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Books: Other Notables

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TIME

MOTHER GOOSE illustrated by Kate Greenaway. Unpaged. Evergreen Press. $2. Mr. and Mrs. Jack Sprat look a bit like Lord Byron and Lady Caroline Lamb at dinner. But this slender facsimile reprint of selected Mother Goose rhymes does reasonably well by the grainy, graceful, pastel charms of Victorian Illustrator Kate Greena way’s 1881 original.

CATHEDRAL: The Story of Its Construction by David Macaulay. 80 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $6.95. This marvelous book recreates the building of a French Gothic cathedral, from the hewing down of half a forest to the placement of the last sheet of lead on the spire. Macaulay, a young architect, uses voluminous knowledge and pen-and-ink sketches, accompanied by a brief, clear narrative. He shows how to design and build a flying buttress, cast a bell in bronze, use the mortise-and-tenon method on the roof beams. By changing his viewpoint, he also powerfully conveys the immense rook-filled heights of the cathedral.

A GREAT BIG UGLY MAN CAME UP AND TIED HIS HORSE TO ME: A Book of Nonsense Verse illustrated by Wallace Tripp. 46 pages. Little, Brown. $5.95. An apogee of anthropomorphism that takes a collection of crazy quatrains and lurid limericks literally and presents men and animals behaving comically like people. Wallace Tripp can do more with a sulky young rabbit, or a fox glumly watching water pour through his tattered umbrella, than anyone would think possible.

NO KISS FOR MOTHER by Tomi Ungerer. 40 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $5.95. Piper Paw is a bad-hat young cat who cannot abide being called Honey Pie by his mother, Mrs. Velvet Paw. Nor can he stand her icky kisses. After plying the little creep with Casserole of Mole Innards, mother finally slaps son into silence. He buys her yellow roses and they come to a kissless domestic stalemate that is better than their sweet-and-sour past. A very sharp and funny book.

GREAT SWEDISH FAIRY TALES illustrated by John Bauer. 239 pages. Delacorte/ Seymour Lawrence. $7.95. These slightly static stories introduce a world of fearless children who come to no harm, questing princes, and, above all, trolls and tomtes. Trolls, as everyone knows, are huge, gnarly creatures. They have tails, live for three or four thousand years, and seem to be fond of putting children into frying pans. Tomtes, on the other hand, are small (ten inches tall), benign and clever. The illustrator, John Bauer, who died in 1918, seems to have been Sweden’s answer to Arthur Rackham and Howard Pyle. A fondness for somber colors makes him a good deal better at painting trolls than princes.

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