Through the Forest installation shot, 2010, Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel, via hauser & wirth Vancouver-based conceptual artist Rodney Graham's interest in the relationships between texts, literature and music and art were on full view in "Through The Forest," his...
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Category archive: books
February 7, 2012
Doctor, Doctor! Rodney Graham's Juddy Children's Trolleys
February 2, 2012
No Singin' Cats Here
I'm sure it's beautifully done, but really, I'm only posting about Ithys Press's new letterpress edition of one of James Joyce's two stories for kids, The Cats of Copenhagen, which is actually the first time it's been published as...
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Thank You Bear Is Still Awesome.
I still can't get over how pitch perfectly cute and awesome Greg Foley's Thank You Bear is. Such great books. And there's a little website, too? I didn't know Bear was pixelated! ThankYouBear.com [thankyoubear.com]...
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January 27, 2012
'The Quarry Whence Modern Names Are Hewn'
The past and the future once again meet in the present, with generally awesome effect. Because while it seems normal that you can now instantly find and buy a copy of Charles Wareing Endell Bardsley's suddenly indispensable 1888 book, Curiosities...
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January 26, 2012
Wanted: More Hilarious People To Interview Maurice Sendak
I barely missed it the other night, but DT reader Rolf sent the link along today. And sure enough, Maurice Sendak's interview with Stephen Colbert is as funny as hell: It'll be sad when he's gone, which, wow, I wish...
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January 24, 2012
Mr. Caitlin Flanagan Is Barbie's Executive Producer And All That Entails
HAHA, all this time everyone's been getting all worked up about Caitlin Flanagan and her pretend-housewifery, and her imaginary teen oral sex epidemic fearmongering, and have been ignoring the real menace II society: her husband, Rob Hudnut. Hudnut turns out...
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January 23, 2012
BREAKING: Performers Name Children
During my formative literary and journalistic years, when I discovered it as source of inspiring, vital writing and reporting, as well as outrageously smart, outrage-inducing statistics, devastatingly presented, Harper's Magazine was led by Lewis Lapham. At one point, I hoped...
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January 17, 2012
MetaFilter Roundup Of Unlikely Kids Book Authors
MetaFilter has a nice thread about kids books by people you might not have expected to write kids books. Many of them have been mentioned on DT before: Gertrude Stein [twice, kind of]; bell hooks; Graham Greene; and Sylvia Plath,...
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January 9, 2012
The Best Dr. Seuss Movie In, What, 20 Years? 40?
A video version of Dr. Seuss's Oh The Places You'll Go shot entirely at Burning Man? If you think about it, it makes perfect sense. Surprisingly, it lacks most nudity. Oh, the Places You'll Go at Burning Man! dir....
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January 2, 2012
Darcel The Shill
I don't know why it took me this long to make the connection, but now it feels like the entire spectrum of hip culture can be mapped out by the travails of imaginary, big-headed, one-eyed, emotionally fraught misfits with...
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December 30, 2011
The Children's Books Of Tom Seidmann-Freud
Tom Seidmann-Freud was Sigmund Freud's niece. She was born Martha-Gertrud Freud, and at 15 she changed her name to Tom and started wearing men's clothes. Which, sure, George Sand did it, too, and big deal. It was more inexplicable...
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December 24, 2011
Star Trek Coloring Book
The crazy thing about this Star Trek color and activity book--besides the fact that I once bought it as blog fodder. And then didn't use it. And then lost it. And just found it while clearing out some books...
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December 20, 2011
CHANUKAAAHHHHHHHHH!!!
Kids. You never know how they'll turn out. The kid's first favorite Chanukah story was the kids re-enacting Judah Macabee in Dorling Kindersley's schlubby classic, My First Hanukah Boardbook. K2, meanwhile, just screams like a latke on the loose....
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Childhood In Rome: It's The Little Differences
This has been trapped on my iPad for months now. In the Times Literary Supplement in October, Oxford historian Peter Thonemann wrote an excellent review of two scholarly books on the Roman concept and experience of childhoodThere is remarkably little...
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December 12, 2011
Acht Lustige Eichhörnchen By Kolo Moser
50 Watts has a post about a great-looking, handmade children's book by the Viennese Secession artist Kolo Moser. You should definitely check out the whole thing. Me, I can't get past the eight, funny--and awesome--squirrels. Obviously, these two are...
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December 10, 2011
This Is The Kid Who Inspired Ezra Jack Keats's Peter
The Jewish Museum exhibition commemorating the work of Ezra Jack Keats is open, trying to get a jump on the 50th anniversary of The Snowy Day. Which is next year. The NY Times article ends with a very touching quote...
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December 9, 2011
Guess What I Think About Marcel The Shell With Shoes On?
It's adorable! How am I doing YouTube so wrong that I didn't find out about this until a year and 18 million views into its existence? Marcel was the offhand, one-week creation of Jenny Slate and Dean Fleischer-Camp. Guess...
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November 29, 2011
The Star Trek Book Of Opposites Goes Where No Boardbook Has Gone Before
Dammit, Jim! The Star Trek Book of Opposites basically looks like the platonic ideal of nerd boardbooks. And considering it costs 99.999% less than a prop baby Ewok, it will make the perfect gift. You can buy with confidence,...
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November 21, 2011
Go The F*ck To Print
If you give a kid an iPad, he's going to want to watch a Sesame Street clip on YouTube. And if he watches YouTube, he's going to ask to watch just part of a movie. And if you let him...
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November 16, 2011
Get The F*ck Out Of My Genre
Well, $()#%* my $)(%#, how the #$)%( did I miss this? In an interview with the Miami New Times, Adam Mansbach, the author of the insta-classic Go The F*ck To Sleep, was asked about competition in the budding parody-childrens-book-peppered-with-profanity...
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November 14, 2011
Goodnight iPad Should Really Be An App
I know I should be hyping and LOL RT'ing this so it goes viral, and maybe so DT can get a piece of the Amazon action, but it's just not that funny. At least the book trailer's not. What...
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November 12, 2011
Here Is Jimmy Fallon As Jim Morrison Singing 'Reading Rainbow'
If LaVar Burton ever finally decides to go all Shatner on us and release an album, I'm sure the funk version of this will be untouchably awesome. Until then, though, Jimmy Fallon's Jim Morrison has the best cover version...
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November 7, 2011
Glenn Ligon On Glenn Ligon's Coloring Paintings
Malcolm X (Version 1) #1, 2000, via lacma Glenn Ligon's retrospective has now moved from the Whitney to the LA County Museum, and LACMA's blog posted an interview clip with Ligon where he discusses his Coloring series, which have...
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November 2, 2011
We May Now Rebuild Enzo Mari's Big Stone Game Playground.
Thanks to a DT operative who presumably had the good sense not to overpay for his copy of the small, 1969 book, I Giochi per Bambini di Enzo Mari, I think we have enough information to proceed with the...
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October 31, 2011
I Speak For The DVDs
Holy crap, who are the brain-wave-challenged vultures in charge of Dr. Seuss's movie adaptations business? The only possibly good thing that can be said about The Lorax Movie is that it might be technically impossible that it's worse than Cat...
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October 28, 2011
Small Criminals Among Us
The opening horror story vignettes may be overflowing with obvious, overlooked developmental and parental red flags, but even if it's not enough to be the best parenting advice book written by a juvenile detention psychologist, Gad Czudner's Small Criminals...
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October 23, 2011
Jean Prouvé Swingset Mayhem
Whoa, check out the man going crazy on his rocket sled swingset! This image if from Ivorypress's new mook, Jean Prouvé 1901-1984, which is apparently/obviously pretty sweet. You can buy it from Walther Koenig, and/or see some more vintage...
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October 19, 2011
The Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Coloring Book Is Quite Advanced
Of COURSE Greg Irons' illustrations for Gary Gygax's D&D coloring book are a bit too advanced for little kids; it's got Advanced right in the title! What are you, -5 Intelligence? Giant, colorable scans of The Official Advanced Dungeons...
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Kurt Schwitters' Merz Fairy Tales
There was a fantastic exhibition of Kurt Schwitters' art work this past spring and summer at Princeton, which woke me up to the Dadaist collagist's wacked out fairy tales and illustrated children's books. Schwitters began publishing fairy tales illustrated...
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October 12, 2011
Nura, Nura Woodson Ulreich
Another incredible vintage children's book find at 50 Watts. This time, it's illustrations by New York artist Norah Woodson Ulreich, who worked under the name Nura. Above is The Buttermilk Tree from 1934, which, I hear the photogravures are...
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October 10, 2011
This Week In Tentacle Kawaii: Alien Facehugger & Seussian Cthulhu
So Neatorama introduces an Alien facehugger plush toy the same time DrFaustusAU starts publishing his Lovecraft X Seuss mashup, The Call of Cthulhu? All we need is a plush great vampire squid doll, and we can declare this a toddler...
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So Take A Kid And A Kids Book To Occupy Wall Street
Alright, here's what we do. I just got an email from Betsy, who's helping to organize the People's Library at Occupy Wall Street. [The Library's getting great coverage, btw, and GalleyCat reports they just posted their OWSLibrary catalog online.]...
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October 9, 2011
A Report From The Occupy Wall Street Little People's Library
When the New Yorker's Alexia Nader first wrote about the library being created at Occupy Wall Street's protest headquarters at Zuccotti Park last week, it contained all of 100 titles, and "the only books that are sectioned off are the...
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October 7, 2011
Kings Of The Hill: Putin & Medvedev Coloring Book
Supporters of Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev have published one of those crappy-looking propaganda coloring books which are intended to get media attention from press release-suckered wire service photographers, not actually be any good at all for a kid...
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September 27, 2011
Hitler For Bedtime In Germany
First the Klan, now the Nazis, Why didn't anyone tell me it was happy happy joy joy week here at Daddy Types? A new kids' book by Gerda Raidt and Christa Holtei, Die Strasse doesn't so much tell the...
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September 20, 2011
Czech Made: Awesome Motorcyclists By Libuse Niklova
Mondo Blogo's got another round-up of crazy old avant-garde toys. This time the theme is Czech Designers Who Got More Toys Produced Than Ludislav Sutnar, Maybe Because They Stayed In Czechoslovakia. In other words, the Libuse Niklova retrospective at...
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September 9, 2011
Interviews Of Note With/About The Jews
Can I post these together? I really, I don't know. I just read them in quick succession; they're sitting in my browser tabs right next to each other. Some time ago, the notable anti-Semite Mel Gibson talked with The Atlantic's...
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September 8, 2011
GOP Wants You To Pray For The President
One of my most cherished children's books is from Tommy Nelson the children's imprint of faith-oriented publisher Thomas Nelson. It's The Presidential Prayer Team's Kids Who Pray for the U.S.A. It's a heartwarming and inspiring guide to teaching your...
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September 7, 2011
Dallas Clayton Paintin' & Singin' & Readin' Tour!
You can have your Bugaboo sample sales, West Coast! Because now we got your Dallas Clayton, and we're not giving him back! For a week or so. The kid's book author/artist/polymath is touring the East Coast from the 9th...
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August 27, 2011
Space Oddity: The Children's Book, As Imagined By Andrew Kolb
This is ground control to Andrew Kolb, you really have made the grade. This homebrewed, just-for-fun, not-for-sale, trying-to-get-blessed-by-the-Bowie-gods reimagining of "Space Oddity" as a kids book is flat-out awesome. Though it is also very, very sad... It would certainly...
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August 23, 2011
Help, Mom! There Are Communist Environmentalists Under My Bed!
Leftist subversives are using their "stranglehold" on the Liberal Children's Media to unleash their ungodly "political indoctrination" of sharing, cooperation, and environmentalism on your vulnerable children! If only the Liberals didn't control the rest of the media, too, maybe someone...
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August 22, 2011
Give Big Carrot Whatever They Want
Oh man, there's so much to post, but who's got the time? Before she went out of town for work, the wife brought home a bag of fresh carrots from the farmers market. Yeah, the kids are transfixed by...
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August 19, 2011
Speak, Pedal Car
A couple of years ago, car writer Roger Boylan published an article in Autosavant about Dmitri Nabokov's passion for cars. A few months later, Nabokov forwarded a rather incredible selection of family photographs, accompanied by his captions. Most are...
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August 18, 2011
The Snowy Day 49th Anniversary Sellabration!
Ezra Jack Keats awesome children's book, The Snowy Day was published 49 years ago, in 1962! So here is a New York Times story about all the festivities. Which are planned for the 50th anniversary. Of a book you can...
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August 17, 2011
Madeline Dollhouse Wallpaper
I was waiting for J. Courtney Sullivan's NY Times article about her deep commitment to her childhood dollhouse to turn out not to be one of those adults-way-too-into-dollhouses stories. I guess the fact that she started going to dollhouse furniture...
