possibility that it might not be automatically...
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Posted by greg at
11:48 AM
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Comments (4)
June 16, 2007
Turns out the inky black Rufty Tufty was just the tip of the golliwog iceberg [Oh wait.] Golliwoggs, as they were originally spelled, became a wildly popular staple of British kid life for most of the 20th century. In...
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Posted by greg at
10:46 AM
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Comments (6)
So while trying to find out what the HELL is up with a series of kid's books from as late as 1960 about characters called Nicky and Nigger, I did a Google image search for Dorothy Craigie and found...
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Posted by greg at
9:03 AM
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Comments (7)
June 15, 2007
Graham Greene was a prolific lover, primarily of prostitutes and other men's wives. In the 1940's, Graham had an affair with Dorothy Glover, a costume designer, who later began a career as a children's book illustrator under the name...
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Posted by greg at
5:09 PM
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Comments (0)
In addition to his own titles, Edward Ardizzone illustrated children's books for other writers, folks like James Kenward; Ardizzone's cousin Christianna Brand, whose Nurse Mathilda series told the stories their grandfather had told them; and Graham Greene. Huh? If...
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Posted by greg at
3:52 PM
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Comments (2)
So the Domestic Interiors Database is nearly impenetrable, with pull down menus offering searches by "Dwelling - Specified Social Level" and such. Randomly trying to recreate Andy's search, I stumble across this excerpt from James Kenward's 1955 autobiographical children's book,...
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Posted by greg at
12:06 PM
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Comments (0)
June 12, 2007
D'oh I can't watch. Never mind that they've been in my browser window for three days. Someone is selling some incredible, scarce game/book things that Bruno Munari did for Danese back in the early 1970's, on eBay, and they're...
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Posted by greg at
5:53 PM
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Comments (1)
Personally, I think any time's a good time to buy Lisa Brown's Baby, Be Of Use boardbooks. Why waste your baby's precious time teaching him to sit up, when you could be focusing on far more beneficial skills like...
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Posted by greg at
1:55 PM
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Comments (1)
June 11, 2007
It's funny how your day can take a turn. You go to bed thinking you'll be posting about the coverage of the new Louis Vuitton kid's clothing line in the new Japanese edition of Milk Magazine. And instead, you...
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Posted by greg at
3:09 PM
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Comments (0)
June 7, 2007
In the Kid Brand Whore post below, DT reader Dan found a single search result for Sean Hannity. How can you not be interested to see what it is? The book is Freddie The Free-Range Chicken, which is actually...
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Posted by greg at
1:44 PM
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Comments (4)
June 6, 2007
A reader called me out for harshing on Maisy, and she's right; though the particular book the kid and I read was lame, it's far from the worst example of brand-brainwashing crap that the Baby Industrial Complex foists on our...
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Posted by greg at
10:46 AM
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Comments (24)
The kid and I left the crappy Maisy book at the library the other day, but we brought home two books, one decent and one great. To choose them, I made a stack of six books we read or flipped...
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Posted by greg at
12:45 AM
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Comments (6)
June 5, 2007
At the auction house on York, they were feeling just fine. Two hedge fund managers buzzing on some free wine. The estimate was just a bit over nine, but they both had daughters named Madeline. AMERICAN PAINTINGS, Sale No....
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Posted by greg at
7:26 PM
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Comments (1)
June 4, 2007
Jessica Francis Kane has an idea to help readers-turned-parents get back their reading time: IKEA-style, supervised kidcheck playrooms at bookstores or libraries. Little does JFK know that for every parent scheming for more reading opportunities, there are a hundred freelance...
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Posted by greg at
9:32 PM
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Comments (1)
You ever have one of those parenting moments that stops you dead in your tracks, and you break out in a cold sweat? Like when you find yourself agreeing with New York Magazine sex-makes-babies columnist Amy Sohn about something? Sohn...
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Posted by greg at
6:27 PM
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Comments (10)
May 25, 2007
It doesn't happen often, but every once in a while, I kind of wish we were all a bunch of sick, high, funny, dorks with mad Photoshopping skillz and too much time on our hands. Scrolling through these wildly inappropriate...
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Posted by greg at
9:23 AM
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Comments (1)
May 24, 2007
NOW I remember why I had this Maurice Sendak interview sitting open in my browser tabs for three days. I guess when I said Sendak was weird, I meant perceptive, while simultaneously making me realize how weird I am. Because...
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Posted by greg at
10:12 PM
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Comments (0)
Having this library copy of The Carrot Seed in the house got me to digging for more Ruth Krauss and Crockett Johnson titles. Maurice Sendak gets a big shoutout on the dustjacket, too, and it turns out Sendak illustrated...
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Posted by greg at
12:14 PM
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Comments (2)
May 21, 2007
We've been reading a lot of Thank You Bear the last couple of weeks, and I have to say, it's just great. It's beautiful, it feels great to read it, and the kid loves it. The MBA in me...
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Posted by greg at
12:22 AM
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Comments (4)
May 16, 2007
I had no idea Elmer even existed before the kid got a book and a stuffed animal as a newborn gift, so it's a little weird to grasp that the patchwork elephant actually came out, so to speak, in...
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Posted by greg at
10:10 AM
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Comments (0)
May 7, 2007
In 1954, the German-Swiss artist Dieter Roth created a book for the son of Claus Bremer, the German dramatist and concrete poet. Known as Kinderbuch, the book consisted of op-art-y geometric shapes and patterns rippling across 28 letterpressed cardboard...
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Posted by greg at
11:05 AM
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Comments (0)
May 3, 2007
Slate has short reviews of two books that deal with the unspoken or unregulated implications of fertility treatments: Liza Mundy's Everything Conceivable: How Assisted Reproduction Is Changing Men, Women, and the World and Peggy Orenstein's more experiential Waiting For Daisy,...
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Posted by greg at
7:20 AM
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Comments (3)
May 1, 2007
OK, last things first: Ugly Dolls is now being moved to the Parent Company category with the news that David Horvath and Sun Min Kim are expecting a baby girl, apparently just in time to muck up their schedule for...
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Posted by greg at
11:11 AM
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Comments (1)
Greg Foley was the first person I ever knew to sport a grille. Years before any hip hoppers ever jumped on the grillewagon. And I have to confess, the longtime creative director of Visionaire and V/VMan magazines was also...
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Posted by greg at
7:43 AM
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Comments (1)
April 30, 2007
You know, I was wondering: What if you, me, this whole planet, the solar system, were just like dust under the fingernail of a giant? Or what if, you know, all of human civilization is not our own, but...
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Posted by greg at
7:32 AM
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Comments (2)
April 24, 2007
Great Caesar's Ghost, where was I February 1st? That's the day Dutch published the digital images for the latest of his growing oeuvre of beyond-awesome children's books. This time it's a stunning alphabet book composed of street art, which he...
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Posted by greg at
12:17 AM
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Comments (4)
April 13, 2007
After he founded and left Mad! magazine, Harvey Kurtzman edited Help!. Suck.com co-founder Joey Anuff posted a collection of Kurtzman art, including the layout notes for the Feb. 1964 cover above, which tell a bit about how they got...
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Posted by greg at
1:40 PM
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Comments (3)
March 28, 2007
I am so cool. I am so cool. Everybody loves me. I am so cool. The cartoonists need a few extra weeks to formulate their responses, I guess. Neal Pollack's Alternadad gets a cartoon review from Ward Sutton in the...
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Posted by greg at
7:39 AM
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Comments (0)
March 25, 2007
I try to keep an open mind about things, but it can be really hard. When I flew to a friend's wedding in Minnesota, who was sitting across the aisle from me? Garrison Keillor, of course. So what do...
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Posted by greg at
9:33 PM
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Comments (5)
March 23, 2007
I guess it should be a sign for something when the frenzy over a children's book is coming just from the artists. Such is the case with The Golden Book of Little Verses, which the Hollywood Animators Archive calls "one...
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Posted by greg at
12:53 AM
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Comments (3)
March 21, 2007
Civic life is hard, let's go shopping: So I'm waiting for Benjamin Barber, the guy who wrote Jihad vs McWorld, who's about to talk to WNYC's Brian Lehrer about his new book with the parental-attention-grabbing title, Consumed: How Markets...
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Posted by greg at
11:42 PM
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Comments (0)
March 18, 2007
Elmer is definitely, 100% not gray. He's not quite flamboyant, but he is as rainbow-colored as the bumper sticker on any Subaru, and just as proud. He's so cute, you'd have to be a cranky, old ogre from Minnesota...
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Posted by greg at
9:25 AM
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Comments (2)
March 8, 2007
Unbelievable. Dylan Hears A Who! is a collection of six Dr. Seuss songs interpreted in the style of the philosopher/musician Bob Dylan. Stream them online, or download the whole set of tracks for offline enjoyment. There's just one thing...I...
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Posted by greg at
1:07 PM
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Comments (3)
March 6, 2007
My wife flagged several very interesting studies on how kids' minds work and form and evolve in that looong NY Times Magazine article, "Darwin's God." I haven't gotten through it myself, but she's right; they're pretty fascinating. This one is...
