A Child's Garden of Verses

 This is one of those books that is just a warm fuzzy place.  A classic of course, illustrated by the fantastic Erik Blegvad.  

A Child's Garden of Verses

Robert Louis Stevenson

illustrated by Erik Blegvad 1978

Hurry, Hurry, Mary Dear

Erik Blegvad illustrates his good friend, N.M. Bodecker's funny poem about a put-upon woman busily preparing for winter.  She must pick apples, chop firewood, churn butter, smoke hams, sew and cook and clean.  As she gets more and more disheveled and exhausted looking, you see her fat husband lounging in his chair, looking quite comfortable and you share her sentiments exactly!  It's all in good fun and Blegvad's pictures are as delightful as always.

Hurry, Hurry, Mary Dear

N.M. Bodecker

illustrated by Erik Blegvad

(Bodecker was also an illustrator and this little tidbit was included in the front of the book.)

The Winter Bear

Of course I couldn't help but post another Blegvad illustrated book!

  

The Winter Bear

Ruth Craft

illustrated by Erik Blegvad 1976

Three siblings go out for a walk on a bleak winter day and find, stuck in a hedge, a teddy bear.  There's no explanation for how or why the bear is there.  But somehow the story doesn't need it.  The children take him home, clean him up, and give him something to wear.

 

Other books illustrated by Erik Blegvad:

Mud Pies and Other Recipes

Moon-Watch Summer

The Dirty Old Man

Anna Banana and Me

Self-Portrait: Erik Blegvad

 

Self-Portrait:

Erik Blegvad

written and illustrated by Erik Blegvad  1979

This AMAZING book arrived in the mail right before Christmas.  Erik Blegvad became my favorite illustrator this summer (I kept adding his illustrated books to this blog).  So I ordered this book second hand and it's even better than I imagined.

It's a very simple auto-biography filled with Blegvad's own illustrations as well as a few from instrumental artist friends and mentors.  He writes it in a conversational way, telling us about his father who hoped to become an artist but was a marine biologist instead, his grandfather who knew the King (of Denmark), and his childhood spent in Copenhagen.

He writes about going to art school and meeting his wife (the author Lenore Blegvad) in Paris.  And as to be expected, the accompanying pictures are wonderful.  There are rough sketches and two pages of what he calls "Roughs, Revisions, Dummies, Doodles, and Decorated Envelopes".  You can guess how much I just love the "decorated envelope" page!

 

Erik and his wife Lenore

 

Love these envelopes!!

Though I loved his work before, I love him even more now through this kind and inspirational biography.

     There's a lazy side to me.  I hold it responsible for placing a sunrise north of Copenhagen, or a sixth finger on a decorated envelope, and for occasionally making some stiff and graceless drawings. 
     But when my lucky side is working, I find myself concentrated at the tip of my pen.  Which to my delight, proceeds to create people, objects, and worlds I never knew existed.
     To have learned to observe at such an early age, to have stumbled into such a varied life, to have spent it with such extraordinary people- there's luck for you.

Other books illustrated by Erik Blegvad:

Mud Pies and Other Recipes

Moon-Watch Summer

The Dirty Old Man

Anna Banana and Me

Mud Pies and Other Recipes

Mud Pies and Other Recipes

Marjorie Winslow

illustrated by Erik Blegvad 2010

I've noticed that left to their own devices, kids will start making mud pies or "cooking" with whatever can be found in the yard- leaves, sticks, dirt.  I find Charlotte's concoctions on the patio or in the tree house.  Sometimes the neighbor kids come over and there's pots of leaf stew with spoons sticking out or sandy casseroles.  Madeleine and Henry used to do this too.  I remember acorns were a particularly favorite ingredient in their dishes.  (And Madeleine just reminded me that onion grass was a staple.)


This absolutely adorable book is written with that child chef in mind. It's dedicated to "Susan and Kate, former doll chefs, who knew better than to taste for seasoning and, therefore, grew up."

It opens with:

This is a cookbook for dolls. It is written for kind climates and summertime.
It is an outdoor cookbook, because dolls dote on mud, when properly prepared. They love the crunch of pine needles and the sweet feel of seaweed on the tongue. The market place, then, will be a forest or sand dune or your own back yard.

The recipes include things like "Pencil Sharpener Pudding", "Pine Needle Upside-Down Cake", "Bark Sandwich", "Roast Rocks", and "Dandelion Souffle".

Erik Blegvad does the drawings. And though children's imaginations certainly don't need the intervention of this book, it's still fun to read and full of cute ideas.

Charlotte's "tea"

Other books illustrated by Erik Blegvad:

Moon-Watch Summer

The Dirty Old Man

Anna Banana and Me

Moon-Watch Summer

Thinking of Neil Armstrong...

Moon-Watch Summer

Lenore Blegvad

illustrated by Erik Blegvad 1972

We seem to like the books by Lenore Blegvad. This easy reader (with nice, unpretentious drawings) tells the story of a boy and his sister who are sent to live with their grandmother in the country for the summer. The grandmother's country house is a dream (at least to me!). It's surrounded by beautiful mountains, a big garden, a creek, and her old horse in the pasture. But it's the summer of 1969, Apollo 11, and all the boy, Adam, cares about is following the astronauts on the radio and watching the moon landing. He resents that his grandmother doesn't have a tv and her rural way of life. But within a few days, he learns to see the value of the country, the slower pace, and the natural world around him. When circumstances force him to care for his younger sister one night, he forms a tender bond with her and begins to understand the beauty in the way his grandmother lives.

That very morning the whole family had watched the televised beginning of another journey- one that Adam had waited a long, long time to see:  the roaring, fiery blast-off of the Apollo 11 spacecraft, on its way to land the first men on the moon.

Sometime later Adam turned off his radio, and the farmhouse was quiet.  Outside in the sloping fields crickets chirped.  He could hear frogs calling from the damp grasses along the edge of the brook below.  With the touch of cool air from the pine woods on his face, Adam lay under his quilt and thought about the astronauts.  Enclosed in their capsule, they were also at rest for the night, moving farther and farther away from him at every moment.

Also by Lenore Blegvad:

Anna Banana 

The Dirty Old Man

I know this poet, but I had never come across this wonderful little poem before.

The Dirty Old Man: A Lay of Leadenhall

William Allingham

illustrated by Erik Blegvad 1965

A precursor to Miss Havisham, the dirty old man lives in absolute squalor and filth though he is a kind gentleman of breeding. Upstairs is a room that has sat undisturbed for 40 years and represents the tragedy that started his undoing.
 

William Allingham notes:  A singular man, named Nathaniel Bentley, for many years kept a large hardware shop in Leadenhall Street, London.  He was best known as 'Dirty Dick.'  ...He died about the year 1809.  The verses accord with the accounts respecting himself and his house...

"The Dirty Old Man" ... (was) first published in Mr. Dickens's "Household Words", and I believe had the honour of suggesting to the great novelist something in "Great Expectations"...

The old man has played out his parts in the scene.

        Wherever he now is, I hope he's more clean.

Yet give we a  thought free of scoffing or ban

        To that Dirty Old House and that Dirty Old Man.