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July 30, 2011
'You're The Kiddie Book Man!'
Not sure what's odder, that Dave Eggers did a phoner with Maurice Sendak about the author/artist's first new solo book in 30 years, that he did the interview for Vanity Fair, or that he didn't mention his screenplay adaptation of...
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July 27, 2011
Oh, THAT Mez! A Day In The Life Of A Breastfeeding Toddler
From my finance days, I remember this great story about a guy who'd ride his recumbent bicycle to Stanford every day along Sand Hill Road, where all the VC firms had their offices. When he went to interview at...
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June 29, 2011
Whoa, Dare Wright Lonely Doll Photos At Bonhams
How'd I miss these? Did I not scroll all the way down? I was just updating the price results on last week's kids book illustrations roundup [short answer: pretty rough if your name's not Pooh], and there at the bottom,...
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June 28, 2011
Lonely Doll Meets Lost Library RIGHT NOW
OK, I'm freaking out a little bit right now. On June 28, 2006, exactly five years ago today, DT published Marjorie's review of The Lonely Doll as part of the Daddy Types Bizarre Childrens Book Contest. The Lonely Doll...
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It's Funny Until Somebody Actually Tells A Kid To Go The F*ck To Sleep
I guess Nancy Grace is off CNN for the summer, and so the role of asking prosecutors of child murder cases to accuse the creators of Go The F*ck To Sleep of promoting child abuse is being played by Karen...
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June 27, 2011
Design Observer Talks With Renegade Illustrator Tomi Ungerer
Here is a long interview with wacked out but awesome children's book-and-erotica illustrator Tomi Ungerer. A fascinating guy, but my main takeaway is that the name of the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art is #$)(%ing ridiculous and needs...
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Go The Flickr To Tweet
Barry's tweet sounded so much like a line from Go The F*ck To Sleep, I couldn't resist. The baby octopi are grilling, charred in the gasfire's leap. I'm thinking of plathing my head in the oven, if you don't...
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June 25, 2011
You Probably Will Want Handy Dad In Like Five Years
Todd Davis has some TV show on the Real Estate Flipping Channel, but his old-school kid projects instruction book Handy Dad looks good anyway. Thing is, though, if you're reading this site on a Saturday night, your kid's probably...
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June 23, 2011
Alot To Chew On
Sorry, it's been kind of a hectic week offline. But then just when I think I have taken on too many things, I get a press release like this one--Unique children's book tackles issues from rescue animals to domestic violence...
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June 15, 2011
In The Cave Of Go The F**k Back To Sleep
Alright, here we are. 305 views and counting. Werner, you know I love you, and the kid and I both loved The Cave of Forgotten Dreams, but I gotta give this round to Samuel L. Jackson. Werner Herzog reads Mansbach...
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June 14, 2011
Wary Meyers Has An Awesome Father's Day Pop-Up Shop
I am really sick of Father's Day pitches, and I plan to not really do anything in the way of Father's Day posts, since, really, every day is Father's Day around here. But I will say that the antidote to...
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Samuel L. Jackson Reading Go The F**k To Sleep Right Now
Whether you know him best as Mace Windu or Jules Winnfield, or maybe somewhere in between as the guy who reads the Bible and Nelson Mandela's favorite folk tales to you while you jog, Samuel L. Jackson will henceforth...
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June 13, 2011
Werner Herzog Went The F**k To The New York Public Library
I did not attend your SEO webinar. We were at the playground during your summer safety tips momblogger Tweetchat. I do occasionally miss the end of an eBay auction I've been following. A couple of weeks ago I had to...
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June 9, 2011
Mr. Mole's Awesome Attic Playroom
The NY Times goes poking around writer Tom McNeal's house, which has a couple of rather awesome playrooms hidden in the eaves. Their kids are tweens now, but I imagine these were pretty popular back in the day. That...
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OMGNOWAY! BERENSTAIN BEARS THE MUSICAL!!!
WHOA, FULL STOP! There is now a Berenstain Bears Live Musical! It opens in just a couple of weeks! At the Manhattan Music And Arts Center beginning June 25th! This is the press release I have been waiting for all...
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Four Interesting Things In Bonham's Illustrations Auction
The big ticket in Bonham's upcoming 20th century illustration auction in New York is undoubtedly the big [16x20] watercolor Maurice Sendak created for a 1990 conference poster for the International Board of Books for Young People, which is IBBY, not...
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May 27, 2011
It's Just An Opiate Smuggled Into Prison In A Coloring Book
Suboxone is a prescription opiate that has become a drug of choice in prison because it is easily converted to an orange-tinted paste, which is then smuggled in via the mails:"We've had too many people dry the stuff onto...
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May 26, 2011
Vanity Fairy Hollow
Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter is writing a children's book. I assume it will either be about the Kenendys or about a boy who discovers his hair can fly. Graydon Carter: Children's Book Author [nyt via @lehmannchris]...
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May 25, 2011
If You Haven't Been Pitched It, It's New To You!
Alright, so this had been bugging me: why Steve Guarnaccia's kind of dopey-yuppie Three Little Starchitect Pigs book just got a promo in the New York Times T Magazine, even though it was actually published two years ago? But after...
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May 24, 2011
The Gnome-Mobile, By Walt Disney And Upton Sinclair
How many lives did you ruin, Julie Andrews? Just tell me. Go ahead, how many? If you ever wondered what happened to the half of the cast of Mary Poppins, that didn't end up in Herbie The Love Bug,...
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May 19, 2011
Do We Become Our Parents Or Our Childhood Selves?
At The Millions, Kevin Hartnett tells of suddenly having a deep, nostalgic, and deep again onrush of emotion while reading Caps For Sale to his son at bedtime.As my son finished his milk and started to fall asleep, I found...
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May 15, 2011
Go The F**k To The Top Of The Amazon Bestseller List
Un-f**king-believable. Days after a bootleg PDF scan of Adam Mansbach and Ricardo Cortes' parents' book Go The F**k To Sleep started making the rounds, the book hit #1 on Amazon's bestseller list, where it jostled with Tina Fey's parenting book...
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May 10, 2011
It's Just An Awesome Bedtime Book With The F-Bomb In The Title
Wait, yeah, yeah, Adam Mansbach, author of Go The F*%$ To Sleep. But why did I not recognize that the illustrator Ricardo Cortes is the Ricardo Cortes, creator of the kindergarten-narc-thwarting classic, It's Just A Plant? I mean, holy...
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April 26, 2011
Hey Go The F**k To Sleep Guy, Publish Your F**king Book Already!
I can't wait for Adam Mansbach and Ricardo Cortes' new children's parents' book, Go the F**k to Sleep to come out. Seriously. No, seriously. October 11th?? I'm sure it's funny as all f**k and whatnot, but I'm serious. Get...
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April 20, 2011
The RL Gang Of The Shopocalpyse
You know, I see a dadtweeter there with like 25,000 followers, and I'm like, geez, even if I were doing it, I'd apparently be doing it wrong? But then I think, maybe not? Because holy crap, the way his profile...
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April 18, 2011
Think Of The Family Of Children
Bwahahaahathisissoawesome. It's not mentioned on Old Chum's flickr page, so I asked. [Old Chum is actually the flickr stream of Vancouver's own heritage central, Old Faithful Shop.] And so we learn that this photo is from The Family of...
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April 14, 2011
Can A 3-D Movie Adaptation Starring Mike Myers Be Far Behind?
"Two long time children's book favorites completely modernized" I looked into it, and there's really nothing at stake in this particular case. But the deep, unaware wrongness of the subject line of this morning's publicist email still made me sad...
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The Selfish Giant, Illustrated By Herbert Danska
Oscar Wilde had two young sons and was adding a parenting focus to the magazine he edited, The Woman's World, when he published his childrens story collection, The Happy Prince. As a kid, I did not realize that was...
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April 13, 2011
When Did Boys Stop Wearing Pink?
Wow, it feels like I've been waiting my whole parental life for historian Jo B. Paoletti's book, Pink and Blue: Telling the Girls From the Boys in America; I hope it doesn't drive me crazy with subjectivity and suck....
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[read the full post...]
April 12, 2011
Buy This You Will: House At Chew Corner Now In Print
When we last checked in with "relentlessly cheerful" artist/dad James Hance, he was selling some prints for Wookie The Chew, his flat-out awesome Star Wars X Winnie The Pooh project, and I believe he was previewing a book at...
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April 8, 2011
Ganja Man From Another Planet
Good grief. How many times has Marijuana Man been invented, in all the years of weekends, in millions of dorm rooms and on millions of kind of ratty sofas, in millions of bedrooms after the kids are finally asleep,...
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Happy To Find Happy To Be Nappy And Other bell hooks Books
So what else is in the beautiful TV mosaic of HBO Family's children's programming schedule? Because basically, it looks like an idyllic, multi-cultural paradise. It's Zion from The Matrix minus all the Matrix part. And the role of The...
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April 7, 2011
Robert Guillaume's Happily Ever After Fairy Tales On HBO Are Still A Real Thing.
OK, this has to be quick, because I've got preschool pickup in a couple of minutes: So Kottke points to this UK Independent roundup of The 50 Books Every Child Should Read. Which I click through, even though it's for...
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April 1, 2011
Porko Von Popbutton Is A Real Book.
So apparently in 1968 Sports Illustrated actually commissioned William Pene du Bois to write and illustrate a children's story called Beat The Queen, which was later published as a standalone book as Porko von Popbutton. Porko's the nickname of...
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March 22, 2011
Suffering Sappho, It's Amazon Babysitter!
Wonder Woman, Wonder Woman's on the way to help the baby T-Rex and save the day She's written like crap, And she's not too buff, But throw some mythological references in the mix, and I guess you've got the...
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March 13, 2011
House Of Cash Museum Coloring Book, Part 3
Only three installments in, and I'm already behind. Here are the next few pages in the DT House of Cash Museum Coloring Book: Page 4: "The only thing that's real" Page 5: "The needle tears a hole" Page 6: "The...
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March 11, 2011
Mister Smartypants And Little Miss MLA
So what you're saying, Amazon UK reviewer Hamilton Richardson, is that maybe I was wrong, and ad man Roger Hargreaves did not create the Mister Men and Little Miss series purely as a merchandise licensing scheme, but as an ambitious...
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The Black Hole--For Kids!
The only thing I really remember about Disney's The Black Hole is that it was the company's first PG-rated film. Also that it kind of sucked. Neither of those things kept Disney from merchandising it for little kids, though. As...
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March 4, 2011
House of Cash Museum Coloring Book, Part 2
Alright, here are a couple more pages from the in-progress, House of Cash Museum Coloring Book. Note that these pages bracket the first installment: the opulent bowl of fruit is page 0, and the closeup is Page 3. They...
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[read the full post...]
March 3, 2011
You Can Have It All, My Coloring Book Empire Of Dirt
Now don't get me wrong, it's pretty bad. But somehow The Country Music Wax Museum Coloring Book just is not as awful as you really want it to be. Oh, on the other hand, here's the last line from Jack...
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[read the full post...]
February 10, 2011
3rd Place: A Children's Coloring Book, By Richard Prince
As one of the artier guys on the coloring book beat, I sometimes like to think that I'm set up in such a way that I find out about things like, say, a Richard Prince coloring book before they...
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[read the full post...]
February 9, 2011
You've Come A Little Way, Baby! Marcel Breuer Coloring Book
The 1962 Marcel Breuer Coloring Book was featured on Daddy Types--wow--almost six years ago, but I'd forgotten about it. And the images on the Smithsonian's Archives for American Art site seem to be a little bigger now, so maybe...
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[read the full post...]
Green Eggs & Ham On Rye
Awesome Awesome Books author/artist/ dad Dallas Clayton has shared his list of top ten children's books with the posh British mumblog Babyccino [which I assume is pronounced -chino, though I was confused because first read it as -cinco. But enough...
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[read the full post...]
February 4, 2011
Fancy Old ABC Books?
In their monthly Rare Book Room selection, AbeBooks is featuring 25 vintage ABC books from their booksellers' inventories. Francoise's beautiful, simple illustrations are always nice to see, and the woodcuts of W.B. Falls' 1923 ABC Book are kind of...
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February 2, 2011
Ten Teen Moms? Norman Rockwell's Counting Book
Sheesh, if there's one thing this country could really use it's less Norman Rockwell. If there's two things, it's a chance for this kid to grow up in a supportive and loving environment free from bullying and fear so...
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[read the full post...]