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Posted by greg at
10:46 PM
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Comments (1)
March 1, 2007
Holy crap, And I thought Bisphenol A hysteria compounded by equivocating corporate shills was scary. Artist and prolific children's book illustrator Bob Staake ["Stack," as in "stack of titles to his name," btw] remembered all the tales of Der...
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Posted by greg at
8:00 AM
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Comments (7)
February 27, 2007
Starting in the fall of 2003, NYC & Company, the official visitors & tourist organization for New York City, launched a marketing campaign to lure families to the city. Central to that effort was Miffy Loves New York City!, a...
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Posted by greg at
2:45 PM
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Comments (1)
In 1953, Gaberbocchus Press, the labor-of-passion publishing company run by Polish emigre artists Stefan and Franciszka Themerson out of their London basement, issued The Good Citizen's Alphabet by Bertrand Russell. "B is for Bolshevik - Anyone whose opinions I...
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Posted by greg at
11:18 AM
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Comments (0)
February 23, 2007
Apparently a couple of hundred million dollars in the bank is enough to eliminate human beings' innate desire to impress magazine reporters. Also, it clears your mind and helps you think about--if not actually write--that children's book:You see, Carrey has...
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Posted by greg at
12:11 PM
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Comments (0)
February 20, 2007
This is one well-packed sentence, from Steven Heller's obituary for Joseph Low, author of Mice Twice, which won the Caldecott Honor award in 1981, and who just passed away last week at 95:In the 1950s Mr. Low was known for...
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Posted by greg at
7:59 AM
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Comments (0)
February 18, 2007
The Higher Power of Lucky, by librarian Susan Patron, illustrated by Matt Phelan, won the Newberry Medal, which some librarians want to affix to the first page, over the word, "scrotum." That's where Lucky hears another character talk about...
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Posted by greg at
1:16 PM
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Comments (2)
February 7, 2007
They grow up so fast. To celebrate the Rice Daddies' first blogging anniversary, RD is throwing a book review contest. [nice, I like that idea] They're looking for your review of "your favorite book from your own childhood that you...
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Posted by greg at
10:21 PM
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Comments (2)
Esther Schuivens was one of the actual designers tapped by Habitat for their first VIP For Kids collection last winter. Her company Esthex made a crafty little Eskimo [1] doll, since replaced by Harry Potter's couch or something. This...
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Posted by greg at
7:57 AM
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Comments (1)
February 5, 2007
Jim Flora was a prolific artist and illustrator whose trippy post-war modernist album covers for RCA/Victor and Columbia jazz recordings have gained renewed appreciation in the eBay era. His style bridges early American modernists like Stuart Davis and Marie-Therese-era...
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Posted by greg at
9:10 AM
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Comments (0)
January 31, 2007
Since they haven't grown up, much less grown up with the old cartoons, kids won't get the conceptual elegance of Richard McGuire's P+O shapes, abstracted reworkings of Popeye & Olive Oyl's distinctive profiles. But that doesn't mean they won't...
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Posted by greg at
8:55 AM
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Comments (0)
January 25, 2007
CBC arts critic stopped watching Much Music long enough to dump a Diaper Genie II full of hate on "hipster parents," which this week means Neal Pollack's Alternadad and Nerve.com's new parenting website, Babble.On several occasions, Pollack rhapsodizes about his...
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Posted by greg at
12:01 PM
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Comments (2)
January 19, 2007
I haven't decided if I'm going to bid on it yet, but with a starting bid of $45, I guess there's no use worrying if it'll end up being expensive. This is the first copy of the 1957 catalogue...
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Posted by greg at
1:01 PM
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Comments (7)
$10,450. A signed, numbered first edition of Antoine de Saint Exupery's Le Petit Prince was the 7th most expensive book sold on AbeBooks in 2006. Considering the other two copies for sale at the moment are 70-80% more than...
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Posted by greg at
9:50 AM
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Comments (2)
January 11, 2007
Neal Pollack has an interview with Radar v3.0 about his new book, Alternadad, the Eggers, and The Wiggles. But mostly, he talks about weed. I'm looking forward to the book, and to more interviews and reviews, and not just because...
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Posted by greg at
11:26 PM
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Comments (1)
Give Art Spiegelman the Truth In Titling Award. I bought Strange Stories for Strange Kids, Book Two in the Little Lit series he edited, which brings together well known graphic novel and comic book artists as well as other writers...
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Posted by greg at
2:03 PM
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Comments (2)
January 10, 2007
Funny, I don't remember 1994 looking like the zany cruft on an Exersaucer. And I don't recall Post-Modernism retaining even half that credibility as long as it does in Steven Heller and Steven Guarnaccia's book, Designing For Children [first mentioned...
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Posted by greg at
3:06 PM
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Comments (0)
January 5, 2007
You want a bit of the Disney magic without, you know, the Disney part? ASIFA-Hollywood, The International Animated Film Society's animation art archive added some more scans of children's books by longtime Disney artist Mary Blair. Looking around for...
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Posted by greg at
9:28 AM
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Comments (3)
January 2, 2007
Whoa, it's only Jan. 2, and already, I've uncovered the coverup of the year. Lane Smith, the guy who illustrated the classic with John Scieszka, The Stinky Cheese Man and other Fairly Stupid Tales. The kid's had The Stinky Cheese...
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Posted by greg at
4:20 PM
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Comments (0)
December 29, 2006
Does the IRS have a Schedule C code for "Hipster Dad"? Because judging by his interview on Gothamist, Neal Pollack needs one. His parenting memoir Alternadad, due any day now [Jan. 7th, to be exact], got optioned for a movie,...
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Posted by greg at
3:54 PM
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Comments (2)
How does awesome work from less than ten years ago disappear from the parenting culture? Granted, ten years is like five toddler generations ago, and I'll be the first to admit my baby trend radar was completely non-existent until just...
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Posted by greg at
8:24 AM
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Comments (4)
December 19, 2006
When I discovered Richard McGuire's incredible kids' books, it blew me away that titles from just a few years ago could already be out of print. [Which isn't the same as being unavailable to buy, of course, but still.] There...
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Posted by greg at
11:38 AM
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Comments (2)
December 13, 2006
While our parents were ducking and covering in the US, singing the praises of Howdy freakin' Doody to ward off the evils of communism, in East Germany at least, those same commie bastards were cranking out some mighty fine-looking...
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Posted by greg at
10:37 AM
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Comments (1)
December 12, 2006
And here I thought traveling 28 hours straight would be enough for a clean break with Japan, and yet here we are, slogging through jet lag by watching episodes of Pitagora Suitchi online all afternoon. Visiting Masahiko Sato's website,...
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Posted by greg at
5:47 PM
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Comments (0)
December 10, 2006
Swiss eBayer a.r. has just listed this very early and beautiful set of hand-carved wooden figures, dollhouse and furniture by Antonio Vitali. According to a.r., these were sold at the Swiss National Crafts Store (!) in the 1940s and...
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Posted by dt-andy at
1:09 PM
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Comments (0)
November 29, 2006
The answer: far less than 2.5 years. The question: how long before your soul is crushed and your kid's soul is stolen by the whole pink-blue steamroller? Don't get me wrong, I still think it's worth resisting, and truth...
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Posted by greg at
1:35 AM
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Comments (8)
The Fable Game is like a hybrid of two other projects for which Enzo Mari is best known, at least around here: those incredible, intricate animal puzzles that cost about $1 million, and Autoprogettazione, his revolutionary DIY furniture design...
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Posted by greg at
12:30 AM
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Comments (0)
November 27, 2006
Is that an anti-immigrant agenda he's thrusting in that face? Fed up with the dearth of appropriate reading material for his 4-year-old son, Brooklyn Conservative Partry judge John H. Wilson self-published a children's book about illegal immigration titled Hot House...
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Posted by greg at
2:12 PM
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Comments (1)
November 26, 2006
How can you not love neurotic New Yorkers? Seriously. Either you nod your head vigorously and go, "I know! Me too!" when they give you their paranoid shpiel, or their obsessive worrying about things you barely even thought about makes...
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Posted by greg at
10:22 PM
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Comments (0)
November 22, 2006
As most followers of The New Yorker's parenting beat this year have already figured, Caitlin Flanagan has left the building. Too much book money to count, too much book writin' to do. Also, too much of her last article [in...
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Posted by greg at
9:52 AM
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Comments (2)
November 20, 2006
What happens when your 18-month-old post is one of the top Google results for And Tango Makes Three, the children's book about the true story of two male penguins in the Central Park Zoo who hatch and raise an egg...
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Posted by greg at
5:39 PM
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Comments (6)
November 18, 2006
Ah, the holidays. It's been a while since we've agonized over the essentially unobtainable awesomeness of Muji products and toys, but with the release of their 2006 Christmas Catalogue, we can start anew. The toy selection includes some simple...
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Posted by greg at
9:19 AM
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Comments (3)
November 11, 2006
Maybe it's a problem of overfamiliarity causing design blindness, but if I relax a bit and just watch, some of the graphic design on the kids' TV channels is actually pretty nice. The Noggin graphic identity, for example, with the...
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Posted by greg at
10:02 AM
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Comments (1)
November 1, 2006
This great-looking little book is the first from 9Brand [pronounced/translated as Kyu-jirushi in Japanese], an awesome bag and soft goods maker, and writer/illustrator, Keito Seta. Atama wa Dotchi?/Which is your head? is about some kind of friendly vegetarian creature...
