Word: whose
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Dates: during 1980-1980
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DIED. Ben Travers, 94, British playwright whose comedies about rational people struggling with outrageous circumstances tickled audiences for five decades; in London. Travers kept the laughs coming right up to 1976, when at 89 he staged The Bed Before Yesterday, a hit sex farce starring Joan Plowright...
...below the eye level of publishers as well as buyers. They were all right in their place, but their place was the end of the book review section, the bottom of the shelf and the back of the catalogue. Today that illustrated literature has become a $200 million business whose profits are often handsome enough to compensate for deficits in the sales of adult books. Says Frank Scioscia, sales manager for junior books at Harper & Row: "The children's book business has enjoyed a consistent increase in sales, even though school funds have dried up, inflation is hurting...
Today, animals and quasi-animals remain a child's earliest modes of transportation to the province of fantasy. Sesame Street, whose pervasive commercialism makes Disney's appear dwarfish, provides a world of tactile monsters; Sendak's night creatures and Arnold Lobel's Homeric tales of friendship between Frog and Toad, Dr. Seuss's Zizzer-Zazzer-Zuzz, Richard Scarry's Best Mother Goose Ever, and the omnipresent Snoopy and Woodstock are leaders in a procession that could populate a fleet of arks. Still, if anything appears with a tail or a mane, a small human...
Even the superficially attractive books have their drawbacks, says Richard Scarry, whose volumes have sold over 80 million copies in 27 languages. "Some are too sophisticated. The illustrations may be good enough for framing. But they really aren't children's books. The text is either too demanding for youngsters or not on their wave length. Children want stories to satisfy their natural curiosity...
...should be said too that there are public figures whose bearing simply does not lend itself to nicknames. It is hard to imagine that the French would ever refer to their leader as Val. And Mrs. Gandhi is surely nothing but Indira to her friend...