For Children

Brittle good intentions glare out from the bright pages of this year's children's books, but most are sad failures, lacking equally in anything resembling either joy or pain. Publishers are like elderly relatives who come to visit--they coo, they tweak too many cheeks. Worse than relatives, they also play up to parents by dropping names, and they charge high prices to do it: this year's list includes several books for very small children that cost upwards of $3, putting an unnaturally high price on a child's natural impulse for destruction.

A Is for Awful. Among the books most bragged about are the most notable flops. Jean Stafford's Elephi is repellingly saccharine, worse even than Lesley Frost's (the poet's daughter) Really Not Really, in which life (really) and fantasy (not really) are carefully trussed into sweet little packages. Poets Ogden Nash and Phyllis McGinley, both of whom are capable of better things, have written companion books (Girls Are Silly and Boys Are Awful) that are silly and awful.

The bulk of the season's books appear to have been written in an afternoon, then printed early next morning. There are countless books filled with topical trivia, like Countdown for Cindy, the story of a blushing girl astronaut. There are stacks of books so eerily old-fashioned that their manuscripts must have been found in somebody's attic, like Susan Peck, Late of Boston. And there are mountains of dull and dutiful books dedicated to teaching children everything from fishing to fission. Mostly, there are far too many books whose size and gaudy color will no doubt divert the uncertain shopper's eye from the enduring children's classics. But among the 1,600 children's books published in the U.S. last year are a few that are the best in years:

NUTSHELL LIBRARY, by Maurice Sendak (Harper & Row; $2.95), is a box of four delights, tiny enough for a child to hide away and keep. All the stories are both written and illustrated by Sendak, who is the Picasso of children's books, and each of them has a function: one teaches counting, another the alphabet, a third offers a strong moral (you should care), and the fourth praises the wonders of chicken soup with rice.

THE MEANEST SQUIRREL I EVER MET, by Gene Zion, illustrated by Margaret Bloy Graham (Scribners ; $3), is a shy warning that there are mean squirrels in the forest too. Hero Squirrel has all his nuts stolen by M. O. (for Mean Old) Squirrel, who tries to sell them at the Squirrel Cafe, but is politely scolded, reforms and, in the end, teaches the little squirrels how to play ice hockey with a hazel nut.

LITTLE OWL, by Reiner Zimnik, illustrated by Hanne Axmann (Atheneum; $3.50), is a translation from German of a tale about a peeping-owl. The illustrations convey with charm and mystery a mocking view of the foolish fears that isolate adults from the pleasant world of children and small animals.

SLEEP BOOK, by Dr. Seuss (Random, House; $2.95), is his best in years. Its illustrations are properly outlandish, and its verses are zany and catchy enough for many rereadings. It is to be read to a child in bed in the hope of encouraging him to join the rest of the animal kingdom in slumber; so:

Everywhere, creatures have

shut off their voices.

They've all gone to bed in the

beds of their choices.

They're sleeping in bushes.

They're sleeping in crannies.

Some on their stomachs and

some on their fannies.

THE EMPEROR AND THE DRUMMER BOY, by Ruth Robbins, illustrated by Nicolas Sidjakov (Parnassus; $3.25), beautifully embroiders the story of Napoleon's visit to Boulogne in 1804, when he ordered a review of his ships at sea in a storm. Few returned, but among them was a boy who floated to shore on his drum. The illustrations are the year's best.

LEONARD BERNSTEIN'S YOUNG PEOPLE'S CONCERTS (Simon & Schuster; $9.95) is an artful success in putting into a box the same wonders he now and then broadcasts on television. Five seven-inch records accompany a lively, learned introduction to music theory and appreciation, employing fragments from Bach, Haydn, Brahms and Prokofiev, among others.

THE CRYSTAL CABINET, ed. by Horace Gregory and Mary a Zaturenska (Holt, Rinehart & Winston; $3.50), is a tasteful and intelligent anthology of lyric poetry that mixes old favorites with surprising curiosities such as E. E. Cummings' Doll's Boy's Asleep and a translation from the Chinese by Ezra Pound.

The Crowell-Collier's Modern Masters series has six new books at $1.95 each (TIME, Nov. 9), by such capable hands as Phyllis McGinley and John Ciardi, each written with a carefully limited vocabulary to suit young readers. The best of the lot is Robert Graves's THE BIG GREEN BOOK, a remarkable example of how much can be told in simple words--338 of them, in this case.

An even finer job is Macmillan's new series of six fairy-tale collections at $1.95 each. Included are Grimm, Oscar Wilde and Hans Christian Andersen, with introductions by Randall Jarrell, John Updike, Isak Dinesen and Elizabeth Bowen. The illustrations are most suitable, and so, particularly, is Updike in an introduction to Wilde's The Young King. "Through these stories you will enter a world where a king properly wears a beggar's rags and where a cracked heart of lead and a dead bird are the most precious things in the city. Is this too strange? Or have you, in fact, always known it to be true?"

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