Bell: Monograph of the Testudinata

Posted on December 13, 2000 by Marco Graziosi

Bell: Monograph of the Testudinata
Thomas Bell’s A Monograph of the Testudinata is one of the great reptile books, containing the finest series of colored plates of turtles ever published. A dental surgeon and professor of zoology, Bell was also a leading English naturalist when he began his ambitious attempt to summarize all the world�s turtles, living and extinct. Working with Bell to produce the forty plates was natural history artist James de Carle Sowerby, to whom Bell would send live specimens. But the genius of the published plates is largely attributable to Edward Lear (known to generations for his nonsense verse), whose reputation as the finest natural history lithographer of his age had earlier been established by a monumental folio on parrots.
[I had not realised so far that the book can be read online and the illustrations are quite good: buying the CD-ROM is still better, however]
Octavo Edition

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Gory stories for tiny tots

Posted on December 2, 2000 by Marco Graziosi

Gory stories for tiny tots
“Many of Edward Gorey’s most fervent devotees think he must be both a) English and b) dead,” reads the biographical note on one of his darkly illustrated tales of hapless babies, consumptive waifs and sexually traumatising furniture. “Actually, he has never so much as visited either place.”
No longer, sadly: though Gorey never did make it across the Atlantic, he is now – owing to a heart attack in April, aged 75, in the cat-filled Cape Cod farmhouse where he lived alone – a permanent resident of the other side. It’s easy to see why readers thought he moved there years ago, his more than 50 books seeming to have issued from the pen of the love child (orphaned, of course) of Ivy Compton Burnett and Edgar Allan Poe.
Books Unlimited

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The Oddness of Oz

Posted on December 1, 2000 by Marco Graziosi

ALISON LURIE: The Oddness of Oz
The year 2000 is the centenary of a famous and much-loved but essentially very odd children’s classic: L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz. Those who recall the story only from childhood reading, or from the MGM film, have perhaps never realized how strange the original book and its sequels are.
The New York Review of Books

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The Cat! The Whos! The Places They Go!

Posted on December 1, 2000 by Marco Graziosi

‘Seussical: The Musical’: The Cat! The Whos! The Places They Go!
Whoever the many chefs were, the finished product is a flavorless broth. The heightened brightness of all the ingredients � the eye- searing design palette, the dizzying lighting effects, the bouncy orchestrations, those mega-watt smiles � perversely meld into a general gray dimness.
The New York Times

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Enchanting visions of fairyland

Posted on November 29, 2000 by Marco Graziosi

Enchanting visions of fairyland
We cannot get rid of the past, even if we try to. Just as history constantly informs the present, so childhood stays with us, shaping our gestures and responses. If the child makes the man, it is not surprising that children�s stories might also attract and please adults. Hans Christian Andersen took this insight one step further. He wrote fairytales that were aimed explicitly at both children and adults, and self-consciously used the form as a way of exploring autobiographical obsessions.
Another review of Wullschlager’s Andersen bio, plus TROUBLESOME THINGS – A History of Fairies and Fairy Stories
TROUBLESOME THINGS – A History of Fairies and Fairy Stories
The times

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Children's Christmas books

Posted on November 29, 2000 by Marco Graziosi

Children’s Christmas books
Recommendations from the Electronic Telegraph’s BooksOnLine

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'Grinch' Helps Get Hollywood Back on Record Pace

Posted on November 27, 2000 by Marco Graziosi

‘Grinch’ Helps Get Hollywood Back on Record Pace “Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” a lavishly mounted offering from the director Ron Howard, starring Jim Carrey, has virtually catapulted families into movie theater seats, dominating the five-day Thanksgiving weekend and earning an estimated $137.4 million in its first 10 days of release, nearly $74 million of it since Wednesday.
The New York Times

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Boing! Pop-Up Books Are Growing Up

Posted on November 27, 2000 by Marco Graziosi

Boing! Pop-Up Books Are Growing Up Pop-up books may be the literary preserve of children, but lately the whirligig pages of flaps, foldouts, pull- tabs and double wheels are moving frenetically to attract grown-ups.
The New York Times

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Sense and Nonsense

Posted on November 25, 2000 by Marco Graziosi

Sense and Nonsense
At the top of the juvenile pantheon, the benevolent ruler of all that he sees, sits Dr. Seuss. In the world of children’s culture, perhaps only Walt Disney has as wide and enduring name recognition. But whereas Disney was primarily an impresario and an empire builder, the Henry Ford of fantasy, Dr. Seuss, who died in 1991 at the age of 87, conformed to a different American archetype: the solitary genius who happens, almost in spite of himself, to be a canny entrepreneur.
The New York Times Magazine

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So Elegant, So Intelligent

Posted on November 25, 2000 by Marco Graziosi

So Elegant, So Intelligent
T. S. ELIOT knew that his carefully constructed persona could be forbidding. He satirized himself, gently but tellingly, in a piece of light verse:
How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot!
With his features of clerical cut,
And his brow so grim
And his mouth so prim
And his conversation, so nicely
Restricted to What Precisely
And If and Perhaps and But.
[A review of WORDS ALONE: The Poet T. S. Eliot, by Denis Donoghue,326 pp., ew Haven:Yale University Press.]
The New York Times Book Review

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