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Posted by greg at
11:51 PM
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Comments (1)
October 26, 2006
I really feel like I've let the kid down. Telling her she'll just have to wait until the US Open to see the IBM logo. Just shaking my head whenever a package comes, and she breaks out into another crying...
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Posted by greg at
11:12 AM
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Comments (4)
October 25, 2006
To my esteemed fellow author, Ms. Gertrude Stein: First let me say, I love your work, and I think you have a very promising future in the arts. Second, congratulations on what appears to be your second children's book,...
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Posted by greg at
10:44 AM
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Comments (1)
Alright, I've lifted enough stuff from Cabinet Magazine's interview with artist Leonard S. Marcus, who gives a fascinating, conversation-sized history of children's books, from the 17th century to Harry Potter. Marcus is an expert on the subject and yet another...
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Posted by greg at
8:47 AM
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Comments (0)
I'm starting to sense a conspiracy of silence here. Gertrude Stein, of all people, did a children's book, too, in 1939, at the suggestion of Margaret Wise Brown, of all people. Do I even need to tell you who did...
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Posted by greg at
8:36 AM
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Comments (0)
Alright, which 6 billion of you have been hiding this from me? Edward Steichen, one of the giants of modern photography, did a children's book in 1930. The First Picture Book was created under the inspiration and influence of his...
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Posted by greg at
1:31 AM
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Comments (0)
October 23, 2006
The last few weeks as we've been ironing out the details and the concept, I've had a single, anxious doubt running through my brain: "But what if no one really disastrously famous has a baby next spring? Who'd care about...
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Posted by greg at
10:30 PM
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Comments (8)
October 19, 2006
It's apparently Fall Sale Madness on Daddy Types today. The MoMA Design Store usually offers museum members a 10% discount on all their purchases. But when the holidays draw near [even a little near], they have Member Shopping Days, both...
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Posted by greg at
4:21 PM
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Comments (0)
As political jiujitsu goes, the release of Kevin Stone's Pat Robertson And Friends Coloring Book couldn't be less threatening to its targets. Robertson seems washed up to me, a slightly stale punchline for a liberal standup routine. Not that...
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Posted by greg at
12:54 AM
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Comments (1)
October 18, 2006
No one in the Boardbook Industrial Complex needs less publicity than Eric Carle [1]. Even an army of Miffy, Elmo, Blues Clues, Disney Princess, Thomas, Spongebob, plain old Bob, Dora, and The Wiggles is powerless to keep Carle's distinctive...
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Posted by greg at
2:24 PM
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Comments (0)
October 12, 2006
You'd think it'd be enough that Czech designer Ladislav Sutnar launched the area code and helped ease civilization into the information age without having waves of data crash down upon our heads. You'd think it'd be enough that his...
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Posted by greg at
8:59 PM
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Comments (1)
October 11, 2006
Except for uncovering several choice quotes from Caitlin Flanagans' apparent flameout on The Colbert Report [ed.: youtube much?], everything you need to know about James Wolcott's hey-where's-the-party? review of some Mommy Wars-related books, you can learn from the title,...
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Posted by greg at
9:28 AM
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Comments (3)
October 6, 2006
"This is my desk. It is mahogany. Important people have mahogany desks. My walls are mahogany, too. I wish I were mahogany." The Executive Coloring Book, circa 1961 [adtothebone via tmn]...
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Posted by greg at
10:46 AM
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Comments (2)
October 5, 2006
According to the press release excerpt at GalleyCat, Dallas Cowboy wide receiver Terrell Owens' children's book [for 3-5yo's], titled Little T Learns To Share, "uses adorable illustrations and rhyming text to show one boy learning to share his new football...
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Posted by greg at
1:05 PM
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Comments (1)
October 1, 2006
LOT 191: AUGMENT EMBRYO INCUBATOR MODULE, [est. $300-350] If you didn't already know Paramount was throwing a massive, EVERYTHING MUST GO! auction of Star Trek props, costumes and memorabilia at Christie's this week [Oct. 5, 6 &7], you probably...
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Posted by greg at
10:03 AM
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Comments (2)
September 30, 2006
I'm givin' her all she's got, Captain, but the nerd flux inhibitor's at a hundred and ten percent! I don't know how long I canna hold'er together! While it appears as a deceptively cute children's book, possibly spun off...
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Posted by greg at
10:49 PM
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Comments (2)
Not content with writing the definitive children's book on defecation [Everybody Poops], illustrator Taro Gomi has set out to conquer those stretches of time between bathroom visits, too. He did these giant coloring/activity books which are as thick as phone...
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Posted by greg at
9:12 AM
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Comments (1)
September 28, 2006
Balouga is a new, sweet-looking gallery of children's design, from the small to the major, which just got added to my shortlist for our next visit to Paris. I mean, just look at that wall of chairs hanging there,...
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Posted by greg at
12:08 AM
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Comments (3)
September 21, 2006
While all the other kids' noses are buried in their New Yorkers, for the last week, my kid's favorite book has been a piece of swag from Las Vegas: the new Argington catalogue. Near as I can tell, the...
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Posted by greg at
9:25 AM
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Comments (8)
September 17, 2006
After How Proust Can Change Your Life, philosopher Alain de Botton's books got a little too precious for me [out of the frying pan, into the fire, I suppose]. But I'll still check in to see what he's up to....
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Posted by greg at
1:35 PM
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Comments (0)
September 15, 2006
When noted steel manufacturer and antique porcelain collector Richard Cohen was in first grade in Manhattan, he was very taken by Veronica, a 1961 book by the Swiss artist Roger Duvoisin about a hippo seeking to make a name...
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Posted by greg at
9:12 PM
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Comments (0)
These university-specific boardbooks would make the perfect gift for parents who don't want to put any pressure whatsoever on their new child and his future prospects. Because really, you'd love him just as much if he decided to skip...
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Posted by greg at
9:54 AM
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Comments (2)
September 7, 2006
Maybe I wouldn't have been so conscious of the hyper-WASPy presumptuousness of Lois Lenski's The Little Sailboat if I hadn't been reading Policeman Small so often. But when we went to the library today, and the kid plopped down...
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Posted by greg at
10:39 PM
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Comments (3)
September 4, 2006
In one of her frequent retro modes, the kid wanted to read her warped, chewed up copy of My First ABC Board Book this morning. This time, I just did the letters, "Big A, little a," etc. And in...
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Posted by greg at
1:35 PM
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Comments (0)
September 2, 2006
From some Boomer on eBay:Those Of You Younger than I - Who Interpret The Past I Lived through with mere History Replication and Remnants of "News" and "Culture" Have Missed So Much........ In the Present Day When you Listen to...
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Posted by greg at
12:08 PM
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Comments (0)
September 1, 2006
You know Little India, that cute little book of Hindu mythology book that dad/animator Sanjay Patel published last year, that I mentioned again yesterday? DT reader JJ Daddy-o clicked through, only to find that it's no longer available. [The...
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Posted by greg at
5:29 PM
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Comments (2)
Over at BoingBoing, Xeni's all freaked out. You'd think she'd never seen a fully illustrated, nothing-left-out, 1971 Danish sex-ed book for preschoolers by Per Holm Knudsen before. [attention t-workers: that first link starts with an illustration from the book;...
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Posted by greg at
12:02 PM
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Comments (2)
August 30, 2006
In the remarkable new film Half Nelson, Ryan Gosling stars as Dan Dunne, an idealistic history teacher in Brooklyn who might have more luck finishing that children's book on Hegelian dialectics if he wasn't spending all his free time passed...
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Posted by greg at
10:15 AM
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Comments (2)
The illustrations in Jeremy Zilber's Why Mommy Is A Democrat are an adorable little family of squirrels, but they might as well be fish in a barrel:Democrats make sure we all share our toys, just like Mommy does. Democrats...
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Posted by greg at
8:10 AM
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Comments (8)
August 25, 2006
No, not that Mickey. Maurice Sendak's In The Night Kitchen has become one of the kid's favorite books to read on our trips to the library. At first, I was worried that the kid might be traumatized by a story...
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Posted by greg at
7:52 AM
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Comments (9)
August 24, 2006
I really hope the list of people haunted by visions of the The Cat in The Hat movie is not confined to Gitmo prisoners. If even a couple of studio executives are on it, we may not have to see...
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Posted by greg at
2:05 PM
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Comments (0)
Sycophantic purple dinosaurs not evil enough for you? Prof. Jeffrey Lockwood has an op-ed in the NY Times today about the environmental and moral evils of the Butterfly Industrial Complex. Seems that there's a heated debate brewing between the...
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Posted by greg at
12:05 PM
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Comments (0)
August 23, 2006
Alphabet flashcards are the new American Apparel t-shirts, the medium of choice for indie-designed baby stuff. Check out artist Tiffany Ard's nerd baby alphabet cards, for example. Ard has a lyrical, watercolor-y style that no doubt keeps her busy...
