CHILDREN'S BOOKS

By Stefan Kanfer

There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.

--Charles Dickens

Especially children's books. At the Christmas season hundreds of new volumes beckon, each with an appealing dust jacket, each with the promise of juvenile delight. It is only upon close examination that the fantasy turns out to be a dream of Ebenezer Scrooge: volumes shaped like rabbits, turtles--everything but books; "relevant" accounts of crime and strife; the latest data on the making of babies--but little about the meaning of love. Still, along the shelves a few items always glitter--works that will be read and reread long after the backs and covers are coated with crayon, spilled milk, tears and time.

In Anno's Alphabet (Crowell; $6.95), Artist Mitsumasa Anno exhibits a gifted mind as well as hand. Twenty-six illustrations mount ingenious optical illusions in the shape of letters (see story head above--(c) 1974 by Fukuinkan-Sho-ten);on the opposite pages are objects beginning with those letters. With scrupulous detail Anno simultaneously dazzles, entertains and instructs in the best alphabet book of the year.

For Pezzettino (Pantheon; $4.95), Leo Lionni manages a feat of Klee: his collages and swirls of paint evoke the sensations of childhood. Pezzettino is a minuscule symbol, and all his friends are large, adventurous ones--until the boy sails off to the isle of Wham. The result is a pleasing metaphor for growing pains, and a consolation for that temporary period when the very young are dwarfed by parents, siblings, and sometimes life itself.

"Every child must have something to ignore/ And that's what parents were created for." So observed Ogden Nash, and as if in agreement, Mercer Mayer has produced Two More Moral Tales (Four Winds; $3.50). No adult is needed to explain these textless jokes about pigs who put on elaborate evening wear and then head for mud, or about a venal fox who sells fur coats that are still alive. The Chicken's Child, by Margaret A. Hartelius (Doubleday; $4.95) is similarly pictorial. A chicken accidentally hatches an alligator egg. The green baby thereupon eats corn, pies, wash-tubs and tractors, yet still manages to win himself an honored place on the farm and in the child's library.

Parents are back in style in three books of poems for the young. John Lawrence's Rabbit & Pork: Rhyming Talk (Crowell; $6.95) revives the old cockney custom of jingling euphemisms: "Johnny Homer" to mean corner. By means of fine-lined wood engravings, Lawrence invests each miniverse with whimsy and bite (from "Inky Smudge": Judge, to "Noah's Ark": Park); his pageant of animals educates almost as much as it amuses. Perhaps the most diverting beast of the season is the dragon of Magic in the Mist (Atheneum; $4.95). Margaret Mary Kimmel's happy reptile--illustrated by Trina Schart Hyman--is the best igniter since the match.

X.J. Kennedy is a widely published adult's poet. In One Winter Night in August (Atheneum; $5.95), he turns his powerful gaze downward and inward to the world of the child. Nonsense is Kennedy's forte: "Said a census taker to a centaur, 'Pardon me, I'm counting/ Sir, are you man or are you horse?/ Please, would you mind dismounting?' " How do versifiers obtain such poetic license? Where do they get their ideas? To askers of these eternal questions, Karla Kuskin offers Near the Window Tree (Harper & Row; $5.50). Her verses appear on the right-hand page. On the left is her reason for writing them and instructions on how the child may compose a poem of his own. Mrs. Kuskin's reedy illustrations are inspirations in themselves; her text is the best explanation of elementary prosody available at any price.

Children too old for the preceding volumes, and too young for Ragtime, will find the proper mixture of satire and plot in Are All the Giants Dead? (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; $6.50). Mary Norton, writer of the celebrated Borrowers series, relates the intriguing dream of young James, a boy who finds himself in the land of obsolete fairy-tale characters. There, Beauty and the Beast have produced a daughter, Dulcibel; and Jack the Giant Killer, and the Giant himself, have grown old in the service of their tales. The Wizard of Op (Little, Brown; $4.95) is similarly pitched for older children who have a high tolerance for the bizarre. Artist Ed Emberly has assembled a series of patterns, mazes and comic strips to tell the story of op art. Warning: readers who gaze too long at certain pages may find themselves on the edge of vertigo--a pleasant sensation only to minors.

Pharaonic Opulence. This Christmas two books share honors for the most imaginative tour de force. David Macaulay's brilliant Pyramid (Houghton Mifflin; $7.95) shows, detail by detail, how the great pharaohs' burial places were conceived and constructed. Like the artist's previous Cathedral and City, Pyramid shows the line and bias of an architect more at home with buildings than men. But his draftsmanship is unexcelled, and his book is pharaonic in opulence and design. Finally, for parents, children and pets, there is Peter Cordozo's The Whole Kids Catalog (Bantam). Like the Whole and Last Earth Catalogs, this compendium recognizes no limits except those of space.

Within its 218 pages it provides suggestions, illustrations and addresses for every interest from art to yoga, from carving puppets to building play grounds. Its most popular feature is certain to be the listing for free and almost-free items -- which does not include this $5.95 catalog. Still, its thousand-odd listings work out to about a penny apiece, the best -- and perhaps the only -- bargain of this supercharged holiday season.

Stefan Kanfer

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