A Selection of Picture Books by Local Authors

For the young and the young at heart

By Sheridan Sansegundo

(12/13/2006)

“Duckhampton”
Christian McLean
Illustrations by Amelia Haviland

Duckhampton Press, $19.95

   “Duckhampton” tells the story of Robert, the youngest duckling of the oh-so-superior white Gadwalls of Central Park, who loses his way while flying to Duckhampton for the summer. It is a blissful book, particularly the illustrations.

   The Gadwalls do not speak to pigeons and geese, “who are dirty and steal your feathers,” but it turns out to be a pigeon and a goose who rescue the little duckling. They fly over Manquackset, meet some swans who are even more snobbish than the Gadwalls, and land by mistake on Lake Ronquackama — whose shoreline is chockablock with ice cream stands, carousels, water slides, boom boxes, beach games, and, oh dear, ducks of inferior shapes, sizes, and colors.

   They eventually arrive at the Big Duck in Flanders. Robert’s parents, who have been all the way out to the Montauk Lighthouse looking for him, find him and, deciding that he must have been kidnapped, have the goose and the pigeon locked up.

   Robert is whisked away to the elegant ponds of Duckhampton for a celebration to mark his return. But Robert will not cooperate. He tells his story again and again until his friends are released. For the first time a party is held in Duckhampton in honor of a goose and a pigeon.

   There are some good messages about snobbery here for the kids, a bit of sly fun at the expense of the Hamptons for the adults, and illustrations that will keep everyone happy — a party of owls (great horned, snowy, screech, and barn) having afternoon tea and playing cards, tall ships passing under the Brooklyn Bridge, and the best renditions of different types of feathers that you will find anywhere.

“I’m Dirty”
Kate and Jim McMullan

HarperCollins, $16.99

   The target audience for “I’m Dirty,” about the adventures of a backhoe, is small boys with an obsession about giant yellow earth-moving machines — which seems to be most of them.

   The drawings are big, bright, wild, yucky, mucky, and dripping in gunk and mud. They are accompanied by typical backhoe conversation such as “Ugh!” “RRRRRRRM!”“Mmmmmmmmpuh!” “Chomp, chomp, chomp!” which will make reading aloud a joy for histrionic parents.

   The story finds a nice clean backhoe on its way to work. “I’ve got steel arms, hydraulic rams, and a specialized, maximized, GIANT-SIZED LOADER BUCKET.” He (oh yes, it’s definitely a he) is dropped off at a dump site and sets to work cleaning up 10 torn-up truck tires, 9 fractured fans, 8 busted beach chairs — you get the idea — and taking them off to a Dumpster. Then he yanks out tree stumps, scrapes and flattens, and leaves the site spotless.

   “Me?” he finishes happily. “I’m DIRTY!” And so he is.

“Blackie, the Horse
Who Stood Still”
Christopher Cerf and Paige Peterson

Welcome Books, $18.95

   If this one doesn’t bring out the Kleenex box, I don’t know what will. Not because it is sad (anyone who has had to remove a sobbing 5-year-old from a screening of “Bambi” learns to be cautious about children’s books where dogs, horses, or mothers die), but simply because this true story is very touching.

   This odd horse was born in Kansas. As a colt Blackie didn’t run and jump, he just stood still. It did not appear that he was going to be of any use in life, since a stationary horse has few applications.

   But luck was with him. A rodeo rider came to the farm specifically looking for just such an animal — he roped bulls in the ring and needed a horse that would stand his ground. Blackie never flinched from the bulls and he and his rider won many awards.

   When the cowboy retired, the problem arose again. What can you do with a horse that won’t move? The problem was solved once more, this time by a captain from the U.S. Cavalry Mounted Patrol. He took Blackie to Yosemite, where he happily posed for tourists’ photographs.

   When Blackie got too old and swaybacked to work he was put out to pasture in a field with a view of the Golden Gate Bridge. Both the road and the railway passed by the field, and after a while, as the story of the horse that was always motionless in exactly the same spot began to spread, everyone who went by waved. Blackie, happy in his field, just stood. He stood there for another 28 years. A statue of the horse now marks the spot.

   The text of the story is told in rhyme, and the pictures have been made to look as if a skilled first-grader had done them. It’s a very cute book.