January 28, 2011
Boring Art For Baby
Dino Crawling, 2010, Julian Opie via outset/luxuo Look, I'm the biggest art for baby guy around. The kid's first movie was Cassavetes' Shadows. She has Takashi Murakami stuffed animals. Photos of her in her Bugaboo next to Yoshio Taniguchi...
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[read the full post...]
January 21, 2011
Feminist Drives Princess Industrial Complex Off Road
The New York Times has given New York Times writer Peggy Orenstein's new book, Cinderella Ate My Daughter, a very nice, if slightly meta review. The book is based on an article Orenstein wrote about the Princess Industrial Complex a...
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[read the full post...]
January 20, 2011
F#$*( Yeah High Expectations Asian Father
Either Chinese Moms really are everybody everywhere but you, you lazy, bad, gwai louh parent--or Tiger Mom's got some 'splainin' to do. Like, during her kids' 8-hour forced piano marches, was Amy Chua just cold hitting reload on High Expectations...
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Amy Chua Puts The Me Me In Meme
Please just tell me that all of this attention does not mean people are buying her book, right? RIGHT? Anyway, I've only seen about 100 so far, but this is my favorite; it captures the essence of what really matters...
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January 19, 2011
Wednesday WTF
In the immortal words of the philosopher, "Sometimes you just gotta say, WTF?" For alliterative purposes, this is one of those times: One day, and you can't swing a Russian baby on the Internet without hitting a fevered reaction to...
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Not Your 'Usual Psychic Child Material'
This blurb for Sara Wiseman's new book, Your Psychic Child contains entire universes I didn't even know existed:Sara Wiseman is the Erma Bombeck of the psychic crowd...Her writing style and her personality offer us a break from the usual 'psychic...
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[read the full post...]
January 18, 2011
Echolilia By Eli & Timothy Archibald
When his son Eli was five and driving him and his wife nuts, photographer Timothy Archibald tried to make sense of his tantrum-filled world by photographing it. His photos of Eli's notes and creations evolved into an inventive collaboration,...
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[read the full post...]
January 17, 2011
Oh, Suzuki Beane
Hipster families are all alike; every unhipster family is also. And thus it is that reading a looseleaf Xerox scan of Suzuki Beane, the Eloise-style beatnik parody of 1960 Greenwich Village parenting, reminded me of Tolstoy. And The Breakfast Club....
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January 12, 2011
Wow, Get The Catalogue For Toys Of The Avant-Garde
Holy smokes. After seeing the post here a few weeks ago, Patrick actually ordered the catalogue for the Museo Picasso Malaga's rocking exhibition, "Toys of the Avant-Garde." He just posted a whole slew of photos from it on Mondo-Blogo,...
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January 10, 2011
Prince Charming's Nuts, Or Is He?
I admit, I haven't read all of child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim's 1976 treatise, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. [It's hard to find it discussed online, if only because the first hundred or so...
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January 9, 2011
Chinese Mothering Involves Neither Joy Nor Luck
Woo-hoo, this just in from New Haven, aka the place where Amy Chua's kids already are, and your kids will never get, because they have lazy, weak, over-coddling you for a parent instead of a real Chinese Mother: Uh, well,...
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[read the full post...]
December 28, 2010
Curious George Busts Outta Rikers
I'm sitting here worrying my kid's gonna leave Sundance thinking it's normal to turn on a fireplace with a lightswitch. And then I read this story about dads on Rikers recording themselves reading books to kids they can't see, and...
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[read the full post...]
December 15, 2010
36 Pages: Craig Frazier
If you're a fan of great children's book illustration, you probably already know about artist/author Craig Frazier's blog, 36 Pages, which features posts about the creative process, great kids books from the past and present, and occasional stories about...
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[read the full post...]
December 8, 2010
Small Child Once Lived In Large Loft
The other day I came across this book, Converted into Houses, from an era, 1976, where the idea of converting a loft or industrial building into a house was still novel enough to hang a book proposal on. Nothing...
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[read the full post...]
December 1, 2010
Idiocracy On The March: The Liberal Claus
You'd think that with the great flowering on the right wing of American politics the last couple of years, nurtured and fed in the rich, fecund intellectual soil the Bush administration tilled for all those years, that we would...
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[read the full post...]
November 26, 2010
Kenny Scharf's Awesome Baby Bouncer & Crib Of Death
It took two-and-a-half years, but I finally found a picture of the crazy crib downtown artist Kenny Scharf made in the early 1980s for his daughter Zena. It's a snap of a book of Scharf's work posted on Art...
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[read the full post...]
November 19, 2010
A Children's Treasury Of Mark E. Smith Verse
I'm getting bombarded with Holiday Gift List Tip? pitches right now. But all I want for Christmas is for Erik to hurry up and finish his insanely awesome children's book version of The Fall frontman Mark E. Smith's lyrics. A...
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[read the full post...]
November 17, 2010
El Lissitzky Was The Suprematist Leo Leonni
Seriously. In addition to evangelizing the Russian brand of Constructivism across post-WWI Europe, El Lissitzky illustrated Yiddish children's books. I'll be looking for some of those. [aha, thanks, Lorenzo de Medici!] Also this delightful bedtime favorite, Suprematist Story of...
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[read the full post...]
October 29, 2010
Visionaire Fairytale
It's 2010, over three years since my old buddy Greg Foley, the creative director for Visionaire and V/V Man began his incredibly sweet, awesome series of children's books with Thank You, Bear. And so it should be the most...
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[read the full post...]
October 27, 2010
Hermès - Album A Colorier
On the Dinosaurs + Robots post about the Hermès X Leica M7 camera, Mister Jalopy paraphrased "the merchant prince" Mickey Drexler, who "cited Hermès as being the only luxury brand that delivers the promise." So true, I thought, as...
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[read the full post...]
October 26, 2010
Warhol's Paintings For Children: The Exhibit
In 1983, with a couple of kids of his own running around, Andy Warhol's longtime Swiss dealer Bruno Bischofberger asked him to create a show of small paintings for children. The show, "Paintings for Children," featured The Toy Series...
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¡Atención, Los Publicistas Del Museo!
I don't ask for much, really. I'm not one of those swaghound bloggers mucking around for free samples. Or blackmailing companies with the threats of negative posts because baby needs a new pair of Crocs. And though I mock the...
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[read the full post...]
October 25, 2010
The Snow Baby
Admiral Robert Peary's wife Josephine accompanied him on several of his early expeditions to Greenland, including the one where he pretty much swiped Ahnighto, the massive meteorite fragment which had been the Inuit's primary source of iron for centuries,...
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Mommy Steps: Lisa Belkin's Slowly Coming Around
Whether it's a couple of years of intensive parentblogging, or the shifting economy, finding the right research, or whatever, the NY Times' Lisa Belkin is finally seeing work-family balance issues as a parents' problem, not just a moms' problem. From...
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[read the full post...]
October 24, 2010
Oh, The Brat Books You'll Write
Some folks are stoked by the news that a previously unknown, unfinished Dr. Seuss manuscript came onto the market. [It sold at auction for $42,000.] Ted Geisel had begun it in the late 60s and shelved it, and then in...
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[read the full post...]
October 20, 2010
The Answer Is, The Rabbit Takes Too Long To Go To Sleep
Yes, even if there weren't a clock right there on the nightstand, measuring the passage of time in Goodnight Moon by the distance the moon travels across the sky IS overanalytical. And our in-house astrophysicist is asleep, so I'm...
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October 17, 2010
How To Earn $100 The Easy Way
Dear Expectant Parent, While pairing pop songs with his celebrity-rewrites of Anton Chekhov stories, including Bonnie Tyler's immortal classic, "Holding Out For A Hero," New Yorker editor Ben Greenman makes expectant parents an offer they'd be crazy to refuse:Sing along...
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[read the full post...]
October 8, 2010
B Is For Ben-Day Dots, C Is For Condolences: Lichtenstein's ABC
While poking around photographer Bob Adelman's site, I found this children's book he published in 1999, Roy Lichtenstein's ABC. Each letter of the alphabet is illustrated by a work or detail from Lichtenstein's iconic oeuvre. Adelman was friendly with...
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September 28, 2010
Dunk The Kids In Angry White Politics With This Fine Tea Party Coloring Book!
You know, after taking a bit of heat for going all Wonkette on the latest car seat data, I have learned my lesson. So I'll just point out that this thing exists, and if you want to find out...
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September 20, 2010
Ringo Atelier, Qu'est Ce Que C'est?
If you wish to make a Ringo Atelier from scratch, you must first invent the universe. Paris is filled with a network of ateliers I've stared at it for a few days now, and near as I can tell, Ringo...
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[read the full post...]
September 10, 2010
Unhappy Childrens Book Writers Are Each Unhappy In His Own Way
Writes John Walsh at the end of his 2,400 word article in the Independent:It would be foolish, for all kinds of reasons, to suggest that the lives of contemporary children's authors will turn out to have been battlefields of neurosis,...
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[read the full post...]
September 9, 2010
The Stig Abides
Leave it to the English to put a helmet on the only guy with remotely normal-looking hair. The Stig is a guy named Ben Collins, who wrote a tell-all book because he and his wife have had three kids...
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[read the full post...]
September 7, 2010
They Don't Make Alphabets Like They Used To
Science book guy John Ptak wondered what jobs were common enough in 1850 they could illustrate a kid's alphabet book: I thought Wharfinger won the prize, until he did a followup post of a 1844 alphabet primer from Newark: "O...
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[read the full post...]
September 1, 2010
Deep In The Galaxy Far, Far Away: Wookie The Chew
James Hance's site, where he sells his prints and comic books of his adorable creations such as Wookie the Chew, a Star Wars X Winnie the Pooh mashup starring Han Solo as Christopher Robin, is very slow at the...
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[read the full post...]
August 18, 2010
Zoos Clues
Trying to parent while fully loaded down with zoo ambivalence is hard enough on its own. It's only made worse by living a block away from two of them [National Zoo in DC, Central Park Zoo in NYC]. Which...
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[read the full post...]
August 10, 2010
Anorak Activity Book
The fine folks at Anorak, Britain's hippest, cutest, indie kids magazine, have just released their first Happy Activity Book for Kids. I doubt there's a single princess in it. That alone would make it worth every ha'penny. Happy Activity...
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[read the full post...]
July 26, 2010
We Believe That Bad Children's Book Titles Are Our Future
In 1998, as part of a weekly Style section Invitational contest, the Washington Post put out a call for bad ideas for a children's book. The 21 winners were published online, though since six of the finalists came from two...
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[read the full post...]
July 7, 2010
Milca Mayerova's Abeceda Is Back In Print
Great news for fans of early Czech modernism/dance/typography/conceptual artbooks who were hoping to teach their kid the 25 letters of the alphabet: Milca Mayerova's Abeceda, which was featured on DT last year, has been reissued. The Redstone Press has...
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DT Mommy Mailbag: Summertime Edition
Hey Ladies, it sure is hot out there! Here's some cool tips and marketing messages for you from the DT Mommy Mailbag! "Let Moms know: Nordstrom's Anniversay Sale!" will include Trina makeup bags! "Sharon Lerner's new book looks for...
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[read the full post...]
July 6, 2010
Kid, I'm Your Father! Daddy Types Summer Camp
The kid's summer camp is over, now Daddy Types Camp is starting. The Death Star Cookie project will be in 5-12 business days and ten minutes, basically as soon as the eBay seller's package arrives. Darth Vader's Activity Book...
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[read the full post...]
July 1, 2010
'What An Appalling Quantity Of Peter!' That's What Bea Said!
Did you know Peter Rabbit began in 1893 as a series of illustrated letters to Beatrix Potter's former governess's five-year-old son? And that after seven years, the governess, Annie Moore, encouraged Potter to publish them, but no one would...
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[read the full post...]
June 30, 2010
Wie? Wer? Was? Lololand Berlin Boardbook
The way I heard it--which seems not to be true--is that Berlinomat is an official city branding project in the form of a souvenir vending machine in the Hauptbahnhof, the main train station. Well, it's just a store that...
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[read the full post...]
June 29, 2010
Wait, Ruth Krauss And Mary Blair??
So while we're busy poking around the early work of Ruth Krauss, it turns out she did a Little Golden Book with none other than legendary Disney artist Mary Blair. Maybe if I'd been a little girl at some...
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Wait, Ruth Krauss And Ad Reinhardt??
Ruth Krauss we know, because with a carefully crafted minimum of words, she wrote a ton of children's books, including The Carrot Seed, which was illustrated by her husband Crockett Johnson. And because the Krauss-Johnsons basically adopted a teen...
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[read the full post...]