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Posted by greg at
9:17 AM
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Comments (1)
August 21, 2006
Gregg Chinn made these sweet modernist alphabet cards for his daughter, who's three. Now that he's proved their effectiveness at instilling alphabetical and modernistical knowledge ["B is for Bauhaus," "J is for Jet Age," "M is for (duh) Modern,"...
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Posted by greg at
6:11 PM
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Comments (3)
It appears that one of the hits of the 2005 literary conference season was Prof. Sharon McQueen's "The Story of The Story of Ferdinand: The Creation of a Cultural Icon Through Performance Versions and Variations." While I remember it...
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Posted by greg at
10:02 AM
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Comments (2)
August 16, 2006
In the mid-1950's, Swedish photographer Lennart Nilsson pioneered the use of endoscopy to take pictures inside the human body. Starting in 1965, his unbelievable photos of in utero fetuses and zygotes were published in magazines all over the world, and...
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Posted by greg at
9:45 AM
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Comments (0)
August 12, 2006
The other day in Printed Matter, the always amazing artists' book store/exhibition space in Chelsea, I started wondering about what books artists might have made for kids. Given the thousands of publications on hand, I ended up narrowing the...
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Posted by greg at
4:51 PM
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Comments (0)
August 9, 2006
The supercute cast of stuffed vinyl animal characters from the House of Ingri have big, expressive South Park eyes. Even the sad/weary/skeptical-looking ones are huggably cute. Unfortunately, their small parts and non-chew-resistant naugahyde means these toys must carry the...
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Posted by greg at
10:31 AM
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Comments (3)
August 7, 2006
Except I'm surprised they went with "for ages 4 and up" instead of "born before September 11th, 2001." 9/11 Families Give Back Fund Activity Book [asphalteden via gawker]...
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Posted by greg at
9:05 PM
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Comments (2)
August 4, 2006
"Any photos of sweet Bauhaus children's furniture?" I ask with dopey innocence at the end of the previous post. To which modernist design shark Andy replies, "Crafts of the Weimar Bauhaus, 1919-1924. An Early Experiment in Industrial Design has...
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Posted by greg at
10:50 PM
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Comments (2)
August 3, 2006
The kid's got a thing at the moment for Lois Lenski's book, Policeman Small, and so I toggle between admiration of her clean, simple artwork and annoyance at the guy's apparently non-union job [a 12hour shift with only 30...
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Posted by greg at
9:29 AM
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Comments (1)
August 2, 2006
Ashanti just got a deal to "write" a children's book. This is not the cover. Gawker's got the details--and the mad Photoshopping skillz. [gawker]...
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Posted by greg at
11:43 PM
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Comments (0)
July 29, 2006
The Zurich-based art publisher Nieves has just released Tokyo And My Daughter, a book by photographer Takashi Homma. It's the latest in a series of artist titles that includes Sonic Youther Kim Gordon's Chronicles, Vol. 1 and Thumbsucker director...
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Posted by greg at
9:56 PM
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Comments (1)
July 27, 2006
Grrr. I get hyper-irritable when I read articles that reflexively namecheck Betty Friedan in their opening sentence and then proceed to discuss the dilemmas, stresses, and oft-ensuing depression that come with parenting, but that don't make a single freakin' mention...
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Posted by greg at
2:41 PM
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Comments (5)
July 14, 2006
Mr. Crack, that is. For some reason, this "SAVE OUR CHILDREN!" "CRACK WILL MAKE YOU A SLAVE!" book isn't listed on Amazon, but you can buy it online. Or from the guy driving around the Upper West Side in...
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Posted by greg at
10:41 AM
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Comments (0)
July 12, 2006
As in Pete Doherty. In a book for children. Popjustice has taken the classic Roger Hargreaves Mr. Men and Little Miss books as inspiration for Popjustice Idols, a line of popstar biographies for children. [We got a few of...
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Posted by greg at
1:50 PM
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Comments (0)
July 10, 2006
Although it's more Robert Ryman than Jackson Pollock, it looks like someone's been reading Olivia again. Kids and an Open Can of Paint, What Could Go Wrong? [neatorama via boingboing] [update: here's a link to the peanut butter version...
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Posted by greg at
4:18 PM
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Comments (2)
July 5, 2006
I was still buzzing from my eBay discovery of Mario dal Fabbro's How to Make Children's Furniture... a couple of weeks back when I came across James Hennessy and Victor Papanek's 1973-4 Nomadic Furniture books. They were part of...
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Posted by greg at
8:10 PM
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Comments (3)
My wife and mother-in-law spent a good portion of the holiday yesterday working on a quiet book for the kid. It's going to clock in at around 12 pages, and I have a feeling it will be exquisite, beyond the...
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Posted by greg at
9:21 AM
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Comments (1)
June 29, 2006
Title: Hippos Go Berserk Author/Illustrator: Sandra Boynton Reviewed by: Danielle "One hippo, all alone, calls two hippos on the phone..." Simple premise - Hippo is bored at home alone, wants to party. Makes a couple of calls.... ends up...
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Posted by greg at
3:11 PM
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Comments (7)
June 25, 2006
Whether vintage, hard-to-find, or just a good deal, interesting eBay auctions show up here at daddytypes from time to time. And when they don't, I try to find them myself for your shoppertainment: First off, the Creative Playthings hobby...
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Posted by greg at
1:37 PM
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Comments (2)
June 24, 2006
Steve Caplin and Simon Rose published Dad Stuff: Shedloads of Ideas for Dads last November in the UK. Then last month, I guess because depending on how you say it, "shedloads of ideas" doesn't really work as a gifty book...
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Posted by greg at
10:36 PM
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Comments (1)
June 8, 2006
Santa Fe writer/dad Rob Wilder has just published his first book, Daddy Needs A Drink. It's a collection of stories--collected, from what I can tell, from his column in the Santa Fe Reporter--about the haps and mishaps of parenthood. Wilder's...
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Posted by greg at
2:21 PM
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Comments (0)
June 6, 2006
Slate writer Emily Bazelon was worried that cry-it-out guru Dr. Richard Ferber's new edition of his book was gonna be all backtracky and soft about co-sleeping and stuff. Apparently, she needn't have worried. The book still has charts and timetables...
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Posted by greg at
3:03 PM
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Comments (0)
Last fall, a good family friend got the kid a gift subscription to Wild Animal Baby, basically a baby magazine--for kids ages 6 months to 4 years--published by the National Wildlife Federation. Who even knew that babies had magazines? Dads...
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Posted by greg at
1:36 PM
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Comments (10)
May 23, 2006
From the Many Irons In The Fire Dept, baby furniture modman David Netto has started contributing to Child Magazine. His first column is about a 1937 children's book by Naomi Averill that he got from his mom when he was...
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Posted by greg at
2:16 PM
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Comments (5)
May 19, 2006
So there's an early 19th century poem by William Roscoe called "The Butterfly Ball and The Grasshopper Feast." An illustrated children's book version came out in 1973, which was accompanied/followed by a legendary [if esoterically so] album of future British...
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Posted by greg at
12:41 AM
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Comments (1)
May 18, 2006
The kid and I were at the library the other day, so I took a glance through the whole of Eric Carle's oeuvre. Now we like us some hungry caterpillar and some busy spider like anyone else, but I have...
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Posted by greg at
10:38 AM
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Comments (3)
April 30, 2006
If he had only quoted Madonna while pointing out that 99.9% of celebrity children's books, in fact, totally suck, it would be enough. If he had only pointed out that, in fact, Billy Joel's book for children, the sickeningly...
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Posted by greg at
8:11 AM
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Comments (2)
April 29, 2006
Your idea to revolutionise the world of distribution is undoubtedly to be admired. It is an idea shared by a wide section of the public sensitive to the question and not only those who, like me, fight for existence along...
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Posted by greg at
12:42 AM
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Comments (2)
April 28, 2006
Just came across A Is For Artist, an interesting-looking alphabet book which was commissioned by the Tate Museum [Tate? The Tate? Museum? Museums? Whatever.] in London, and features arty photography by one Ella Doran, a hot-in-England designer, and the...
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Posted by greg at
3:02 PM
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Comments (4)
April 26, 2006
A child-free renter from Manhattan reports from the book party for Salon's new anthology, Maybe Baby. As with so many things in NYC, it's really all about the real estate. And as with so many things in parenting and publishing,...
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Posted by greg at
11:40 AM
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Comments (0)
April 24, 2006
The price of liberty from primary colored tyranny is eternal vigilance. The battle over pink or blue pastels was nothing; that ends at the layette. The assault of bright red/yellow/blue plastic toys and gear and furniture goes on forever, usually...
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Posted by greg at
7:16 AM
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Comments (3)
April 15, 2006
Ahh, the Mommy Wars. Still, even though she's pursuing a diplomatic solution now, there's no denying the war-mongering rhetoric of Leslie Morgan Steiner's book. She took us to war under false pretenses--hey, now everybody in Washington's doing it! Dogpile!--and now...
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Posted by greg at
9:24 PM
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Comments (2)
So Salon has published an anthology of essays about deciding whether to become a parent. It's based on their "To Breed or Not To Breed?" series. It includes pieces by big name hipster-writer-dads like Rick Moody and Neal Pollack [note:...
