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FROGS MERRY (by Juliet Kepes; Pantheon; $2.95) is like skindiving by proxy. One drops into an aquamarine world of luminous blues and greens. There is no more story line than the splash of frogs at play. Suddenly, two herons goose-step into the pond. But the lily pads, like huge oriental fans, hide the frogs from their enemies. Frolicking again, the frogs ride a turtle like a raft. Time for a supper snack of algae and dragonfly eggs, and the frogs' perfect day is done. Mrs. Kepes draws the way jazz sounds, and her book is an improvised underwater lyric.
THE STORY OF YOUNG KING ARTHUR (by Clifton Fadiman, illustrated by Paul Liberovsky; Random House; $1.50). Like the actor who plays Hamlet, no author can wholly fail when telling the Arthurian saga. While no Malory or even a T. H. White (The Once and Future King) Author Fadiman is a cut above Lerner & Loewe (Camelot). His grave young hero seems to sense that he is on the threshold of a mythic destiny. Fadiman's Merlin is a wiser Polonius. His courts and tourna ments are a pageant of medieval glory as if they had been clipped from the film sequences of Olivier's Henry V.
TOBIAS AND HIS BIG RED SATCHEL (by Sunny B. Warner; Knopf; $3) reflects every moppet's image of himself as a grown-up Mr. Fixit. Toting around a battered old doctor's bag almost as big as he is, Tobias finds novel uses for its contents. With his saw he rescues an absent-minded carpenter who had built a house without a door. With his shovel he refloats a stranded whale. Author-Illustrator Warner's pictures are as winningly harum-scarum as her resourceful little hero.