June 27, 2010
Seasons By Blexbolex
I don't know French illustrator Blexbolex's work, but it has the kind of modern spareness I like about Jacob Lawrence's paintings and Leo Lionni's paint collages. From the Enchanted Lion book trailer below, Seasons looks very nice. And since...
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June 18, 2010
George Mendoza, Children's Book Industry 'Phenomenon'
Alright, the mime's not talking, so we'll have to dig into this George Mendoza Children's Book Industrial Complex on our own. George Mendoza is listed as the author of both of Marcel Marceau's children's books. At the same time, he...
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June 17, 2010
Mime Reading: Marcel Marceau's Children's Books
K2 and I enter a used book store. I scan the children's book shelves. What's this? I spy a curious book, I pick it up, open it. Flip the pages. A look of surprise, then bewilderment, then incredulous amusement,...
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[read the full post...]
June 16, 2010
Das Gibbenbaum?
Very interesting, and possibly only half as annoying as the English Silverstein: A German Shel Silverstein? [dadwagon]...
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[read the full post...]
June 7, 2010
OG Shepard Pooh Poster
Sweet. The Wary Meyerses just garage saled this poster from the V&A for a 1969 exhibit of E.H. Shepard's original illustrations for Winnie the Pooh. EH Shepard at V&A [warymeyers] Previously and completely unrelated: Deep in the Hundred Acre...
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[read the full post...]
June 5, 2010
David Miller Made A Robot Costume In The 1950s
It's not just bloggers' or hipster authors' kids whose lives get turned into fodder for their parents work projects. If your dad was, say, a Naval photographer with Edward Steichen, goes onto co-curate historic photo exhibitions after the War...
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[read the full post...]
June 4, 2010
DT Friday Freakout: Helicopter Parent Edition
Personally, my own weekends have been full of comment spam-related freakouts. But just in case you haven't hand Ukrainian spambots take down your server lately, here are some recent, overwrought headlines from the worlds of science, safety, and parenting to...
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June 1, 2010
Is This Ezra Jack Keats?
This was hanging on a friend's childhood bedroom wall for as long as he could remember; I suggested he take it while we were moving some other stuff. I swear, that profile reminds me of Ezra Jack Keats. I've...
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[read the full post...]
May 24, 2010
Andrew Wakefield Saga Now In Comic Book Form
Didn't think it'd be Dr. Andrew Wakefield Day around here, but, you gotta blog about Darryl Cunningham's 15-page vacctivist saga comic book when you find it: Also, the publisher of an autism treatment-related book with a foreword by Jenny McCarthy...
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[read the full post...]
May 22, 2010
Enzo Mari Pities Your Coloring In The Lines
You know I'll go to the mat for Enzo Mari anytime, anyplace. And I would love to find some vintage copies of his awesome Drawing Cards sets, too, like the one Michael recently posted at his blog, Stopping Off...
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[read the full post...]
May 18, 2010
Bing, MegaBing
Wow, how hard must it suck for Microsoft to traipse in and name their also-ran search engine after your adorable, troublemaking throwback boardbook bunny? Pretty hard, I'm guessing. Ted Dewan published the first of his ten Bing Bunny books...
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[read the full post...]
Geek Dad Still Keeping The Geek Moms Down
Sorry this outrageous scandal got stranded on my iPad. It's really too important to ignore. That Ken Denmead, he's got some balls. Turns out Denmead, who edits Wired.com's project blog Geek Dad, is perpetuating our society's oppression of women by...
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[read the full post...]
May 17, 2010
Disfarmer: The Richard Avedon Of Cleburne County
Mike Meyer, small-town, Depression-era, proto-modernist photographer, changes his name to Disfarmer? Is this story real? Why am I only hearing about this now? These photos are absolutely fantastic.In the 1930s a tornado swept through the Heber Springs [Arkansas] valley...
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[read the full post...]
L'il Inappropriate Books
This comes so close to my Daddy Types Master Plan for World Domination, I'm tempted to send a San Jose SWAT Team to Comic-Con this year and scoop up all the copies of Josh Cooley's forthcoming book, Movies R...
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[read the full post...]
May 10, 2010
Massive Photobook Printing Roundup
After digital Jason Dunn had a kid, he went looking for a comprehensive review of the various photo book printing services online. And found out there wasn't one. So he spent six months test printing his son's book over and...
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[read the full post...]
April 15, 2010
The Anti-Slavery Alphabet, c.1846
With lines like "I is the Infant/ from its fond mother torn," and "W is the whipping post," but as far as abolitionist alphabet primers go, this is probably the best I've ever seen. So goodbye Teabaggers, and hello Emancipation...
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[read the full post...]
April 6, 2010
Richard McGuire + Liquid Liquid On Fallon
Holy smokes. Liquid Liquid performing "Cavern" on Jimmy Fallon. So Richard McGuire is like, "Now that two of my four awesome children's books are back in print, I can take a break from designing awesome motion graphics for PBS Kids...
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[read the full post...]
March 29, 2010
Sanjay Patel's Ramayana Was Born In A San Bernardino Motel
One of my earliest favorite discoveries made while writing Daddy Types was Sanjay Patel's awesome Little India, his beautiful retromodern illustrated primer of Hindu deities. Patel, whose dayjob is at Pixar, first published Little India on his own, then...
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[read the full post...]
March 25, 2010
A Little Monkey, Chased By The Nazis. We Have To Help Him. This Is Curious
I've been kind of interested to see "Curious George Saves The Day," the Jewish Museum's exhibit of the work of H.A. and Margret Rey, but now after reading Edward Rothstein's review in the Times, I'm a bit confounded, too....
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This Week's Greatest Children's Book Links Of The Year
Dadwagon has located The Strangest Children's Book of All Time, a 1980 Tibetan refugee's tale of psychoanalysis, as imagined by Richard Scarry's Wall Street Journal doppelganger. Meanwhile, 10 Zen Monkeys claims to have found The Most Depressing Children's Books Ever...
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[read the full post...]
March 5, 2010
Star Wars X Goodnight Moon Mashup By Noah Dziobecki
The Force is strong with this one. Noah Dziobecki made this awesome, Star Wars-themed Goodnight Moon parody for a friend's kid's first birthday. But there is another: Noah's a dad-to-be himself. And there could be yet another. Because you...
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[read the full post...]
March 4, 2010
Ooh, Chouette! Vincent Mathy Livres De Jeunesse!
You know how some kids just have to have their blanket, or their bear, or their favorite sweat sock with them, or they go completely boneless and mental? I just realized that I'm like that with a browser tab...
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[read the full post...]
March 1, 2010
'My First' Graffiti Coloring Book Is Actually My Third
So many graffiti coloring books, so little time to meet with Axe body spray's agency about their rad, new muralbombing campaign. Kobie Solomon is the Detroit [Area] artist whose "My First" Graffiti Coloring Book is the latest entry in...
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[read the full post...]
February 24, 2010
Never Saw: Enzo Mari See Saw
Mamma mia, how could I have tracked down every variation of Enzo Mari's iconic 16 Animali puzzle last year [on Feb. 25!], and yet somehow I missed l'Altalena/ See-Saw? What an awesome-looking book. Michael has a full set of...
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[read the full post...]
February 19, 2010
I Lego N. Y.: The Boardbook
Emily Jagoda's Star Wars bathroom tiles reminded me of the awesome NY subway map bathroom tiles Christoph Niemann designed for his young, subway-expert son. Which, of course, reminded me of Niemann's "I Lego N.Y." series in the NY Times. Which,...
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[read the full post...]
February 16, 2010
What Is Wrong With You White People?
So much going on in Jonathan Liu's Geekdad post about how parents are turning our kids into racists. And by parents, I guess Liu means white parents: The attitude (at least of those who think racism is wrong) is generally...
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The Golden Book Of Chemistry Experiments
At first, the idea that the 1960 Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments was teaching America's Youth how to make deadly chlorine gas at home makes me sad for the decline of Education, Science, and Progress in These United States....
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[read the full post...]
February 9, 2010
Round And Round And Square By Fredun Shapur
Fredun Shapur's illustration and design work is as awesome as his name, and it baffles me how little information about it exists on the web. Shapur did toys and graphics for Creative Playthings, including an iconic series of posters...
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[read the full post...]
February 7, 2010
DT Advertiser Shoutout: Gold Pants Edition
It's a snowbound Sunday night, and a doddering, old English couple just lipsynched in the middle of an LED extravaganza. What better time to give a shoutout to the advertisers who support Daddy Types and line the kids' 529 plans?...
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[read the full post...]
February 4, 2010
All The Characters In Rumplestiltskin, I Need To See You In The Hall
Not my thing, but I can respect and appreciate the fine work Paul Zelinsky did on his renaissance-style illustration of the story of Rumpelstiltskin. Some of those characters are so finely drawn, I expect they are relatives or neighbors...
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[read the full post...]
February 3, 2010
'This Was A Harsh Reality For Mike, Who Had No Significant Human Relationships'
From the unbridled destruction of the landscape by proto-suburban sprawl, to the ever-looming threat of unemployment from technological obsolescence, to the desperate search for work--any work--that drives prices and wages to near zero--and literally leaves the working man trapped with...
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[read the full post...]
February 2, 2010
The Oscar Night Max Wore His Wolf Suit
And was sent to his room without any nominations. Yow. As if this weren't a big enough buzzkill already. Oscar Snubs: Why The Wild Things Aren't Nominated [vanityfair.com]...
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[read the full post...]
What The World Needs Now Is Mayakovsky's The Bedbug For Kids
We sure showed those Capitalists bastards, eh, Comrade? With the discovery of this awesome Soviet-era children's book version of a Bolshevik-era play, it's turning into Trotsky Tuesday around here. These days, Will from Journey Round My Skull is on...
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[read the full post...]
Marxist Bill Martins Are Everywhere!
Holy smokes, Matt from DadWagon has an awesome IM chat with Bill Martin, the Marxist one who wrote Ethical Marxism: The Categorical Imperative of Liberation, not the Marxist one who tried sneaking his capitalist-hating propaganda into Texas schools disguised as...
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[read the full post...]
January 27, 2010
Brown Bear Vs Board Of Education
Yesterday I learned from Dadwagon that members of the Texas State Board of Education recommended banning the work of Bill Martin Jr, who authored Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?, from being used in the state's public education...
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[read the full post...]
January 21, 2010
Andy Warhol's 'A Is An Alphabet'
When he was trying to drum up work as an illustrator in the 1950s, Andy Warhol made little gifts for his clients and friends--mostly painted Ukrainian Easter eggs and little portfolios of drawings and poems wrapped in tissue. A...
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[read the full post...]
January 19, 2010
Lipstick On A Headless Pig: El Ultimo Grito Mico
High-design Italian or not, I've spent my years as a dad trying to avoid giant hunks of kid-targeted plastic. So even though it's from 2006, it's in MoMA's collection now, and it's in an upcoming exhibit of seating for...
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[read the full post...]
January 18, 2010
Curious George, Wrath Of God
"But is it really George's fault? Or is it the Man in The Yellow Hat's fault for taking an agent of chaos out of the wilderness, and trying against all hope to civilize him?" I've given it some serious...
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[read the full post...]
January 13, 2010
Dammit! I Was Going To Blog Geoffrey Hoyle's 2010!
Well, there goes my big 2010 Daddy Types Breakout Web Traffic 3.0 Strategy out the window. Someone else has already started overblogging 2010: Living In The Future, a goofy, purple children's book written by Geoffrey Hoyle, with illustrations by...
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[read the full post...]
January 12, 2010
Who Killed Cock Robin? Who Put It In My First Nursery Book?
The first thing to know is that My First Nursery Book, with illustrations by the Polish/British avant-garde artist and publisher Franciszka Themerson, has just been reissued in its original 1947 form, and you and I and everyone should buy...
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[read the full post...]
The Soviet Union Died So That This Children's Book Might Live
Wow. The Miracle of Life is a 1992 elementary school book from Russia, which just the year before had been the Soviet Union. I'd say it was a fair trade. As far as basic explanations of life, birth, and...
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[read the full post...]
January 7, 2010
International Discourse Coloring Book By Ian James
I've posted a picture of the Karl Marx page before, but the International Discourse Coloring Book by artist Ian James deserves special attention. The book, such as it exists, is really only an instantiation of a larger project, The...
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[read the full post...]
January 6, 2010
Margaret Wise Brown Was As Wack As She Was Prolific
Munro Leaf's always a classic, but seriously, Margaret Wise Brown, what is up? I can't decide which ten books from Curious Pages' massive bloglist of "Recommended inappropriate books for kids" to post about next....
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[read the full post...]