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Posted by greg at
8:57 AM
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Comments (1)
April 10, 2006
A few weeks back, I wondered where the parodies and mashups of Goodnight Moon were. I mean, millions of eager/exhausted new parents, with their defenses weakened by lack of sleep, have the original burned into their psyches. That's gotta come...
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Posted by greg at
7:59 PM
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Comments (1)
I'm gonna go out on a limb and declare that around here, Peeps are and will remain a once-a-year, irresistible culinary temptation that you'll gorge yourself on and inevitably regret later. AND NO MORE. So to whoever the Procter &...
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Posted by greg at
2:01 PM
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Comments (2)
April 9, 2006
A roundup of highlights from dadblogs that, while admittedly incomplete, serves to demonstrate my own utter slackitude on the useful and entertaining information front lately: First things first. I felt proud, even a little groundbreaking, when I did the DT...
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Posted by greg at
11:57 PM
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Comments (0)
April 7, 2006
So you want an advice book for disciplining your newborn, get her to sleep through the night PDQ, &c., but you're afraid of getting hooked up with a pseudo-Biblical cult? Fortunately, the cult of celebrity is here to help. The...
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Posted by greg at
1:38 PM
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Comments (0)
April 2, 2006
Taking me out . Originally uploaded by My Ultraman Daddy. When we were in Japan last summer, I tried to find some books from Tatsuya Miyanishi's Otousan wa Ultraman/ Daddy is Ultraman series, but only ended up with Daddy's...
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Posted by greg at
5:13 PM
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Comments (1)
March 31, 2006
New parent trying to do the right thing but tired of thinking for yourself? Just wishing for a secretive, authoritarian, and uncredentialed charismatic leader to provide you with an elemental-fear-based, irrationally and incorrectly nostalgic, anarchy- rebellion-, and immorality-saturated worldview based...
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Posted by greg at
11:58 AM
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Comments (15)
March 30, 2006
I've been dreaming of cool children's books by contemporary artists since before the kid was born. So it's exciting to see Jen DeNike, an artist I've admired and who's work has gotten a lot of exposure lately, is hosting Coloring...
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Posted by greg at
11:02 AM
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Comments (1)
March 25, 2006
Histoire de Perlette was published in 1936 by Flammarion. It's basically the illustrated life cycle of a water droplet, from morning dew to beachfront evaporation. Bˆ©atrice Appia's artwork is beautiful; although the style is totally different, the waterdrops hanging out...
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Posted by greg at
10:43 PM
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Comments (1)
Oddly enough, there are two excellent online exhibitions of vintage Russian children's books. I found them this morning, and then surfed through the scanned covers and pages with the kid. She seemed suitably impressed, but let's be real: most...
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Posted by greg at
10:13 PM
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Comments (1)
March 24, 2006
I'm skimming through a nice takedown of New Yorker writer Caitlin Flanagan--don't worry, there'll be plenty more; she has a book coming out--when I caught this mention of a novel called Goodnight Nobody, and I thought, "Hey, where are all...
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Posted by greg at
2:39 PM
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Comments (2)
March 23, 2006
As we all know, letting your kid see a television screen before he's two will fry his little brain. If he doesn't get into Harvard Class of '28, you'll be able to trace it back to that one half hour...
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Posted by greg at
3:50 PM
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Comments (1)
March 9, 2006
Whoa, my head's spinning from a Brat Pack-induced cloud of celebrity authoring mindgames. It turns out that Ally Sheedy wrote a children's book called She was nice to mice: The other side of Elizabeth I's character never before revealed by...
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Posted by greg at
5:14 PM
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Comments (2)
So in that Kylie Minogue article, the Guardian mentions a bunch of other celebrities who decided to have a go at making children's books. Some, like Madonna, just have their Kabbalah flack throw some preachy crap together, while others, like...
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Posted by greg at
8:37 AM
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Comments (12)
Singer/gay icon Kylie Minogue is working on a children's book. The Guardian gives a tantalizing preview of the book, titled, Showgirl Princess, which is due in September:It tells the story of Kylie, whose dream of becoming a showgirl princess comes...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:17 AM
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Comments (3)
March 5, 2006
A list of highlights from other blogging dads out there that's as comprehensive as my knowledge of parenting [*cough cough*]: You can't pick your kids, but you can pick their noses. And you can brush their teeth. Adventuredad has a...
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Posted by greg at
4:51 PM
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Comments (4)
March 4, 2006
So apparently, there's this whole population of people so intent with sharing their experience, their writings, and the flotsam of their daily lives, they create elaborate--but tiny, almost invisible, really--publications all on their own. They labor and sweat over the...
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Posted by greg at
11:42 PM
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Comments (1)
February 23, 2006
So a quick Diet Coke run turned into an hour at the library when we looked to see what the caravan of strollers was up to: Story Time. There were easily 50 kids under 2, who nearly all sat entranced...
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Posted by greg at
11:54 AM
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Comments (2)
February 19, 2006
Just goes to show you, there's more than one way to lock in your spot in the history of children's book art. Possibly because he was afraid of getting shanked by revisionist children's book art historians in the aphid-friendly future,...
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Posted by greg at
4:01 PM
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Comments (3)
February 8, 2006
Judging by the comments and my email, I have not been the only one with alphabet floor mats on the brain. They seem to embody the love it/hate it march of primary colored kidstuff across new parents' once-sophisticated lives. There...
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Posted by greg at
5:21 PM
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Comments (2)
February 5, 2006
Continuing in the "dyed-in-cashmere-metrosexual" theme, here's a "separated at birth?" pairing from Manolo The Shoe Blogger. On the left: John Galliano's Winter06-07 runway show last month in Paris. On the right, the A-list party on top of the tree...
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Posted by greg at
5:57 PM
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Comments (0)
February 1, 2006
I guess child-hating is not "Hollywood" after all, just "LA." Because from the generosity with which they are supporting such a worthy cause, it's obvious that our New York celebrities just love themselves some kids. Even the ones who...
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Posted by greg at
2:44 PM
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Comments (1)
Moxie mentioned the shabby Thomas The Train boardbook adaptations. We got a box set of Thomas books, and while they're a little thin [and while I fail to see how "round" and "arched" are opposites in the SAT sense of...
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Posted by greg at
11:06 AM
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Comments (10)
January 31, 2006
It was pretty obvious to me that the story had been shortened, but the artwork looked familiar enough, and the trademarked [seriously] phrasing was all there. But the more I read The Little Engine That Could in boardbook form,...
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Posted by greg at
10:41 PM
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Comments (5)
If you think you've got it rough with all the boardbooks blurring together when you read them, just imagine if you're in the industry. When you get that whole, "Oy, haven't I read this one before? Why am I still...
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Posted by greg at
1:19 PM
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Comments (1)
January 29, 2006
In advance of his new book coming out, writer Neal Pollack has dutifully turned his website into an ersatz parenting blog, complete with updates on his son Elijah's potty training. The poo hit the fans around November, and it wasn't/hasn't...
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Posted by greg at
9:04 PM
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Comments (2)
January 28, 2006
So last week, Blogads asked if I was interested in an all-expense-paid trip to Amsterdam, courtesy of the Dutch Tourism Board, no strings, all I'd have to do is be interviewed by them and give them a month's free adspace...
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Posted by greg at
11:50 AM
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Comments (5)
January 25, 2006
Victoria writes at de stijl about their experiments getting the Leapfrog Alphabet Pal to swear. Which, of course, was a highlight of "Baby Einstein," an essay in David Sedaris's Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim about his brother becoming...
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Posted by greg at
11:36 PM
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Comments (10)
Considered one of the most influential artists at Disney, who was credited with the creation of "It's A Small World," Mary Blair's illustration work is apparently quite scarce. Particularly the giant-sized Golden Book of Little Verses which...oh, wait, there's one...
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Posted by greg at
10:54 PM
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Comments (3)
January 23, 2006
We found this book at the library the other day. It's called Bembo's Zoo: An Animal ABC Book by art director [obviously] Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich [great name, even if it doesn't all fit on a credit card]. Bembo...
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Posted by greg at
9:43 PM
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Comments (5)
January 11, 2006
Hats off to DK's "my first" boardbook series, who's clearly in the lead, while Eric Carle and "I Spy," battle it out for second place. I just picked up a couple of books to put away, and for no reason...
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Posted by greg at
5:21 PM
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Comments (4)
January 5, 2006
In the basement of our building in DC, by the recycling bins, there's a shelf for old books. This was on it last night. Naturally, I had to take a look, and it seems I was the first person to...
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Posted by greg at
8:41 AM
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Comments (3)
January 4, 2006
Well, that was no fun. While I was stymied by SQL table syntax, Kaz, Jeremy and some other folks started discussing the best way to make photobooks for the grandparents. [We didn't do that this year, but I DID print...
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Posted by greg at
11:46 AM
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Comments (16)
January 2, 2006
I think we all knew he was troubled, but a Dallas TV news station is reporting that Elmo may be only one cheap sweatsuit shy of a suicide pact. Instead of asking, "Who wants to try to go potty?" an...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:00 PM
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Comments (0)
December 23, 2005
While it's mostly a too-kind report of a bookstore reading with an audience of pre-selected children, I'd kind of hoped this UK Observer article would be more of a review of Paul McCartney's first children's book, High In The Clouds....