“Pumpkins”
Ken Robbins

Roaring Brook Press, $14.95

   Ken Robbins has followed up his photographic essay about leaves with one about pumpkins, that quintessential symbol of fall in the Eastern United States.

   A simple text follows the cycle of the pumpkin, starting with a wagonload of the bright orange, good-for-very-little gourds. Where do they come from?

   We see the farmer (a rather sexy farmer in short shorts) planting the seeds, the first leaves emerging, and then what is for me the most interesting part of the pumpkin cycle — its spreading vines, curly gripping tendrils, bright yellow flowers like fallen hollyhocks, and graceful leaves.

   There is, of course, a photo of the giant-pumpkin nuts with their monstrous 1,000-pound pumpkin. It comes just after a picture of a tiny orange gourd that fits into a small child’s hand. The best photo shows a collection of unusual pumpkins — flat brown ones, bulbous yellow and green horrors, grizzled gray things, smooth pale pink ones, and ugly mottled creatures that only a pumpkin mother could love. Who knew there was so much variety?

   The books winds up, as is only correct since there is a limit to how many pumpkin pies you feel like making, with the carving of jack-o’-lanterns and the finished product, complete with candle, being carried down the street by a group of scary ghosts and skeletons. “Pumpkins” is fun and instructive at the same time.

“The Catwalk Cats”
Grace Coddington and

Didier Malige
Edition 7 L, $32

   I’m not sure whether the audience for this book is meant to be children or adults but I do know that it is only for the cat-obsessed, cat ninnies, and those cat droolers who start making cooing baby noises at the very sight of a feline.

   Grace Coddington is the high-powered creative director of Vogue America, Didier Malige, her husband, is a stylist, and together they dotingly own many cats, pampered pussies who travel to runway shows in Paris and on photo shoots all over the world.

   The book is far too hefty — $32 and 192 pages — for such a slight subject. It comprises some pretty ho-hum photographs of their cats, followed by endless pages of cat drawings by Ms. Coddington.

   She is an extremely skillful illustrator and the drawings couldn’t be more charming. The cats are little fashionistas, which could be very amusing. Unfortunately the accompanying text lacks the minutest touch of wit. Bland is definitely the color of the month, with boring a close follow-up. Maybe at Vogue they will scream with delight at the idea of a cat in a Balmain dress or trying to fit all its clothes into a Louis Vuitton suitcase. It did nothing for me.

   This could have been a winner — a very small book with one photo of each cat followed by a few dozen drawings with really witty captions. Alas, it did not happen.

   Just look at the list of thanks at the back — Anna Wintour, Andre Leon Talley, Drew Barrymore, Manolo Blahnik, Ralph Lauren, Oscar de la Renta, Marc Jacobs, Helmut Lange, and dozens more fashion names. Do I hear “excessively self-indulgent”?

   I showed it to my cat. He coughed up a hairball.

“The Artful Dog:
Canines From the
Metropolitan Museum
of Art”
Shari Thompson, editor

Chronicle Books, $9.95

   And last comes a little six-inch-square stocking stuffer for dog lovers. This one gets it right. It features the Metropolitan Museum’s paintings, drawings, or photographs of dogs, or details of works that have dogs in them, by Renoir, Fragonard, Thomas Eakins, Veronese, John Singer Sargent, Rosa Bonheur, Landseer, Joseph Stella, and dozens more.

   Each picture is accompanied by doggy quotations from Maeterlinck, Fran Lebowitz, Thomas Hardy, Robert Benchley, Gertrude Stein, and so on.

   Here is Mather Brown’s stout, gussied-up, bewigged matron and her, to be frank, obnoxious lapdog. Along the same lines is Francesco Montemezzano’s 16th-century painting, except the matron in this portrait is fatter and the dog even smaller.

   It is great to see the divine dogs from “The Hunt of the Unicorn” given center stage or the man sitting on the shore with his dog watching an approaching thunderstorm in a detail from a painting by Martin Johnson Heade. There is a photo of Walker Evans with his poodle and an exquisite greyhound in Batoni’s “Diana and Cupid.”

   On the whole, Shari Thompson has chosen lesser-known works of art and combined them with oddball photographs and some amusing old advertisements to create this toothsome little book. Even cynophobics will be unable to resist it.