Wrong, Wrong, Wrong 'By' Andy Warhol
Let's be clear that Andy Warhol did not write any books between 1994 and 1997, because he was 7-10 years dead. In a fit of stocking-stuffing genius, however, starting in Holiday '94, The Warhol Foundation executed several keyword searches...
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[read the full post...]
January 5, 2010
Heinz Coloring Book
Photo and ephemera collector Jim Linderman suggests--or jokes, I can't tell--that the 1927 promotiocational classic, Heinz Kindergarten Book: Pictures To Trace might have provided early source material for Andy Warhol. Who knows? Warhol was certainly a voracious a collector...
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December 30, 2009
Spitting Is Sign Of Love After All
In his last interview, conducted while writing his great, posthumously published novel, 2666 and finally published in English last month, the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño discussed parenting:In the end, one could talk for hours about the relationship between a father...
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[read the full post...]
December 7, 2009
Finally, Secrets Of The Cardboard Play Dome Revealed!
And here, all this time, I thought the secret to making easy, awesome cardboard play domes was the Esko Kongsberg i-XL24 die-less cutting and creasing table. [Actually, I knew that something was missing. Thanks to veteran domologist Tom Camilli's...
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[read the full post...]
December 3, 2009
Tres Awesome French Children's Books
At A Journey Round My Skull, Will has an incredible collection of scans from French children's books of the 1930s and '40s. There are some great-looking titles like Je Fais mes Jouets avec des Plantes [I Make My Toys...
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[read the full post...]
December 2, 2009
Meat Industrial Complex, Baby Industrial Complex, Dadbook Industrial Complex
Meanwhile, from the yuppie rabbit hutches of Park Slope, Brooklyn: When I thought it was just a passive aggressive manifesto of smug vegetarianism, I was happy to let Jonathan Safran Foer's new book, Eating Animals go by with nary a...
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[read the full post...]
November 30, 2009
Molto Richard McGuire!
Longtime DT readers and early New York club music aficionados will know of our abiding interest in the work of Richard McGuire. It's one of the mysteries of children's book publishing that even as the artist's signature illustrations were...
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[read the full post...]
November 28, 2009
Avenue Q: The Other Furry Bible
Funny things happen when you look for a fur-covered book. You get the one Sarah Palin was "reading" to her son during half of a TV news interview, Tiny Bear's Bible, which, it turns out, is not real bear...
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'We Can Give Him To Grandma Now If You Want To'
From the back cover of the fur-covered Tiny Bear's BibleTiny Bear's Bible is a warm, fuzzy reminder of how God loves his children--in a format that kids can cuddle. Together with their friend Tiny Bear, children discover eleven Bible...
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[read the full post...]
November 23, 2009
Vintage Illustration Auction Finds: Sendak, Ungerer, Stein, Hurd
So what could be better at an illustrated book auction than five children's books with drawings by Andy Warhol? Glad you asked. Lot 308: Good Shabbos, Everybody, published privately in 1951 by the United Synagogue Commission on Jewish Education, which...
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Andy Warhol's Other Children's Books
The upcoming illustration auction at Bloomsbury New York includes some very interesting stuff. Least interesting among them: a collection of some of the children's anthologies from the late 1950s which include stories illustrated by Andy Warhol. Warhol was still...
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[read the full post...]
November 21, 2009
Muji Washable Coloring Book
How about some international Muji awesomeness you can get shipped to the US? The exchange rate may kill you, but the Muji UK online store ships to the US and Canada, no sweat. Fortunately, this washable cloth coloring book...
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[read the full post...]
November 20, 2009
Good Googly Moogly, Tiny Tim Singing To Real Children
When all is said and done, and we're all dead, and all the history's written, I suspect the people who are now called Gen X will be known as the lucky, unscarred-childhooded few who were too young for Tiny...
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[read the full post...]
November 18, 2009
Madeleine Brand Thinks That Tree Should Just Stop Giving, It's Only Encouraging Him
It's apparently NPR Bad Decisions Day around here. After her slightly quirky, mid-day news/talk show "Day To Day" was canceled, West Coast radio host Madeleine Brand found another gig: momblogger. She is leading the LA Times' new blog/podcast hybrid, Parenting...
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Goodnight, Keith Moon
The rhymes are a little rough in spots, but one thing's for sure: Bruce Worden and Clare Cross's parody Goodnight, Keith Moon is better than the idea of The Who performing at the Super Bowl. Go see it before...
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[read the full post...]
November 10, 2009
Factchecking The Childrearing Experts
You may remember NY Post reporter Jeremy Olshan from such blog posts as "My boys can swim, there just aren't that many of them,", "Brooklyn bike stores fix stroller flats!" and "Holy smokes, IVF means we have twins now!" That...
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[read the full post...]
November 5, 2009
Goodnight, Dead Turks: The Decemberists' Childrens' Book Is Finally At The Printer
I know that when fans read in Paste Oct '06 that The Decemberists' Colin Meloy and Carson Ellis would put out a children's book "about a talking cat who lives in turn-of-the-century Butte, Montana," many people stopped uploading greenscreen...
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[read the full post...]
November 4, 2009
Alphabet Google Earth By Thomas de Bruin
I've been spending a bit of time recently in the Netherlands version of Google Earth, and the geometry of the Dutch landscape is really distinctive. And educational! Thomas de Bruin has assembled the entire alphabet, upper and lower case,...
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[read the full post...]
November 3, 2009
A Is For Anvil: Spectacular Dutch Childrens Books Online
Het ABC voor Holland's Kleintjes met 156 Plaatjes, by Daan Hoeksema, 1923 Bibliodyssey's found another incredible trove of vintage children's books, this time at The Memory of The Netherlands. The digitized collections of libraries and institutions spanning 160 years--including...
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[read the full post...]
October 23, 2009
DT Friday Freakout: Nuclear Edition
Here are some stories from the science, safety, and parenting worlds designed to help give your confidence a little extra push--over the cliff. Have a great weekend! Actually, these first two are just funny-sad: Do you remember going outside to...
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October 22, 2009
Where The Weird Things Are: The Little Prince Movie
We are not big The Little Prince people. I'm sure we have a copy of the book around somewhere, in French, but we haven't read it to the kid. And I guess I read it myself at some point,...
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October 19, 2009
Where The Moody Emos Are
The kid and I just got back from Where The Wild Things Are. I'd spent the weekend shuttling her around to birthday parties, pinging her to see if she was, in fact, equipped to handle the film. [I knew she'd...
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[read the full post...]
October 15, 2009
The Spike Jonze Maurice Sendak Movie I DEFINITELY Want To See
Wow, but the documentary Spike Jonze and Lance Bangs about Maurice Sendak sounds absolutely fantastic. Sounds like their hang-back style captures this cantankerous, complicated, sad, angry, sensitive old genius almost perfectly. As one commenter on the LA Times piece says,...
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[read the full post...]
October 12, 2009
Tibor Gergely X Lucy Sprague Mitchell Throwback Colabos
The awesomely named Tibor Gergely fled the Nazis for New York, where he illustrated one million Golden Books, plus the two Important Wartime Lesson stories the AFISA-Hollywood Animation Archive recently posted. They're just a taste of what's to come;...
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[read the full post...]
How Do Dinosaurs Market Their Industrial Products To Children?
What do GM Diesels do in 1955? When they thought selling just to Industry meant they'd always be alive? Did they make PR comic books in which they denigrate diesels in European cars? Whoops! Now it is too late! For...
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[read the full post...]
October 10, 2009
Let The Last Week Of PR Rumpus Start
From Newsweek's "exclusive" interview with Maurice Sendak, Spike Jonze, and Dave Eggers--who was on speaker: What do you say to parents who think the Wild Things film may be too scary? Sendak: I would tell them to go to hell....
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[read the full post...]
September 29, 2009
The Night Max's Dad Wore His Wolf Suit
And made colabo mischief of one kind: and another: Someone in licensing needs to get sent to bed without eating anything. WTWTA WTF?: Where The Wild Things Are X Opening Ceremony: Max Sweatshirt, $460, Max Suit, $610 [openingceremony.us via the...
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[read the full post...]
September 25, 2009
It's Just A Plan Colombia: Awesome Activist Art By Beehive Design Collective
I was just surfing through some images of the protests at the G20 in Pittsburgh when I was stopped and stunned by the absolutely incredible banners of art-activists of the Beehive Design Collective. the Beehive Collective translates in-depth socio-political...
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[read the full post...]
September 20, 2009
Sartorialist Temporarily Screws Up Arthur Elgort Camera Ready Market
In 1997, fashion photographer Arthur Elgort published Camera Ready: How to Shoot Your Kids, an awesome and inspiring collection of eleven years' worth of his best photos of his own kids, combined with wise, useful, not overly technical advice....
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September 18, 2009
A Child's Machiavelli, AKA The Other Little Prince
It's like my dad always told me: "If you can't beat'em, make sardonic Machiavelli references about'em." When John DiIulio fled the Bush White House in 2001, he described the hyper-politicized environment as being run by "Mayberry Machiavellis." And when...
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[read the full post...]
September 3, 2009
Dust Jackets, Also George Aiken Didn't Write A Parenting Book
I know she's only been around for a year and a half, but it feels like we've been bogged down in a dust jacket war with K2 since the 1960's. Once she discovered books, her perpetual first action has...
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[read the full post...]
August 30, 2009
Old Timey Kid Book Awesomeness At BibliOdyssey
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } I picked this for the easy laugh, but my favorite title in this BibliOdyssey collection...
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August 27, 2009
When Max Eggers Got A Wolf Suit: Media Dad And Gay Socrates Debate WTWTA
I didn't mention the excerpt of Dave Egger's novelization of his screenplay adaptation of Maurice Sendak's Where The Wild Things Are which ran in the New Yorker last week, mostly because I barely managed to read the magazine's publicist's email...
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[read the full post...]
August 24, 2009
Indie Rock Coloring Book By Yellow Bird Project
Graphic artist Andy J. Miller has been collaborating with the Yellow Bird Project on their Indie Rock Coloring Book for almost two years, almost since the YBP itself was founded. There's a page for each of the 32 indie...
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[read the full post...]
August 21, 2009
DTQ: What iPhone Picturebook Apps Do You Use?
It just gives me a headache to wade through the iPhone App Store. And the few picturebook apps I've seen look like crap: a jury-rigged reader with a couple of dopey clip art-lookin' titles no one's ever read twice. Still,...
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[read the full post...]
August 18, 2009
Alison Gopnik On How Babies' Brains Work And How They Learn
One of the forgotten pleasures of visiting the grandparents: reading the print edition of the newspaper. I just finished reading Alison Gopnik's editorial in the Sunday NY Times. Gopnik, a UC Berkeley child psychologist, has turned up on DT before,...
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[read the full post...]
August 17, 2009
Thriftshop Find: The Family of Man, The Magazine
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } Thriftshop Find: The Family of Man, The Magazine, originally uploaded by daddytypes. Obviously it's kind...
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On Loving Ezra Jack Keats
Even in the middle of it, I forget much of parenting is transmitting or recreating my own childhood for my kids. We went to my grandmother's house, so the kid can rummage through the same coal-bin-turned-basement-toy-closet I used to; we...
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[read the full post...]
August 10, 2009
WTD: The Ford Buckminster Fullerwagon
Don't let the old-timey photography fool you. The Ford Treasury of Station Wagon Living is not an artifact of the past; it is a blueprint of the future. From the foreword:Like most new ideas, the book has been a...
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[read the full post...]
August 9, 2009
Nomadic Car Furniture: Ford Treasury Of Station Wagon Living
We're Ford country, y'all! This is so awesome, it's like someone slammed on the brakes, and I just got plastered by all the awesomeness bouncing around in the back of the Country Squire Wagon. Lash it down, people! As...
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[read the full post...]
August 6, 2009
The End Of Adventure, Literature As Michael Chabon Knows It. Them. Also Maps
Here's what I hear: We don't let children go out in the woods today alone anymore, because of our unfounded fear of strangers in vans. The result of this Razing of the Wilderness of Childhood is, in the future, no...
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[read the full post...]
August 4, 2009
This Week In Affordable Artworks: Jane Mount's Kid Book Self-Portrait
I always make sure to have my vintage Pynchons and Nabokovs slotted in there just in case someone like artist Jane Mount comes over. See, like the rest of us, Mount likes to judge people by what's on their...
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[read the full post...]
August 3, 2009
Grey Gardens Coloring Books
Haha, you know how when you're just driving along life's highway, admiring the Maysles brothers' documentary filmmaking genius, and you suddenly get sideswiped by a passing editorial bemusement at unusual coloring books. And when you pull over to check...
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[read the full post...]
