Written and illustrated by Piet Worm (1957) Every household has an odd children’s book that no one can recall purchasing or receiving as a gift. No one takes ownership of it; it simply exists. Ours was The Three Little Horses, and what a strange and unnerving book it was. The author’s name didn’t help one… Read more »

Florence Parry Heide, illustrated by Robert Osborn (1969) I picked this book out at a school bookmobile event. Something about that title just resonated for me. The text lists a clever mixture of actual scary things (stepping on something squishy when you’re barefoot), standard scary things (witches), and ridiculous scary things (an apple with a… Read more »

Written and illustrated by Hilary Knight (1964) A precursor to the similar Where’s Waldo series by more than twenty years, this was a book that I studied, not for the text, which is fairly brief, but for the art. Wallace is an orangutan who lives in a zoo but keeps escaping to large public settings… Read more »

Lydia Scott, illustrated by Mildred Wetmore (1939) My grandparents had an eclectic collection of children’s books, none of which were of recent vintage, so they must have belonged to my mother and her sisters. My siblings and I read all of them over and over during visits to the grandparents, mainly because we were a… Read more »

Written and illustrated by Syd Hoff (1958) This was the first book I read by myself. (I don’t count the ones I “read” but had really just memorized.) I was in kindergarten, and we were learning to pronounce the letter sounds. I guess I’d proven myself, because my teacher said I could take Danny and… Read more »