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Posted by greg at
11:13 AM
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Comments (0)
December 14, 2005
Author/illustrator Lisa Brown's internationally reknowned "Baby Be of Use" instructional boardbook series has revolutionized infant and child productivity rates in the developing world. And the Walton Family's richer and the rest of us are a little less poor because...
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Posted by greg at
10:45 AM
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Comments (1)
December 7, 2005
I've got a Prada cashmere cap warming my bedhead right now, so I know it isn't me; this book is a $%&(*ing menace and needs to be smothered in its crib. I'm talking about This Little Piggy Went To Prada:...
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Posted by greg at
9:50 PM
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Comments (7)
December 6, 2005
Not only a Kid-o bib, of course, will do, but I'm just saying. That all-too-familiar frustration with the horrible design of most baby gear probably intensifies when you open an awesome baby store, because Kid-o has introduced quite a...
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Posted by greg at
8:34 AM
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Comments (4)
December 5, 2005
Apparently, the cigarette--and the bong, Soloflex machine, and the Book of Mormon--are just the tip of the iceberg. Writer Karen Karbo points out a lot of other things in Clement Hurd's Goodnight Moon that could be sending the dangerously wrong...
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Posted by greg at
5:13 PM
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Comments (0)
November 30, 2005
RIP Stan Berenstain, although with a reported 260 million books in print, your throwback gender-stereotyped, put-upon, begrudgingly disinterested papa bear will live on for quite a while. Stan Berenstain Dies; Co-Creator of Books On Berenstain Bears [washpost]...
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Posted by greg at
2:54 PM
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Comments (5)
November 28, 2005
Here's a photoset on flickr that tracks some of the interesting changes between the 1963 edition of Richard Scarry's Best Word Book Ever and the 1991 re-issue. Just one example from the cover: the cat pushing the stroller is now...
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Posted by greg at
5:58 PM
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Comments (0)
November 27, 2005
Grandma has this book, Trucks and Diggers: One to Ten : Counting from Caterpillar, which the kid LOVES. Turns out it's a part of a licensed series of Caterpillar-branded books that feature only official CAT equipment. They're obviously designed to...
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Posted by greg at
10:08 PM
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Comments (5)
November 18, 2005
When Scott "found" this image on the back cover of his kid's copy of Goodnight Moon, he inadvertently became the first entry in the Daddy Types "What is Clement Holding?" Photoshop contest. Let's keep them safe for work, but...
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Posted by greg at
5:01 PM
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Comments (5)
The NY Times thinks the big story here is that Harper Collins digitally removed the cigarette from the jacket cover photograph of Clement Hurd, the illustrator of Goodnight Moon. I think the real story is that the book sells 800,000...
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Posted by greg at
1:13 PM
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Comments (6)
November 15, 2005
So Istvan Banyai has a new book, The Other Side, again with the no words, that "whips the viewer into a fury of fast-paced looking." All three books about toddlers getting a new baby brother or sister get great reviews,...
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Posted by greg at
11:31 AM
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Comments (0)
November 14, 2005
Harper Collins has published Cashmere If You Can, a children's book about a Mongolian cashmere goat named Wawa Hohhot and his family who live on the roof of Saks Fifth Avenue. The book was created as a marketing tool, and...
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Posted by greg at
12:29 AM
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Comments (1)
November 5, 2005
Hotelier/Uma Thurman squeeze Andre Balasz commissioned a children's book as part of the marketing program for his new SoHo condo loft development, 40 Mercer St, which was designed by French deathstarchitect Jean Nouvel. It's called--get this--Jacques et Jill:In "Jacques...
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Posted by greg at
12:24 PM
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Comments (0)
November 4, 2005
If you can't wait another couple of days for the debut of Conde Nast's lush Cookie Magazine, scoot on over to a better newsstand and pick up a copy of MiLK. If it's not the French inspiration for Cookie, Milk...
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Posted by greg at
9:00 PM
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Comments (2)
November 2, 2005
If you're reading this site at work, maybe you should save this link until you get home. Unless you work in a German pre-school, where this book seems to have originated. Where babies come from? In German. [planetdan via tmn]...
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Posted by greg at
9:59 AM
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Comments (3)
October 28, 2005
Yeow, read this one only after the kid's gone to sleep. It's a knee-slapping, cringe-inducing Winnie The Pooh, as reimagined by a South African columnist named Tom Eaton. Let me put it this way: Rabbit's side effects from the live...
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Posted by greg at
10:18 PM
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Comments (0)
October 24, 2005
And wife Vendela Vida on the birth of their daughter October Adelaide* Eggers Vida. Anyone else out there transpose and give the kid his wife's last name? Anyone else out there name the kid after the month in which she...
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Posted by greg at
6:12 PM
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Comments (12)
October 14, 2005
Last year, the grandparents brought the kid a giant musical book back from London, a Peter Rabbit/Beatrix Potter collection of classical nursery rhymes. Of course, for some of these, "classical" means, "if you didn't survive The Blitz, you've never...
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Posted by greg at
10:49 PM
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Comments (2)
October 6, 2005
Right after the disastrous Geraldo Bugaboo sighting, another Gawker reported seeing Paul McCartney " pushing a stroller (with blond kid in it) down 57th St. across from Carnegie Hall" on Monday. [No brand/model mentioned? Come on, anonymous blog readers, what's...
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Posted by greg at
3:22 PM
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Comments (0)
October 4, 2005
Malcolm Gladwell writes about the oddball admissions policies put in place at Harvard and other Ivies in the early 20th century. They began emphasizing character and leadership potential, not just intellectual achievement. Easier to keep the Jews out that way....
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Posted by greg at
9:35 AM
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Comments (1)
September 15, 2005
On our drive up to NYC last week, the kid was getting a little antsy, and had burned through all the books we'd packed before we'd even crossed the Susquehana (you know that bridge in MD where it's really windy,...
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Posted by greg at
12:20 PM
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Comments (0)
Never mind a kid, how can you get a pregnant woman to sleep soundly through the night? According to Jodi Kantor's NYT article, you take away her copy of What To Expect When You're Expecting:...The woman-to-woman tone and the folksy-looking...
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Posted by greg at
10:43 AM
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Comments (13)
I like biodiesel and I can not lie. You other brothers can't deny That when a car tries cuttin' environmental waste, blowin' fry-smell in your face, You get sprung, wanna put some hemp on. 'Cause you know that that car...
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Posted by greg at
8:29 AM
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Comments (3)
September 14, 2005
I loved Curious George books as a kid, especially the one where he eats a puzzle piece. Little did I know that George started out as Fifi, and his creators, Margret and H. A. Rey, were German Jews living in...
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Posted by greg at
10:59 PM
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Comments (4)
This looks awesome. I remember The 500 Hats Of Bartholomew Cubbins and I Want A Hippopotamus for Christmas from my grandmother's house. Now, "copyright permitting," I can get a vintage copy and/or a CD of such long-lost children's books &...
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Posted by greg at
9:51 PM
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Comments (2)
August 21, 2005
This isn't part of the contest [seriously, how lame would that be to magically pull my name out of the hat and give myself a prize?], just a coincidence too good to pass up. Like Byron Barton's Airplanes, Art Seiden's...
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Posted by greg at
11:30 AM
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Comments (2)
August 18, 2005
I think you'd need bigger scans to actually make these original Marcel Breuer sketches into the coloring book they were intended to be, but it's worth a try. Above: Breuer designed the logo for the New Haven Railroad. Original...
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Posted by greg at
1:50 AM
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Comments (0)
August 10, 2005
Pooking around the kitchen timer section of the kinda offbeat department store Tokyu Hands was this Elmer The Gay Vague Patchwork Elephant kitchen timer, for 1,500 yen. It was too high for the kid to see, but later, when...
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Posted by greg at
9:51 AM
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Comments (0)
August 5, 2005
A while back, when I got so many great recommendations for books that don't drive you crazy if you have to read them a thousand times, I thought it'd be interesting to try a book review contest. So how about...
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Posted by greg at
9:11 AM
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Comments (2)
A growing Flickr photoset of book covers from a public school library in New Jersey. Some choice titles: Italian Peepshow, Cornzapoppin'!, and the nerdtastic I Am A Jew. Mazeltov. Unfortunate Childrens Books [flickr.com via boingboing]...
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Posted by greg at
5:26 AM
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Comments (2)
July 27, 2005
The aggressively generic and idealized images of board books kind of bugs me sometimes. Where are all the counting books that show what's really in the kid's world? three bags of Terra Chips, four dry cleaners on the way to...
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Posted by greg at
10:25 PM
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Comments (1)
July 11, 2005
Whether you were refusing to buy the pedantically anti-materialist new children's book Lotsa de Casha on principle because it was written by Madonna, or you were a lifelong fan wondering how your idol could crank out such moralizing claptrap, you...
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Posted by greg at
11:24 AM
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Comments (0)
June 22, 2005
Dina Rabinovitch finally gets her lifelong dream: an interview with Madonna [well, a phoner, anyway]. But--surprise, surprise--the children's authoress and Kabbala water drinker's dodgy and/or canned replies are a huge letdown to an actual Jew. Madonna's children's books, it turns...
