Cheating a little bit here because this is actually in my sister’s collection, not mine. But we had a lot of Richard Scarry stories growing up that are represented in this book. My favorite was What Do People Do All Day? which showed “people”¹ working at different jobs – fighting fires, teaching school, running stores. Kind of a prototypical Studs Terkel for preschoolers and kindergartners.

I love this book. How can you not like a book whose opening flyleaf is filled with a bright and happy sun calling out, “Good morning!” and a closing flyleaf filled darkness illuminated by a sleepy moon who wishes you, “Good night! sleep tight!”²

The “stories” in this book are often not stories at all. The first, for example, has a simple plot: Little Bear gets up, performs his morning ablutions, gets dressed, makes his bed, “comes promptly when he is called to breakfast”, helps clean up after breakfast, and then declares that “he is ready to play with his friends.”

Three things come out in this story which are typical Scarry: First, Little Bear is unfailingly polite and “proper” – making his own bed, coming “promptly” when called, sitting up straight, and helping to clean up before going out to play. Second, everything in Little Bear’s world is labeled from the sun he sees through his bedroom window, to the juice squeezer, and pancakes. And third, you get a good sense of Scarry’s humor, for he labels the toast (“toast”) and then labels the toaster next to them (“He doesn’t eat the toaster.”) Simple humor but hilarious for small children.

Two “stories” later, we meet Big Hilda (a hippopotamus) and are invited to feed her “her ABC’s” with the assistance of Charlie Chipmunk, dressed in a cute little chef’s costume. This introduces another of Scarry’s tricks: he asks questions to create involvement, including silly question. For “A” we are asked, would we feed Hilda an automobile? Or an apple? For “G” would we give her grapes or a glove? And if she ate one glove, should we give her another, so she has a pair? But even Hilda is polite, for X, “Hilda has finished her dinner. She puts her knife and fork on her plate. They look like the letter X.” A tradition that has fallen by the wayside, to the great consternation of servers everywhere.

Other stories teach the names of games and toys, body parts³, days of the week, months, seasons, family members⁴, instruments, cars and things that go, WWI airplanes, and nursery rhymes. The book also includes longer stories, more traditional, clearly culled from Scarry’s work for the Little Golden Books series such as I Am a Bunny⁵ , What Animals Do, Fox and Crow, Colors, and Good Night Little Bear (written by Patricia Scarry). This would be a favorite for many children. It starts as a simple bed time story that then devolves into chaos, Father Bear having put Baby Bear on his shoulders to carry him to bed, and then pretends that he has forgotten that Baby Bear is up there and that he doesn’t know where Baby Bear is.

Some of my favorite stories take place in other countries: Pip Pip Goes to London and A Castle in Denmark⁶; Couscous, The Algerian Detective; Pierre, the Paris Policeman; Good Luck in Rome; Schtoompah, The Funny Austrian; and Officer Montey of Monaco⁷. Some of his stories are short: six panels on a single page, telling a story about Tom, the Fishing Cat, for example, who ends up in the water, courtesy of a great big fish. Some are a single page: A Nice Surprise, “If I write a letter and mail it to someone I love, someone I love may write a letter to me.”⁸

Although these stories were written in the ’50s and ’60s, they still, for the most part, hold up, aside from gender roles: the mommys are in the kitchen, the daddys go off to work. (I read in Scarry’s Wikipedia page that he complained that, in one of his books, he did include a female detective but an editor named her with a male name.⁹)

The Bunny Book (by Patricia Scarry) starts with Daddy Bunny playing with his baby. Throughout the story, friends and relatives wonder what Baby Bunny will be when he grows up. Will he be a mailman, run a candy store, drive a railroad train or an airplane or become a farmer? Throughout, Baby Bunny just smiles: he didn’t want to be any of those things. You are asked to guess, as Baby bounces on his daddy’s knee, what Baby Bunny will be. On the last page, it is revealed what he wants to grow up to be: a daddy rabbit.

I would say that, if you have small children, this would be a good book to have around, especially if you are doing the no-technology thing: the amount of details on each page will keep them engrossed for hours. And you will enjoy reading the aloud with your children, too.

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1. Richard Scarry’s “people” are often not people at all, but animals dressed like people. ↩︎
2. “Sleep tight” referring to the comfort of your bed as represented by the tension in the ropes supporting your mattress. ↩︎
3. Those visible when one is fully clothed, assuming one’s pants have a hole for one’s tail. “What kind of tail do you have?” Scarry asks, offering a selection of tiger, donkey, fox, bunny, pig, fish, etc. ↩︎
4. Mother’s brother, Uncle Louie, bursts through the front door with Aunty and all the cousins, to the obvious delight of Mother, Gradma, Sister Kitty, and Brother Tom – while Father Cat looks perturbed at this interruption and Babykins gazes up at his dad, clearly looking for a clue. ↩︎
5. Illustrated by Scarry but written by Ole Risom. ↩︎
6. Where we learn it is polite to “keep a light burning, so that witches who live in your castle can find their way home at night” and that “all ghosts must put their sheets in the washing machine when they get dirty.” ↩︎
7. Basically a collection of Officer Montey’s sayings, such as “Never chase a ball into the street” or never go somewhere with someone you don’t know” (illustrated with a red-eyed wolf in a sharp fedora and a hot pink sports car and a little kitty girl in an a purple dress holding a kitty doll in a pink dress) and, “Whatever you do, don’t bring home stray alligators! They might bite!” ↩︎
8. Writing a letter? Mama, what’s that? ↩︎
9. Interesting, since Scarry’s female characters inevitably wear dresses. So perhaps, in this case, the editor was ahead of his time instead of behind times. ↩︎