Cargoes for Crusoes

by Grant M. Overton

You will also need to explain that you must be left alone with Edna Geister’s new book, What Shall We Play. Grownups are almost certain to think that they ought to stick around and tell you how to go about the fifty best games in this book. They are wrong. Miss Geister herself says so. She says she took the very best out of her hundreds of inspirations for play and took pains to explain them so that children can play them without help or direction, and at sight. Let’s Play is another one of her game books written especially for boys and girls. It Is To Laugh is a little more grown-up (not a great deal).

The Velveteen Rabbit, by Margery Williams, has remarkable pictures. As you look at William Nicholson’s drawings (they were made on stone, which gives them their peculiar texture) you can really see the sawdust hero come to life and leap for joy! We will come in a moment to other books with glorious pictures, but first let us see if we have one or two more books for four and five and six years. Yes. Here is Mother Hubbard’s Wonderful Cupboard, by Maude Radford Warren and Eve Davenport, who also wrote Tales Told by the Gander and Adventures in the Old Woman’s Shoe. The scheme in each of these books is the delightful one of continuing the Mother Goose stories. Mother Goose, with her unfinished tales, is extremely tantalizing. Probably the good woman told all she knew, but it is by no means enough. For instance, she appeared to know nothing of the circumstances in which Mother Hubbard acquired her dog. They were highly interesting. You see, she needed some one to work for and be interested in, and as no child was available she took Diccon, who was a trained, performing dog attached to a circus, but so ill that his owner thought he wouldn’t live long anyway. C. A. Federer has made the many illustrations, some of them in color.

The Wiggly Weasel and Other Stories, by Mabel Marlowe, is another book with many pictures that is full of the fun of clever animals, brownies, and their kin.

Perhaps you take part in plays? Then, if you are young enough, I think you will be enthusiastic over the seven gay masques in The Magic Sea Shell and Other Plays, by John Farrar. There is probably a place in the garden that looks as though a play were about to begin there, or a spot down the meadow or a roomy chimney-corner in the house. Home-made music and costumes, please!

For seriousness, and in moments when you want to know more about the world you live in, and how men came to live in it, anyway, the two most helpful books are likely to be Frederic Arnold Kummer’s The First Days of Man and The First Days of Knowledge. These relate the true fairy story of Creation and man’s coming-to-know. Moreover, it is told in such a way that any boy and most girls can make for themselves the simple tools that man first began by making.

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I spoke of books with pictures. If you are so lucky as to have the Fairy Tales by Hans Andersen, illustrated by Kay Nielsen, or those other books for which he made the illustrations, The Twelve Dancing Princesses and East of the Sun and West of the Moon, I hope you will say a word to your older friends about this artist. They are likely to be as ecstatically happy as yourself, in the contemplation of the pictures, but not to know what it is they admire. Then you must tell them that Kay Nielsen is a Dane, the son of an actor and a famous actress, who was brought up in a home where the rich furnishings and beautiful colors came from Constantinople and the East. He went to London and saw drawings by Aubrey Beardsley in which all the lines combined elegance, suavity (or great smoothness), power (or sureness and ease), and a certain austerity (bareness, simplicity). And so, by what he had seen and by the nature received from his parents, he became a great artist who could do fiery work with an occasional effect of grim strength; but in these pictures you know he is riotously playful with his lines and his colors alike.

Edmund Dulac and Arthur Rackham are other great artists who have done much of their finest work in illustrating children’s books. You may have Hawthorne’s A Wonder Book, illustrated by Rackham, or Edmund Dulac’s Fairy Book, or Stories From the Arabian Nights, The Sleeping Beauty and Other Fairy Tales, or Stories from Hans Andersen, each with Dulac’s pictures. Perhaps the most wonderful of all Dulac’s books is the edition of Shakespeare’s comedy of The Tempest.