July 28, 2009
Who Knew? Mike The Magicat
Our era didn't invent the idea of people being famous merely for being famous. Gong Show judge/psychic Jeane Dixon, I'm looking at you. I'm old enough to have seen your later TV career, but too young to know how...
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[read the full post...]
July 24, 2009
We'll Buy You Up, We Love You So
There's a new short out--not exactly a trailer, and not something I dig calling a "featurette" like I'm supposed to--with mostly Maurice Sendak talking about Spike Jonze's Where The Wild Things Are. Spike's great, but Sendak's awesome, and I feel...
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Dan Meth's Comic Influences? You're Soaking In It!
IN: This video montage of artist/illustrator Dan Meth shows his influences and inspirations in roughly chronological order of exposure. OUT: And this animation montage of more movies adapted from toys is the output. If it were just Care Bears...
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[read the full post...]
July 21, 2009
Ruh Roh! Glenn Ligon Colored [sic] Coloring Book Paintings
So remember how tight that concept was of that one Charleston, SC artist, who decided to make a civil rights coloring book, then have actual kids color it, then turn those into paintings a couple of years ago? Yeah,...
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Joey, Do You Like Coloring Books About Cowboys?
The comic-sized Wrangler Western Museum Coloring Book is an obvious marketing tool--that was published in 1962 by Custom Comics for my high school buddy's grandfather's company, Blue Bell, which operated textile mills way out in the west-- -ern part...
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[read the full post...]
July 20, 2009
Small Coloring Book By Small Magazine
I've always liked small magazine, even as I've watched with amused resignation as the cool, progressive, creative, self-aware, modern, world-changing, ethical, sustainable, handmade, independent kid's product world small embodies turns out have the same retrograde gender biases as the...
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[read the full post...]
July 17, 2009
The Three Little Starchitect Pigs, By Steve Guarnaccia
When it was published in 2000, illustrator and ur-grup Steve Guarnaccia's design snobby retelling of Goldilocks & The Three Iconic Chair-Collecting Bears practically defined the gay uncle gift book genre. Now he's back with another DWR catalogue x fairy tale...
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[read the full post...]
July 10, 2009
7ITBB Interview With Calef Brown
New new new new new. You'd think I never sat at a computer surfing around for interesting kid-related material before. Seven Interesting Things Before Breakfast is a great bookblog that has a fascinating interview with author/illustrator Calef Brown, who...
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[read the full post...]
July 9, 2009
Goodnight, Starched Moon
Interesting. Steve Roden posted images of a little children's bedtime storybook from like 1895 that came free with a box of Faultless Starch. A kid dreams he travels to the moon, where he finds that the lunar pixies clean...
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Brian Wildsmith Overdrive
Given world enough and time, I guess I could get all deep into the children's illustration world to find the really incredible stuff. Then maybe I might have already known about Brian Wildsmith, a British illustrator and author whose...
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[read the full post...]
June 24, 2009
Disney Can Happen To Anyone: Pooh Unplugged, By Karen Finley
After a decade as cannon fodder in the right-wing's culture war, where her every artistic move was invariably introduced as the latest from "controversial and obscene chocolate-smearing performance artist and NEA grant recipient," I would expect that by 1999,...
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[read the full post...]
June 9, 2009
'A China Doll Staring At You From Across The Room'
Odd, I don't remember the Nixon Era as this hilariously creepy. Jim unearths Amy's Doll, another classic picture book from the 70s that--HEADS UP--could trigger a recovered memory trauma for anyone who read it as a child. Have your...
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[read the full post...]
June 8, 2009
George & Barbara Bush Naked On A Hot Day
I'm still trying to stock up on crafty little projects to fill the kid's summer schedule in between camp, grandma sleepovers, and vacations. Somehow, I'm not sure that this vintage paper doll book is going to make it onto...
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[read the full post...]
June 3, 2009
Tetrascroll: AKA Buckylocks And The Three Bears
You know how sometimes you're just sittin' there, building a dome and whatnot, or you're telling your kid the same bedtime story for the bajillionth time, and to keep it fresh, you gradually transmogrify Goldilocks and the Three Bears...
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[read the full post...]
Sotheby's Gets A Turn At Adorable Warhols
Andy Warhol published a boardbook in 1983 through his Swiss dealer Bruno Bischofberger. It's a series of silkscreen paintings of toys and animals taken from vintage ads. We have some copies, and it's cool, but neither kid has shown...
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[read the full post...]
June 2, 2009
The Kid Who Grew Up In The House On Pooh Corner
I just found this drawing by Mike Mills on his Humans blog. It was from his show this spring at Pool Gallery in Berlin, titled, "The only way out is through":With the help of drawings, pamphlets, historic findings and...
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[read the full post...]
June 1, 2009
Crazy Racers That Go-Go-Go! [Out Of Print]
With the end of preschool approaching, I've been stockpiling some craft and toy and art projects to keep the kid busy. At the flea market today, we scored a couple of pristine, c. 1960 activity books from Whitman Publishing of...
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[read the full post...]
May 28, 2009
Let's Read The Sphinx Story Again!
We've been reading our way through the d'Aulaire's Book of Greek Myths at bedtime, and for once, I'm wishing it was more prudish, not less. Because though the kid is loving it, reading the story of Oedipus and the Sphinx...
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[read the full post...]
May 27, 2009
American Plywood Association Kids' Bed, c. 1975
Dave recently posted some scans on Grain Edit of awesome, vintage vacation house plans from the Douglas Fir Plywood Association . The DFPA changed its name to the American Plywood Association in 1964 when it brought in the new...
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[read the full post...]
May 20, 2009
Futuro House, DIY Futuro House
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } Why buy a vintage Futuro House at auction for $50,000, which you'd still have to...
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[read the full post...]
May 18, 2009
Bibs To Go: A Book Of Bibs
Finally, a book that will not be rendered obsolete by iPhone and Kindle. And yet, Bibs To Go is destined to get thrown away. This pad of 20 disposable bibs looks perfect for people who leave the house, but...
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[read the full post...]
May 17, 2009
Donald Barthelme's The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine
I don't know who started it, but there was a period in the 1960s and 1970s when everyone from Monty Python, to the four-armed swami on Sesame Street to Sister Mary Corita Kent to whoever made the tables at Wendy's...
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[read the full post...]
May 15, 2009
"Otherwise They Get The Wrong Idea"
K2 loves tearing pages out of books. Once, in the car on the drive to NYC, she was fileting a gimmicky boardbook copy of There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed A Fly in the back seat. It was keeping...
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[read the full post...]
May 13, 2009
How To Draw Robert Lambry Animals The Albert Verbrugghe Way
You know, I'm always debating with myself over how much info is enough for a good post. Is it really useful for anyone to dig up the publishing history of the pre-war French Augustinian version of Highlights magazine? Isn't it...
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[read the full post...]
How To Draw Animals The Robert Lambry Way
In case you're ever called upon to draw some animals, you may want to brush up on this flickr set of scans from Robert Lambry's les Animaux tels qu'ils sont [Animals as they are]. Lambry's instructions were originally made...
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[read the full post...]
May 11, 2009
Meet Your Custom Coloring Book Industrial Complex
The in-laws came through town recently, and one day was spent at their hotel, the Mandarin Oriental. We played in the pool, dined early in the lobby restaurant, and watched the parade of over-the-top outfits going to the Louis...
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[read the full post...]
May 8, 2009
Hans Christian Andersen's Paper Cuts
The way I remembered it, Hans Christian Andersen was a perennial houseguest of wealthy patrons and would make his intricate paper cuts as a sort of hostess gift. There are something like a thousand still in existence, which would...
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[read the full post...]
May 7, 2009
Hans Christian Andersen's Alphabet
Steve Roden is always finding the most unusual things. Now it's a little square book, Hans Christian Andersen's Alphabet, published in 1955 to commemorate the 150th anniversary of his birth. The illustrations are by the Danish artist Dagmar Starcke,...
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[read the full post...]
Awesome Coloring Book Paintings By Charleston's Favorite Angry Black Artist
Maybe if I were black and had decided to stake out an art career in a bastion of the overly genteel, "we don't have a problem with our black people at all" South like Charleston, I'd be as cynical...
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[read the full post...]
April 30, 2009
Living On The Earth [While Mostly Naked, And With A Kid]
As soon as I saw the cover of Alicia Bay Laurel's Living on The Earth at the library sale, I knew I was buying it, and as soon as I opened it and found out the whole thing was...
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[read the full post...]
April 27, 2009
Moving To A Higher State Of Baby Consciousness
The Boston Globe has an interesting article on the emergent techniques for measuring babies' brain development and activity, and how these advances are changing the commonly accepted model for how babies' brains work and develop. On one level, it's trippy...
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[read the full post...]
April 24, 2009
Dick Bruna And The Seven Dwarfs
It still blows my mind sometimes what libraries will get rid of. In 1966, when Miffy was barely 11 years and six books old, Dick Bruna published a series of fairy tales: Tom Thumb, Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood,...
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[read the full post...]
April 23, 2009
Pocahontas Went To London On A Yellow Submarine
Another awesome library sale find: a beautiful copy of the 1967 psychedelic classic [I'd never heard of], Pocahontas in London, by Jan Wahl, illustrated by John Alcorn. The kid points out it's not as historically accurate as the D'Aulaire,...
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[read the full post...]
April 22, 2009
We're Comic Books From The Government, And We're Here To Help
The library at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln has a collection of government-sponsored comic books. Here are some of them, starting with my favorite. The rest are just filler, pretty much: Pogo: Primer for Parents from the TV Division of the...
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[read the full post...]
Your Kid's Chinese Boss Is Coloring This Right Now
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } 14, originally uploaded by sinosplice. Just teach him to say "Yes sir, I can work...
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[read the full post...]
April 20, 2009
We're From The Government, And We're Here To Help Stop Baby Tossing
When the Children's Bureau of the US Department of Health, Education & Welfare published its first edition of Infant Care in 1914, there was no data on birth rates or infant mortality, no child- and birth-related research, no pediatrics, and...
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[read the full post...]
April 16, 2009
Here We Are, Caitlin And Alec And You And I
"I never wanted to write this book," he tells us at the outset, in a hangdog advisory that we shouldn't expect too much. It was also a book I never wanted to read, but here we are, Alec and I,...
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[read the full post...]
April 14, 2009
Where The Wild Things Weren't
OK, the White House Easter Egg Roll was awesome and all, but for our storytime, we had some knucklehead soccer player from DC United who wouldn't show the kids the book, and then would wonder why they didn't say...
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[read the full post...]
April 9, 2009
Zeus's Roommate
When the kid was born, one of my wife's best friends gave her a vintage copy of Norse Gods and Giants [1967], by Ingri and Edgar d'Aulaire. Apparently, they all used to read it together in elementary school. It's...
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[read the full post...]
April 8, 2009
Someone? Anyone? Is Historien Om Någon Invisible To The Non-Swedish World?
While we're on the subject of 1951 and Sweden and Egon Möller-Nielsen, that also appears to be the publication date for Historien om någon, a children's book he illustrated by Åke Löfgren. It's a ubiquitous classic of Swedish children's literature;...
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[read the full post...]
April 6, 2009
Who Knew? Pre-Bearpocalypse, The Berenstains Were Awesome.
Wow, who knew? Who knew that before they completely sold out and flooded the world with 300 million-and-counting books about their brainless Bear Family, Jan and Stan Berenstain were apparently excellent, talented, witty, and even famous illustrators of the...
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[read the full post...]
March 26, 2009
When The Wild Things Are? Not Till October
OK, there was a moment when it looked like the delays meant it was going to suck. But after seeing the trailer for Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers' incarnation of Where The Wild Things Are, what sucks is that...
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[read the full post...]
March 16, 2009
Blinky The Friendly Hen Is Too A Storybook For Children
By the third time we read it tonight, with the kid on one knee and K2 clamoring on the rest of me like a chicken-laden jungle gym, I think we briefly equalled, if not surpassed, the surreal ridiculousness of...
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[read the full post...]
March 3, 2009
Milca Mayerova's Abeceda: The Czech Alphabet Book To End All Czech Alphabet Books
I worry that I'm slipping. When I first found out a couple of weeks ago about Abeceda, a pioneering artist book created in 1926 by members of a Czech collective in which photographs of dancer/choreographer Milca Mayerova "dancing" each...
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[read the full post...]
March 2, 2009
Some Phony Survey: Dads Flake Out On Books, Should Watch More TV
"A mere 3% of fathers read to their children, compared with 89% of mothers." Somehow, even aunts and uncles read to kids twice as frequently [6%] as their own dads. At least that's the lead finding of a pointless online...
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[read the full post...]