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Posted by greg at
12:05 PM
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Comments (0)
Someone told me about this report at dinner tonight, and whaddya know, Rebel Dad has it linked on his site (with its freshly renewed domain name. Welcome back, buddy). Starting with every parenting book published in the 1990's and still...
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Posted by greg at
12:27 AM
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Comments (6)
June 2, 2005
Slate's David Plotz first wrote about the Repository for Germinal Choice online. It was a sperm bank founded to propagate the genes of Nobel Prize winners, serving the creme de la creme de la creme, if you will, to demanding...
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Posted by greg at
1:36 AM
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Comments (1)
May 22, 2005
I'm so over these Freakonomics freaks, in part because of the whole "a little knowledge" smugness they inspire in people. Like this Chicago Sun-Times writer Debra Pickett, who now wants to get slaphappy on the dopes who use carseats and...
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Posted by greg at
9:39 PM
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Comments (6)
May 20, 2005
Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith are the writer/illustrator duo who brought you The Stinky Cheese Man. [I say you because Cheese Man? we don't have no Stinky Cheese Man. Sometimes I crack myself up, but most of the time I...
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Posted by greg at
9:07 AM
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Comments (1)
May 19, 2005
This is what the web is for. Basic Hip Digital Oddio is converting classic childrens' records from the 1940's and 50's to from paper and vinyl to jpeg and mp3. Each week this year, they upload another sweet, seriously old-school...
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Posted by greg at
3:22 PM
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Comments (1)
May 17, 2005
Hm. It's not fashion week anymore. Nicolas Stargardt's book, Witnesses of War, looks at the lives of children under the Nazis in WWII, Germans (Aryan and non-), Poles, Jews. It's a complicated and brutal subject, one that has been wilfully...
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Posted by greg at
12:09 AM
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Comments (0)
May 5, 2005
It's a story that kinda kicks the cinderblocks out from under the rusty ol' car that is "gays ain't natcherl." Tango Makes Three is the true story of Roy and Silo, two male penguins who've been in a committed, monogamous...
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Posted by greg at
8:51 PM
May 4, 2005
Those Freakonomics guys are at it again. This time, in USA Today, they're excerpting--or at least giving an executive summary--on how "Parenting technique is highly overrated." It's not what you do, they claim, it's who you are that determines your...
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Posted by greg at
4:12 PM
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Comments (1)
April 27, 2005
Huh. I've been cramming on an offline deadline (now passed, it took all my sleep with it), and tomorrow we're traveling all day, so posting will be about. this. light. again Wed., I expect. Meanwhile, I wonder if anyone would...
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Posted by greg at
12:52 AM
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Comments (25)
April 22, 2005
Rebel Dad points to Miriam Pescovitz's interesting-sounding book, The Truth Behind the Mommy Wars, which brings sorely lacking nuance to the debates over how women balance work and parenting. On her blog, Playground Revolution, Pescovitz writes about issues she hears...
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Posted by greg at
5:04 PM
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Comments (0)
April 13, 2005
And I thought the Hindu finger puppets were cute. Sanjay Patel, an animation artist at Pixar, created this amazing illustrated book of Hindu mythological figures, which he self-published under the title, Little India. (One alternative, It's A Small Hindu World...
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Posted by greg at
4:35 PM
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Comments (0)
April 4, 2005
Because it's getting to be a problem. From Do You Want To Be My Friend?: Hippo Giraffe Fox* Peacock From literally everywhere else: Elephant those damn Bunnies I'm actually cool if the fox doesn't say anything on principle....
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Posted by greg at
9:55 PM
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Comments (16)
March 29, 2005
From Gawker:I saw B.D. Wong on Seventh Ave. this morning holding hands with a toddler. If I recall, he and his partner adopted a child, named him Foo, then B.D. wrote a book about two men raising a baby, then...
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Posted by greg at
10:34 AM
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Comments (0)
March 24, 2005
Does this story sound familiar? "There's so much product out there that they want to get the right things for their child, and they want all of it. "Increasingly, new parents have the money, the confidence and the inclination to...
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Posted by greg at
3:42 PM
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Comments (1)
March 8, 2005
If you want to keep on thinking you've invented parenting, and no one's ever had the same experience, problem, or anxiety, or solution you have, don't read Ann Hulbert. She turns her historically contextualizing eye on the recent trend of...
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Posted by greg at
6:46 PM
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Comments (9)
March 4, 2005
"Mimic human infant traits until gametogenesis begins. Devour any competitor spawn." Either a hi-larious parody or an ominous warning for our planet or an irreverent blasphemy, or all three: My Little Golden Book About Zogg, Jason Yungbluth's reinterpretation of...
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Posted by greg at
11:14 PM
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Comments (0)
February 23, 2005
This opening paragraph is the most vivid in Ruth Davis Konigsberg's New York Observer review. It's also the only appearance or mention of a baby daddy.:When I first read Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety, a week after...
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Posted by greg at
11:33 AM
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Comments (1)
February 21, 2005
I remembered skimming a NY Times Magazine article years ago, long before I ever thought about having a kid of my own someday, that revealed that many parents actually (secretly? unconsciously?) prefer and choose work over home. The rewards of...
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Posted by greg at
9:28 PM
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Comments (0)
In her review of Judith Warner's book, Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety, Judith Shulevitz tells the crazies to take a time out. Maybe, she says, the new generation of parents--yes, parents, meaning mothers and fathers--will approach this...
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Posted by greg at
8:55 PM
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Comments (2)
February 10, 2005
Like many of my generation, I grew up on Richard Scarry's densely illustrated books. His humorously anthropomorphized animal world is a formative element of almost every kid's imagination. And now I find out the guy was a slackin' dropout and...
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Posted by greg at
6:09 PM
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Comments (1)
February 9, 2005
This is hi-larious. Mots D'Heures: Gousses, Rames : The D'Antin Manuscript is a 1967 book that purports to be a scholarly translation of a medieval manuscript, complete with arcane footnotes and analysis. What it is, in fact, is a French...
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Posted by greg at
1:59 PM
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Comments (0)
February 8, 2005
Enough with the "We named her Trinity cuz The Matrix is so cool." already. Mother/software designer/writer Laura Wattenberg has just put out The Baby Name Wizard, which injects some welcome data-crunching, analytical rigor to the amorphous, emotional task of babynaming....
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Posted by greg at
2:42 PM
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Comments (6)
January 25, 2005
I just read Virginia Lee Burton's classic, The Little House, to the kid for the first time, and it shocked me. Written in 1942, The Little House is a Caldecott Medal winner that probably every person born in the US...
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Posted by greg at
12:50 PM
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Comments (1)
January 24, 2005
"One night Jackie woke up past her bedtime. She smelled something funny in the air, so she walked down the hall to her parents' bedroom" From the book's website, where you can order It's Just A Plant at a special...
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Posted by greg at
2:36 PM
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Comments (6)
January 21, 2005
I guess it's Breast Milk Week around the Daddy Types offices.The story of the Milky Way, as it appears in Greco-Roman mythology, concerns the feeding of baby Hercules, son of Zeus. Because Hercules' mother was mortal, Zeus put Hercules to...
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Posted by greg at
9:09 AM
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Comments (4)
January 20, 2005
Celebrity philosopher--and the most important man he knows--Alain de Botton discovers "the new dad-lit" in the Times of London. He reviews two new advice books, From Lad to Dad: How to Survive as a Pregnant Father by Stephen Giles; and...
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Posted by greg at
2:07 PM
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Comments (1)
December 28, 2004
You'd think we'd learn by now. It seems that every time the kid starts wigging out, or when we get frustrated with something she's doing--or not doing--we puzzle over it for a while, then we (ok, my wife) checks Brazelton....
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Posted by greg at
6:37 AM
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Comments (0)
December 16, 2004
Repurposed here for the American Spendthrift Husband:Where turkeys and geese are kept, handsome feather fans may as well be made by the younger members of a family, as to be bought. The sooner children are taught to turn their faculties...
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Posted by greg at
12:53 PM
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Comments (3)
December 3, 2004
In the New York Review of Books, Alison Lurie takes a long, historical and memory-filled look at Babar, The King of the Elephants, the 1931 bedtime story creation of Cecile de Brunhoff and her artist husband, Jean. Jean published six...
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Posted by greg at
2:23 PM
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Comments (1)
November 30, 2004
One interesting vein of research was presented at the At-Home Dads Convention a couple of weeks ago in Chi-town. Rebel Dad mentioned it, and now, Peter Baylies, the at-est-home dad of them all, expands on it. Turns out that pregnancy,...
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Posted by greg at
8:18 PM
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Comments (1)
I've seen Elizabeth Weil and Amy Maniatis's book, Crib Notes: A Random Reference For The Modern Parent several times, and have meant to buy it and post about it, then I forgot. Then I'd read McSweeney's, and think, oh, right,...
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Posted by greg at
6:23 AM
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Comments (0)
November 24, 2004
When he's not dispensing disturbingly hilarious and spot-on advice, Matthew over at Defective Yeti is reading Prairie Babies to his kid. According to him, baby woodchucks are called chucklings. And according to the Amazon.com review, the book provides "reassuring and...
