Each year the kiddies, known in the publishing business as "the under sixes," have barrowfuls of fresh and forgettable picture epics to choose from. Average price: $2.25; average reader interest: one perusal shortly after Christmas. Teenagers, unless they have been permanently crippled by early years with Dick and Jane, can begin to forage for their literary fare cheek by jowl with their parents. But how does one bridge the gap between, say, Pooh and Salinger?
Hours of Osmosis. One ploy for hard-pressed parents at Christmas is to buy manuals. Not the kind pasteurized for little minds by juvenile editors, but the real thing, bristling with figures, blueprints, diagrams and small type, on such topics as U.S. military planes, small-boat modeling, horsemanship, classic cars and medieval armor. Over such tomes a young reader is likely to brood for hours, days, even years, absorbing apparently by osmosis those massive supplies of totally useless facts that are the groundwork of all future intellectual curiosity. In days gone by Jane's Fighting Ships was the greatest example going. A new book out this year may also prove hard to beat. It is uncompromisingly entitled German Aircraft of the First World War (Putnam; $14.95). Another candidate, less austere but likely to appeal to a broader range of readers is Eric Sloane's ABC Book of Early Americana (Doubleday; $2.95). With detailed sketches depicting all manner of colonial artifacts from a niddy noddy (fancy thread winder) to a stone boat, it is done with an understanding —rare enough nowadays—that a book should be a thing to pore over, not to leaf through.
More difficult is the yearly search for new fiction fit to place on the juvenile bookshelf alongside the likes of Munro Leaf's Ferdinand and Grahame's Wind in the Willows. In recent years the only vaguely acceptable candidate was Norton luster's Phantom Tollbooth (1961). But this year can boast one genuine small masterpiece. It is called The Wolves of Willoughby Chase (Doubleday; $2.95). Written, as any child's book should be, with obvious fond delight by Poet Conrad Aiken's daughter Joan, the book tells about two very small girls in a very big English country house almost entirely surrounded by dangers.
Gothic Governess. "Snow lay piled on the dark road across Willoughby Wold," Miss Aiken begins. "But from dawn men had been clearing it with brooms and shovels. There were hundreds of them at work, wrapped in sacking because of the bitter cold and keeping together in groups for fear of the wolves, grown savage and reckless from hunger."