Growing Up Wittgenstein
As we learn from Alexander Waugh's new book, The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War, being one Viennese steel magnate Karl Wittgenstein's nine children had its ups and downs. The ups: very musical. Brahms, Richard Strauss, Schoenberg and Mahler...
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[read the full post...]
February 16, 2009
Francoise, Je Vous Aime. Vous et Votre Sweet Illustrations
K2 was still not asleep, so the kid and I had to scavenge a bedtime storybook from the random pile of eBay and library sale finds in our bedroom corner. The result: a thrashed copy of Bruno Munari's Zoo...
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February 10, 2009
Granta: The Fathers Issue
The February issue of Granta, the first to be edited by Alex Clark, is a collection of writing on the subject of fathers:One of childhood's most furtively treasured games is to imagine how life would be if other circumstances had...
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February 9, 2009
Black Panther Coloring Book: Color The Police! Color, Color, Color The Police!
Depending on which Internet you're on, the Black Panther Coloring Book was either: a forgery by the FBI, mass-mailed to whites in the summer of 1969 to undermine support or the Black Panther Party's political complaints a crazy-unhelpful idea...
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February 4, 2009
A C'est Pour Antipathie: Grand Alphabet Amusant
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } Grand Alphabet Amusant (Morel) ABCDE, originally uploaded by peacay. Nice. How Peacay keeps finding these...
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February 2, 2009
David & John Updike's Helpful Alphabet Of Friendly Objects
The week after a great writer dies and his thoughtful, poeto-photographic, out-of-print, abcedarian collaboration with his son and grandchildren gets namechecked in the New York Times is probably not the best time to pop online to buy a copy....
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[read the full post...]
February 1, 2009
November Was Nakaban Month At Chigo
Chigo is one of our absolute favorite baby stores in the world, which is too bad because it's in Tokyo, and we haven't been for a while. Which means we missed the veritable Nakabanpalooza they held last November. I...
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[read the full post...]
January 15, 2009
Mr Private Equity And Little Miss Licensing
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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[read the full post...]
January 13, 2009
A Book Of Snails [Photographed By Martin Iger]
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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January 9, 2009
Awesome OG Illustrator: Taniuchi Rokuro
.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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January 6, 2009
And There You Have It! The Nutcracker, Diagrammed
.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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Ausgezeichnet! Die Drei Soldaten, Bertolt Brecht's Children's Book
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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She's A Children's Product! Burn Her!
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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[read the full post...]
January 5, 2009
Cash-Inspired: The Man Who Couldn't Cry By Scott Reifsnyder
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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[read the full post...]
January 1, 2009
Bambino, Nulla
.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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December 31, 2008
Creative Playthings Playsack Turns Classic "Bag-On-Head" Punishment Into Hours Of Flame-Retardant Fun!
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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[read the full post...]
December 29, 2008
Porsche Coloring Book: There May Be No Substitute
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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[read the full post...]
December 21, 2008
Freaky Tomi Ungerer Books Are Coming Back In Print
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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[read the full post...]
December 19, 2008
Good For The Poohs
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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[read the full post...]
December 17, 2008
Surrealistiwicz Alphabetski Polska
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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[read the full post...]
December 9, 2008
Miroslave Sasek's This Is The Hub of the Universe United Nations
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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[read the full post...]
December 2, 2008
Ayn Rand On Eco-Totalitarian Parenting
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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[read the full post...]
December 1, 2008
Heading East To A List Of Sweet Picture Books
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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Dallas Clayton On Dallas Clayton's An Awesome Book: "Awesome"
"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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November 30, 2008
Auction At Pooh Corner: Original EH Shepard Artwork At Sotheby's
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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Babar Heartily Endorses This Event Or Product
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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[read the full post...]
November 25, 2008
Fantastique! Papa Built His Kids A Birds Nest In 70's France
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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[read the full post...]
November 24, 2008
DT Freakout Monday? The New Yorker Looks At Overparenting
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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[read the full post...]
November 20, 2008
Aung San Stokke? Guy Delisle's Burma Chronicles
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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[read the full post...]
November 12, 2008
Suddenly I Want 1,700 Japanese Babies [By Reiji Esaki]
.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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November 10, 2008
The New York Times Loves The Hip Hop Speaks To Children
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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[read the full post...]
October 31, 2008
Discovery: We Read: A to Z
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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[read the full post...]
October 25, 2008
On The Road With Misters T And JDG
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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[read the full post...]
October 23, 2008
Mots Animaux By Jean Réal
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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[read the full post...]
October 20, 2008
How Your Hipster [Sic] Baby Name News Is Made
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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[read the full post...]
October 13, 2008
That's Eye Candy We Can Believe In
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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[read the full post...]
October 11, 2008
A Peaceable Kingdom, The Shaker Abecedarius By The Provensens
.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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October 2, 2008
More Dutch Memories: Canada And The ABC's Of Dental Care
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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Chicco And The Man [And His Natural Sucking Instinct]
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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[read the full post...]
October 1, 2008
W Is For White Baby's Burden: Nieuw Indisch ABC Book Looks Pretty Awkward Now
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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[read the full post...]
September 29, 2008
Poetry About William Blake, By Nancy Willard
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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[read the full post...]
September 27, 2008
Yet Another Rietveld Kids Chair [And Table!]
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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[read the full post...]
September 19, 2008
Orange You Glad It's Not Pink Or Blue?
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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[read the full post...]
If My Dad Was Voting For Obama, I'd Be Happy, Too
My Dad's Pick, Barack Obama by some happy kid in Michigan [image chris carlson/ap via daylife]...
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September 18, 2008
Babar And The French Colonialist Hermeneutics Of Blah Blah Blah
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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Too Much Pressure
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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[read the full post...]
September 15, 2008
Beh Is For Bazooka: OG Iranian Coloring Book
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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[read the full post...]
September 10, 2008
Two Things I Did Not Know About Maurice Sendak
The second is that he's had a lifelong fascination with the Lindbergh Baby kidnapping, so much so that he's spent years searching for one of the miniature souvenir ladders that were sold outside the New Jersey courtroom where Bruno...
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[read the full post...]
September 8, 2008
You've Come A Long Way, Retarded Baby
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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[read the full post...]
September 5, 2008
Granddaddy Of Type: Lawrence Weiner's Children's Book
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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[read the full post...]
September 1, 2008
The Demonization Of The Foreskin In Victorian Britain, By The Student Of The Foreskin In Victorian England
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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[read the full post...]
August 30, 2008
Alphabet Truck By Eric Tabuchi
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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[read the full post...]
August 28, 2008
Wise Australia Keeps Fantasies Of Bush & Naked Children To Themselves
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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[read the full post...]
August 18, 2008
Kids: It's The Little Differences
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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[read the full post...]
At Least 7 Kid-Friendly Apps For The iPhone Generation
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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[read the full post...]
August 14, 2008
Campbell Learns About Bond Trading, Tom Wolfe's Children's Book-In-Waiting
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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[read the full post...]
August 13, 2008
Karmazing! Little India Kali Plush Doll By Leeanna Butcher
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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[read the full post...]
August 12, 2008
Mrs Mortimer's Bigoted, Victorian English Neighborhood
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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[read the full post...]
August 11, 2008
Let's Go Outdoors, And When That Sells, Let's Go Other Places
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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[read the full post...]
August 8, 2008
Dude. Maybe Baby May Be Having A Baby!
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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[read the full post...]
August 5, 2008
Jack Spade, 56 Greene St Between Spring & Broome - NO
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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[read the full post...]
August 1, 2008
Greg Learns About Didactic Children's Book Publishing
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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[read the full post...]
July 31, 2008
The Daddy Reads At Night
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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[read the full post...]
July 22, 2008
Parodists, Learn A Lessons From Pat the Politician
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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[read the full post...]
July 21, 2008
Kali Whoa! Take The Hindu Deities, Leave The Karma
.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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Awe. Some. Baby's First Internet At The Morning News
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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[read the full post...]
DT's First Class Advice For Flying
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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[read the full post...]
July 13, 2008
From Ortho, Makers Of America's Favorite Herbicide, Comes America's Favorite DIY PoMo Cradle
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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[read the full post...]
Hello! Goodnight, Bush
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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[read the full post...]
July 9, 2008
It's Just An LSD Cocktail: Timothy Leary Psychedelics Coloring Book
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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[read the full post...]
July 4, 2008
NYT Reviews Backpack Carriers In Five Words Or Less
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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[read the full post...]
She Can Bring Home The Demon, Fry It Up In A Pan
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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[read the full post...]
June 27, 2008
Alec Soth's Dog Days, Bogota
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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[read the full post...]
June 25, 2008
Daddy Rhymes
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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[read the full post...]
June 23, 2008
Ben Bernanke, Ben Bernanke, What Do I See? Philip Anderson Illustrates The Fed
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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[read the full post...]
June 20, 2008
DT Road Trip & Head Count
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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[read the full post...]
Neal Pollack's It's Just A Meso-American Hallucinogenic Plant
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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[read the full post...]
June 18, 2008
War & Sweetpeace: Graco Rocking Robot Single-Armedly Tackles Nation's Reading Crisis
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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[read the full post...]
June 17, 2008
So THAT's What's In Crinkly Books
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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[read the full post...]
June 16, 2008
DT Renegade Craft Fair Round-up
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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[read the full post...]
June 11, 2008
Daddy, Where To Cartoons Come From?
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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[read the full post...]
June 3, 2008
Wow, Charley Harper's ABC's Boardbook
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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[read the full post...]
May 21, 2008
Yoshitomo Nara's Children's Book, The Lonesome Puppy
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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[read the full post...]
May 20, 2008
DT Headline Roundup: Peace & Love Edition
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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[read the full post...]
May 7, 2008
Holy Crap, Our Book Is #652 On Amazon, And We're Having A Signing Tonight
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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[read the full post...]
April 30, 2008
Holy Crap, Our Book Is #42 On Amazon
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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[read the full post...]
April 28, 2008
WryBaby's Safe Baby Pregnancy Tips
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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[read the full post...]
April 25, 2008
My First Pixi Books
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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[read the full post...]
April 21, 2008
Ferdinand, The Disney Version
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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[read the full post...]
April 16, 2008
It's Just A Boob Job: A Book To Explain Plastic Surgery To Your Kids
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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[read the full post...]
April 14, 2008
Papa Poems From Siv Widerberg's I'm Like Me
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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We Need A Montage! Children And Their [Babywearing] Fathers
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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[read the full post...]
April 9, 2008
"Blatantly Unfocused Play With Their Daddy"
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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[read the full post...]
March 31, 2008
Hmm, BabyGap Home Seems To Have A Daddy Gap
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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[read the full post...]
Pointing To Parenting, Inc's Pamela Paul
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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[read the full post...]
March 25, 2008
Blogpile! Marion Bataille's Pop-Up ABC3D
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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[read the full post...]
March 24, 2008
ABC Books Good And Bad
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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[read the full post...]
March 18, 2008
DT Link Roundup: Back In The Day Edition
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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[read the full post...]
March 13, 2008
NYT: Jim Carrey Ruins A[nother] Dr. Seuss Movie
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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[read the full post...]
March 4, 2008
I'll Confess! Make It Stop! The Torture Device Coloring Book
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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[read the full post...]
February 22, 2008
Hieroglyphic Peter Rabbit At The British Museum
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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[read the full post...]
February 21, 2008
What Does Daddy Do With All His Playmobil?
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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[read the full post...]
February 19, 2008
Dr Harvey Karp: "You say, ‘Cookie, now. Cookie now.’"
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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[read the full post...]
February 16, 2008
NYT: The Boynton Industrial Complex Is Our Own Damn Fault
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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[read the full post...]
Flora You Didn't Miss Yet: Primer For Prophets Alphabet
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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[read the full post...]
D'oh, I Missed Manhattan: Suh-Weet Reissued Jim Flora Print
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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[read the full post...]
February 13, 2008
Helen Levitt's Photos Of Kids And Their Street Art
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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[read the full post...]
February 11, 2008
Make Joints, Not Jihadis: The "I Don't Want To Blow You Up!" Coloring Book
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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[read the full post...]
February 7, 2008
They Sure Don't Make'em Like They Used To: c1946 Cardboard Bassinet
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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[read the full post...]
February 4, 2008
Lolita Midsleeper Combi Kid's Bed Light Of A Fire, Fire Of Online
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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[read the full post...]
February 1, 2008
Other Graffiti Coloring Book, Er, Colouring Book
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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[read the full post...]
January 24, 2008
Safe Baby Handling Tips From Wry Baby
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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[read the full post...]
