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MISS ESTA MAUDE'S SECRET (story and pictures by W. T. Cummings; Whittlesey House; $3.25) is as American as Our Town. Esta Maude Hay is a spinster schoolteacher who lives in a rickety house on the edge of town, with two cats, a goldfish and a parrot. She dresses in black and drives a black, vintage tin lizzie, known as "Miss Esta Maude's machine." But Esta Maude has a flaming secret vice, a racy, sin-red sports car that she drives like the wind of a Friday midnight. Author-Illustrator Cummings manages to be folksy, foxy, and covertly Freudian all at the same time, and his book will appeal to any child who has conjured up an off-hours double life for teacher.
THE WING ON A FLEA (by Ed Emberley; Little, Brown; $2.95) is a precise ballet of triangles, rectangles and circles performed in an amusing thicket of Steinbergian curlicues. Through a repetition of designs, the author-illustrator opens a child's eyes to the similes and metaphors of nature, the recurring likenesses that link man and animal in the great chain of being. "A triangle is the wing on a flea/ And the beak on a bird/ If you'll just look and see . . . A bandit's bandanna/ An admiral's hat/ And in case you don't know it/ The nose on a cat."
THIS IS EDINBURGH and THIS IS MUNICH (by M. Sasek; Macmillan; $3). As readers of his Rome, London, New York and Paris books know, Author-Illustrator Sasek unwraps cities like Christmas presents. He does not have to simulate a child's natural wonder at what exists; he shares it. From the seven tons of bells in Munich's New Town Hall to the address of the oldest house (No. 5 Burgstrasse), he makes his facts sound like discoveries and his Munich sausages appetizing enough to nibble. Edinburgh, with its floral clock, riot of tartans, and Queen's Own Cameron Highlanders, gives Sasek's artistry more scope. This superior junior travel guide deserves a special skirl of the bagpipes.
THE COMPLETE FAIRY TALES OF OSCAR WILDE (illustrations by Charles Mozley; Watts; $4.95) are timeless parables of good and evil for which no child can be too old and no adult too young. In the past, Wilde has often been reduced to the importance of reading and seeing The Importance of Being Earnest; now he is being rediscovered as a magical fabulist and as great a moralist as he was an immoralist. Wilde saw life as a fatality, and many of his fables end tragically. None can be summarized or quoted out of context, for they are mosaics into which Wilde put the man-hours that it takes to polish a diamond.
THE RISE AND FALL OF ADOLF HITLER (by William L. Shirer; Random House; $1.95) is not, as might be supposed, merely an instant, small-package version of Shirer's massive bestseller, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. This book is more sharply and dramatically focused on the man rather than the world he terrorized. Shirer writes with dignity, authority and a total lack of adult condescension. Without blinking the problem of evil, he captures the demonic fascination of Hitler, whose life was essentially the success story of a monster. Like most of the Landmark series, this book is for the keen and sober youngster who is ready to put away childish things and become, like every man, a child of the time.