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Posted by greg at
11:38 PM
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Comments (2)
November 12, 2004
McGill University has published a selection of the 1920's and 1930's era Soviet children's books from the library's special collections. They feature some wonderful Russian futurist and suprematist artwork, as well as many inspiring tales of the country's accomplishments following...
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Posted by greg at
11:32 PM
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Comments (1)
November 3, 2004
We've come a long way from the days when adults would have to confront their sobbing parents with, "Is it true? Am I adopted?" If you're wondering when the book industry would catch up to the myriad possible answers to...
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Posted by greg at
8:15 PM
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Comments (0)
October 27, 2004
A Zoo party full of corporate-sponsored Halloween stunts, baby Air Jordans, the entire breakfast cereal industry, Snapple in the schools. There's enough kid-targeted marketing to make you long for the good old days--when it was just Lurchi the Salamander...
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Posted by greg at
10:42 AM
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Comments (0)
Compared to Lurchi the salamander, even America's oldest corporate cartoon characters are like punk kids (M-I-C, Copyrights are forever... K-E-Y, Why? Because Congress does what we want...) Lurchi's the mascot of the 100-year old Salamander shoe company started in...
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Posted by greg at
8:18 AM
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Comments (0)
October 23, 2004
In the NY Times Book Review, Alissa Quart reviews a whole slew of childrearing-related books which either feed or refute her hypothesis that, more and more, it's not about the kids; it's all about mothers and their fulfillment. Let me...
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Posted by greg at
11:15 PM
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Comments (3)
October 22, 2004
I'm listening to Leonard Lopate's June 2003 interview with Ann Hulbert, whose columns for Slate I keep linking to here. She's discussing her book, Raising America: Experts, Parents and A Century of Advice About Children. One interesting insight she had...
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Posted by greg at
11:22 PM
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Comments (0)
October 21, 2004
Leo Lionni wrote every book you read as a child, including A Color Of His Own, the story of one chameleon's quest to find out who he really is. Along the way, our confused hero meets an older, wiser chameleon...
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Posted by greg at
11:01 PM
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Comments (1)
October 12, 2004
Ann Hulbert strikes again. In Slate, she spots a new trend in the wake of The Nanny Diaries, where the parents--and particularly the fathers--are the ones who get most of the care. Hulbert compares the literary Mary Poppins (who has...
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Posted by greg at
4:54 PM
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Comments (0)
October 5, 2004
Marla Olmstead is a 4-year old from Binghamton, NY whose paintings are selling [or, at least, they're for sale] for $6,000 in a gallery in town. Her painting career began a couple of years ago, when her father gave her...
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Posted by greg at
3:00 PM
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Comments (2)
September 28, 2004
And take your kid with you. On Slate, Ann Hulbert exposes the ridiculous, contradictory, and divisive "advice" Dr. Phil deals out in his book and on his TV show. Meanwhile, Hulbert turns out to be the author of the interesting-sounding...
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Posted by greg at
7:16 AM
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Comments (2)
August 25, 2004
The Lord may work in mysterious ways, but Lisa Whelchel is happy to reveal her secrets for raising God-fearing, well-disciplined children. ["well" as in "well done steak"] The former Facts of Life star and Mouseketeer is now a prolific author-mom,...
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Posted by greg at
2:02 PM
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Comments (2)
August 24, 2004
Although he's famous as the face of New York's Welcome Committee for the Republican Convention (slogan: "You don't have to be a Democrat to like New York! [just if you want New York to like you back]") and the author...
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Posted by greg at
3:43 PM
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Comments (0)
August 18, 2004
[via waxy] Kodomo no Kuni was a remarkable magazine for children which was emphasized art's ability to expand kids' imagination. It was published in Japan's Taisho era, a short-lived period marked by liberalism, westernization, and modernism that flourished starting...
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Posted by greg at
11:14 PM
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Comments (0)
July 9, 2004
Phil Gyford asked some bigname webloggers [sic] for their summer reading lists, and here are their responses. Although I'm sure your kid would love to hear Middlesex or the latest collection of David Foster Wallace, the only childrens' title recommendations...
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Posted by greg at
3:05 PM
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Comments (3)
July 3, 2004
On the morning of September 11, 2001, George W. Bush was visiting the Emma E. Booker elementary school in Sarasota, Florida, where he read a book called "My Pet Goat" to a class of second graders. With the release of...
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Posted by greg at
8:02 AM
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Comments (0)
June 30, 2004
ChosenCouture.com, the makers of the Yo Semite! and Jews for Jeter t-shirts, also offer a few gift ideas for the new dad. You don't need to be Jewish to appreciate them (although for one, you do need to be a...
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Posted by greg at
12:14 AM
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Comments (0)
June 22, 2004
A good friend gave the kid an Elmer Book and a stuffed Elmer doll, which has become one of her favorites to gnaw on. Elmer is different from other elephants; he's covered with patchworks in all the colors of the...
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Posted by greg at
8:31 PM
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Comments (0)
June 21, 2004
A couple of Daddy Typers in Hotlanta emailed asking about memory books, those keepsake photo/big event albums for recording a kid's life until he's old enough to blog it for himself. I have to confess my ignorance of the memory...
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Posted by greg at
2:01 PM
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Comments (0)
June 15, 2004
In 1983, Andy Warhol made a set of 12 paintings for a little children's book, which was published by the Swiss dealer, Bruno Bischofberger. There's an apple on the cover, and animals (a terrier, a monkey) and machines (a...
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Posted by greg at
2:09 PM
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Comments (1)
June 11, 2004
I'll come clean. I was a Boy Scout. Growing up, our parents drilled it into my and my brothers' heads that we wouldn't get our driver's license until we finished our Eagle Project. [Needless to say, I got my...
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Posted by greg at
2:49 PM
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Comments (3)
May 24, 2004
I just "read" Steven T. Johnson's Alphabet City to my 3-month old (the quotes are because there are no words, only pictures, and of course, I'm lucky if I sound like Charlie Brown's teacher to her at this point), which...
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Posted by greg at
6:21 PM
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Comments (0)
April 30, 2004
In an article for Slate, Swarthmore psych professor Barry Schwartz applies the key principles of his book, The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less, to the challenges of parenting. The executive summary: Parents who relentlessly pursue "only the best"...
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Posted by greg at
11:17 AM
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Comments (0)
April 25, 2004
Optimism can be learned, and it can be taught. Here is an excerpt from The Optimistic Child: A Proven Program to Safeguard Children Against Depression and Build Lifelong Resilience, by Martin E. P. Seligman:Optimistic children explain good events to themselves...
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Posted by greg at
6:02 PM
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April 12, 2004
On the well-behaved baby front, a doctor-in-Westchester friend recommended very highly Tracy Hoggís Secrets of the Baby Whisperer. Through anecdotes and rapid-read bullet points backed by her own and other research, Hogg explains: how to introduce structure to a newborn's...
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11:16 PM
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On his own weblog, writer/uber-blogger/dad Mark Frauenfelder says:I was trying to think about what book has had the greatest effect on my life. I thought about books I'd read in college that seemed to carry a lot of philosophical weight...
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10:25 PM
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April 1, 2004
We just received this great-looking book from some forward-thinking friends. Turns out sign language for hearing babies is quite a cottage industry. [Kindersigns is just one of many programs online.] The basic concept: babies as young as 6-7 months...
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10:44 PM
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March 17, 2004
"It really does seem as if he has baited me with more questions, references, and observations, than mortal father ought to be expected to endure." In the summer of 1851, Nathaniel Hawthorne's wife took the couple's two daughters on an...
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3:19 PM
March 16, 2004
I saw the The Baby Owner's Manual: Operating Instructions, Trouble-Shooting Tips, and Advice on First-Year Maintenance at some hippy gift shop near our house in DC, but it turns out to be pretty good. Well designed, informative, and written...
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10:05 PM
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Although you'd never know it from most baby/kid stores, kids and good design don't have to be mutually exclusive. And Modern Seed is an online-only shop that proves it. There are classic design toys like House of Cards by Ray...
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Posted by greg at
9:39 PM
March 15, 2004
Hearing Daniel Pinkwater's description of Henry Climbs A Mountain last December, we both had that annoying NPR choked-up moment, where we realized this was a book we really wanted to read to our kid someday. Author/illustrator D.B. Johnson has now...
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Posted by greg at
7:48 PM
March 9, 2004
You want to see how quickly you can get your pediatrician to roll his eyes? Just begin a sentence with, "I read on the Internet that..." If you're going to be researching questions about your children's health online, make sure...
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Posted by greg at
9:28 PM
March 3, 2004
Use it during week 1 and beyond, when the kid's crying and you don't know why, and you can't make up a single lyric more. Reading Brazelton's book, we figured we were doing ok, and we should expect a little...
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12:55 PM
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February 18, 2004
Consider Beyond Jennifer and Jason, which groups possible names into very useful categories. In fact, the categories are almost more helpful, since they can focus your naming efforts. For example, we found categories like Soap Opera Names, TV Character Names,...
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12:26 AM
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It seems like every semi-competent pregnancy book is really the thin wedge of some doctor's publishing empire. I don't know yet about the spin-offs and follow-ons, but these three baby book brands have done alright by us so far. My...
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12:13 AM
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