January 23, 2008
Wingnut Book: Hipster Parenting Causes Kiddie Porn
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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[read the full post...]
DTQ&A: Elisha Cooper, Author Of Crawling: A Father's First Year
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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[read the full post...]
January 19, 2008
Lennart Nilsson's Portrait Of An Aka Tribesdad Tribesmom In The Family Of Man
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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[read the full post...]
January 18, 2008
In Attempt To Market Book, German Children's Author Rubs 7.5mm Penis Illustration In America's Faces
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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[read the full post...]
January 11, 2008
Family Man From "The Family Of Man," By Dorothea Lange
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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[read the full post...]
January 10, 2008
Searing Lactivist News! Nestle Brands Babies In China, Gets Smoked By Children's Book Author
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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[read the full post...]
January 9, 2008
The Best Microsoft Servers Are Like Moms: Barefoot And Pregnant
"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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[read the full post...]
January 8, 2008
Mommy, Where Do Jean De Brunhoff Lithographs Come From?
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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[read the full post...]
January 7, 2008
Original Richard Scarry Art
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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[read the full post...]
Wayne Miller's Family In The Family Of Man
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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[read the full post...]
January 6, 2008
Lemony Snicket's Screaming Latke Book Is Pretty Wordy, Funny
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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[read the full post...]
Sept Petit Jappy Chaps? Miss Bravi, I Must Protest!
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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[read the full post...]
December 31, 2007
Parenting Advice Is Different In China, The Old Days, Every Damn Book On The Market
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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[read the full post...]
December 30, 2007
Awesome Ndebele Cardboard House From Driade
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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[read the full post...]
December 28, 2007
This Week In Stump Book News
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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[read the full post...]
Jacob Lawrence's The Migration Of The Negro
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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[read the full post...]
December 26, 2007
JeongMee Yoon's Blue & Pink Projects
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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[read the full post...]
December 21, 2007
The Stump Books For Children, By 'The Pilgrims'
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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[read the full post...]
Saks Children's Book: Happiness Comes From Clothes, Nose Jobs
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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[read the full post...]
DT Window Shopping Roundup: Wooden Bikes, Euro Magazines, Baby Daddy Edition
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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[read the full post...]
December 14, 2007
Teaching The Heir The White Man's Burden
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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[read the full post...]
December 13, 2007
"The Spectre Of Roaming, Near-Feral Children"
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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[read the full post...]
This Is One Of The Houses That The Hungry Caterpillar Built
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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[read the full post...]
December 12, 2007
Parents Treated Best Children's Book Store In Nation, Now Closed, Like Fair-To-Middlin' Library
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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[read the full post...]
December 10, 2007
Saul Bass's Kid's Book: Henri's Walk To Paris
.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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[read the full post...]
Monster Dice By Geoff McFetridge
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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[read the full post...]
December 9, 2007
Microdorm 2: Ken Isaacs' Living Structure For Kids
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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[read the full post...]
December 6, 2007
Merry Krishna! Ghee Happy T-Shirts Make The Perfect Holiday Gift
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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[read the full post...]
December 5, 2007
In The Here And Now: Moons, Mush, Photographs, Lucy Sprague Mitchell
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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[read the full post...]
December 4, 2007
WTF Coloring Books
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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[read the full post...]
Read The Whole Book Online With Lookybook
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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[read the full post...]
Make Me Some Tortillas, Mujer!
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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[read the full post...]
December 3, 2007
It's My Hippie Kid In A Box! Ken Isaacs' Living Structures
.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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[read the full post...]
November 30, 2007
Toni Frissell's Photographic Children's Books
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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[read the full post...]
We Hail Thee, Old Yale: The New Political Alphabet, Circa 1813
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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[read the full post...]
Y Is Not For Yale, Because V Was Already For The 'Varsity, Duh.
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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[read the full post...]
November 29, 2007
The Other 1937 Snow White
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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[read the full post...]
November 23, 2007
Ant Farm Helps Babyplus Technology Break On Through To The Other Side
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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[read the full post...]
November 21, 2007
Vintage Pop-Up Book Teaches Important Lessons On Global Climate Change, Natural Selection
.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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[read the full post...]
November 19, 2007
Shrek Is New Zealand's Most Famous Sheep? Dreamworks Is So Busted
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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[read the full post...]
Hmm. Dadblogs Available For Subscription On The Amazon Kindle e-Reader
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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[read the full post...]
Yotsubato Danbo Amazon Robot Toy Is Like Five Kinds Of Otaku
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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[read the full post...]
November 13, 2007
Someone's Been Sitting In MY Eames Chair
.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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[read the full post...]
DT Retail Scoutabout: Cities & Trikes & Marinas Edition
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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[read the full post...]
November 12, 2007
My First Real World Of Color Boardbook
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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[read the full post...]
November 11, 2007
Otouto No Oppai/ My Little Brother's Boobs
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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[read the full post...]
November 5, 2007
Borat's Stuffed Thong, Or Knitted Icons: The Most Complete List
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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[read the full post...]
October 27, 2007
Unaru No Tomo: Awesome Old Old Japanese Toys
.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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[read the full post...]
October 26, 2007
Graffiti Coloring Book
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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[read the full post...]
October 25, 2007
Dad Has Five Kids' Names, Gay Wizard, Tattooed On Back
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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[read the full post...]
October 18, 2007
NYMag: Good News, Bad News On Where The Wild Things Are Movie
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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[read the full post...]
October 16, 2007
Jessica Seinfeld's "Hide The Vegetables In The Cake" Book Sounds Ridiculous
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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[read the full post...]
Playdate At The Mall: Friends With You's Rainbow Valley Playground
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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[read the full post...]
October 14, 2007
Book Traps
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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[read the full post...]
October 10, 2007
The Animated Nutshell Library By Maurice Sendak
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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[read the full post...]
October 7, 2007
O Is For Orbit: Space Alphabet, By Zacks & Plasencia
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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[read the full post...]
October 4, 2007
Recycling? Finish Your Self Junior Cardboard Chair & Nomadic Furniture Cardboard Car Seat
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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[read the full post...]
The Daily Show Makes Unbearably Crappy Children's Books By Talentless Political Hacks Slightly Funny
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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[read the full post...]
October 2, 2007
Reading Rainbow Rap, &c.
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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[read the full post...]
October 1, 2007
Waiting For The Boardbook: Beckett For Babies
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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September 29, 2007
Thomas The Tank Engine Of The People's Glorious Revolution
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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September 27, 2007
DTQ: Has Anyone Ever Been To The Bologna Children's Book Fair?
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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Whoa. Acona Biconbi By Bruno Munari
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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September 16, 2007
Paul Rand, Punk. Punk, Paul Rand: "Graphics Incognito" By Mark Owens
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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September 6, 2007
It's The Little Differences: Books Once-Blogged Now Actually Reviewed
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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September 3, 2007
William Hunter's Anatomia Uteri Humani Gravidi, 1774
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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August 27, 2007
Whoa. Mary Blair's Disney's Cinderella??
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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August 25, 2007
Freakonomicist Teaches Rock, Paper, Scissors, Not Bedtime Stories. NYT Makes Quiznos Commercial About Same
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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August 24, 2007
DT Cute-Out: Munro Leaf's Safety Can Be Fun Can Be Beautiful
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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August 23, 2007
DTQ: What's Too Long For A Kid's Book?
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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August 17, 2007
FOUND: Documented Evidence That Babble And Alternadad Are, In Fact, Different
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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August 16, 2007
What's In Your Circumcision Library?
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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Pish Posh, It's Just An Air Raid: Blossom, The Brave Balloon
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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August 1, 2007
Between The Lines Artist Coloring Book For Charity By RxArt
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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Peter's ABC Book By Chicago Artist Robert Amft
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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July 31, 2007
P Is For Peanut: The Alphabet Illustrated By The Getty Photo Collection
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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July 25, 2007
B Is For Be-Ins: The Silkscreened Alphabets Of Sister Mary Corita Kent
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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[read the full post...]
July 18, 2007
Keba Keba: Takashi Murakami's Children's Book
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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July 16, 2007
Eine Kleine Buchpenis
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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July 14, 2007
Sylvia Plath's Children's Books
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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July 13, 2007
Greenham Anti-Nuclear Demonstration 25th Anniversary Colouring Book
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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July 6, 2007
Katsumi Komagata's Gorgeous Baby Books
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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July 2, 2007
This Is How We Roll With Lowly Worm
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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June 22, 2007
The Night Max Wore His Wolf Suit And Made Movies Of One Kind
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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June 16, 2007
Daddy Surfs 6: Golliwogs
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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Daddy Surfs 5: Rufty Tufty Is Dorothy Craigie's Second Most Racially Insensitive Children's Book
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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June 15, 2007
Daddy Surfs 4: Dorothy Craigie
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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Daddy Surfs 3: Wha?? Children's Books By Graham Greene??
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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Daddy Surfs 2: Yachts On The Window Sill? Edward Ardizzone?
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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June 12, 2007
Can't Look: Bruno Munari Card Game/Book Things On eBay
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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Be Of Use: Buy Baby, Be Of Use Books
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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June 11, 2007
Heil, Struwwelhitler!
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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[read the full post...]
June 7, 2007
Sean Hannity's Robin Givens Quivers Wrote A Children's Book
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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June 6, 2007
DTQ: Who's The Biggest Kids Brand Whore?
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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Library Card Tales: Leo Lionni & Truckers
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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June 5, 2007
And The Most Expensive Was Madeline
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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June 4, 2007
TMN: Baby Drop-Off For Readers?
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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Pre-School TV's For Marketing, Or D'Oh!, I'm Nodding Along To An Amy Sohn Column
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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May 25, 2007
Sick Photoshopped Children's Book Covers
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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May 24, 2007
Maurice Sendak Watches The Learning Channel
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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Maurice Sendak On The Revolutionary Nature Of The Carrot Seed
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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May 21, 2007
The Kid Gets Library Card, Signs Name, Holy Crap
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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[read the full post...]
May 16, 2007
Elmer The Patchwork Built-In Storage Unit
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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[read the full post...]
May 7, 2007
Dieter Roth's Kinderbuch
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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May 3, 2007
Slate: Everything You Didn't Know You Wanted To Know About The Fertility Industry Because You Were Too Emotionally Involved To Ask
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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May 1, 2007
David Horvath Writes Book! Reads Daddy Types!! Enters Demo!!!
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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Bowie, Lagerfeld, Stipe, Daddy Types Love Thank You Bear
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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April 30, 2007
Welcome To The Desert Of The Playmobil
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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April 24, 2007
P Is For Persona Urbanae: Sweet Juniper's Street Art Alphabet
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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April 13, 2007
Harvey Kurtzman, Josef Schneider, And The Art Of Child Photography
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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March 28, 2007
Alternadad: The Comic Adaptation In The Voice
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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March 25, 2007
M Is For Metal, Mate: Aussie Rocker Alphabet Book
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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[read the full post...]
March 23, 2007
Mary Blair Book? Golden. Verse? Not So Much.
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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[read the full post...]
March 21, 2007
Re: Crazy Writers And The Consumerist Grupocalypse
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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[read the full post...]
March 18, 2007
Japan's Favorite Out&Proud Elephant Has Art Exhibition, Goods Sale
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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[read the full post...]
March 8, 2007
Dr. Bob! Dr. Bob! Dylanesque Covers Of Seuss Songs
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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March 6, 2007
Folkpsychological Development In Infants, Also Descartes' Baby Is An Awesome Title For A Book Or A Band
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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March 1, 2007
Der Struwwelpeter: Scarier Than Plastic Bottles, Even
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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[read the full post...]
February 27, 2007
Miffy Loves New York City; Dick Bruna Loves Cashing NYC's Checks
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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A Is For Asinine - What You Think: Bertrand Russell's Good Citizen's Alphabet
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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February 23, 2007
Jim Carrey Shares His Weirdness, Children's Book Ideas
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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[read the full post...]
February 20, 2007
RIP: Mice Twice Illustrator Joseph Low, 95
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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February 18, 2007
Uptight Censorship Nuts Sack Award-Winning Children's Book
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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February 7, 2007
The Rice Daddies Blogaversary Book Contest
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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Awesome Felt Book By Esther Schuivens
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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[read the full post...]
February 5, 2007
Jazzy Kids Book By Jim Flora: The Day The Cow Sneezed
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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[read the full post...]
January 31, 2007
Richard McGuire's Random Popeye Generator
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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[read the full post...]
January 25, 2007
Canadian Critic Harshes On Hipster Parent Buzz
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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[read the full post...]
January 19, 2007
Rare Play Sculptures Catalogue, Blueprint For Postwar Suburban Utopia [sic], On eBay
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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