Worth Reading Before Wrapping

The season’s glut of books for the young shows few startling trends. Camp, via Edward Gorey, is mounting a minor invasion of the nursery; Peter Rabbit is at last available in I/T/A, there are now 45 Hardy Boys books, and Joan Walsh Anglund, having got onto a good thing, won’t let go until she has more titles to her credit than Victor Appleton or maybe even Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth.

Narrowing the field to books worth reading before wrapping, we find it’s a grand year for poetry. Publishers seem to be waking up to the truth that poems for children should be written (and, for that matter, selected) by poets, rather than by dry-as- dust word-count experts or aging librarians umbilically bound to the rhyming dictionary.

CS

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C. H. Simonds

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The season’s glut of books for the young shows few startling trends. Camp, via Edward Gorey, is mounting a minor invasion of the nursery; Peter Rabbit is at last available in I/T/A, there are now 45 Hardy Boys books, and Joan Walsh Anglund, having got onto a good thing, won’t let go until she has more titles to her credit than Victor Appleton or maybe even Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth.

Narrowing the field to books worth reading before wrapping, we find it’s a grand year for poetry. Publishers seem to be waking up to the truth that poems for children should be written (and, for that matter, selected) by poets, rather than by dry-as- dust word-count experts or aging librarians umbilically bound to the rhyming dictionary.