Man, I loved The Best Story Book Ever - no matter how many times I read that, it always seemed like I saw something new each time.
Love him. His books had all these little things going on that were fun to pour over with my kids. His drawing books were a great intro to drawing when I was small and my kids enjoyed them as well.
I wonder what happened to my ‘What do people do all Day’? just found some preview pages on Amazon, took me right back. I love where he’s done a cutout of the road and you see the construction guys (a pig and a fox I think :)) working underground.
I first came across them as a parent and they were near the top of the list for reading with the kids.
I can’t stand him. Every time I’d look at a Richard Scarry book for my daughter, all I could think is “why is this guy so popular?” The drawings are so incredibly twee and bland that they make no more impression than gray wallpaper. And whatever stories were there (usually the books I saw were just his drawings with an subliminal “Ain’t this cute?” all over them), were dull and unimaginative.
Give me Dr. Seuss, Maurice Sendak, Wanda Gag, Esphyr Slobodkina, Kurt Wiese, Clement Hurd, Nurit Karlin, or any artist whose work showed a little personality. Scarry is the American cheese of artist – no flavor at all.
Haha…I was always scared by a realistic picture of a dragonfly from one of his collections. I still am kinda of jumpy around them.
But I loved Richard Scarry as a kid, and my young nephew likes his books too.
Scarry rules. We read to our kids every night before bed and Busytown is a staple.
When we were kids, my mom made a stuffed Huckle Cat for my brother and a stuffed Lowly Worm for me. Sweet!
Whenever I have a particularly loud sneeze, I often think of “Ah-Choo from Hong Kong” and his basket of eggs.
Richard Scarry (pere) is awesome. Richard Scarry (fils) is not so awesome, and has the annoying habit of working as “Richard Scarry”. My brother (who has a daughter who is in the Scarry target audience) pointed out a place in one of his books where Junior had basically traced some of Senior’s pictures from an earlier book, but a lot of the details didn’t make much sense in the new context.
I apparently still don’t get the joke.
*lowly –adjective
- humble in station, condition, or nature: a lowly cottage.
- low in growth or position.
- humble in attitude, behavior, or spirit; meek. *
So Lowly Worm is a lowly worm.
Loved it as a kid and love his books now as an adult. My son’s favorite bedtime story book for the last 4 years has been ‘Busytown Boat Race’, and whenever someone in the family does something boneheaded or clumsy, that means they ‘pulled a Frumble’.
I loved his books as a kid and my kids love them now. We have one old book of mine from the early 70s, bound with duct tape, and a bunch of new editions. I agreed that the “updates” of Scarry’s books, while sometimes more politically correct, are not improvements.
I’m always wary of a father/son authorial dynasty where the son tries to “carry on” the father’s franchise. The Scarrys, the Herberts…the quality rarely continues at the same level.
The last example of father/son authors who were both quality writers that I can think of were the Dumases, and that’s something like 100-150 years in the past.
The phrase “lowly worm” is of ancient vintage. I dunno where it started, but it certainly predates Scarry.
Christopher Tolkien has done okay by his father’s work, I think; but then he hasn’t tried to write continuations.
Yes, he’s more taken on the role of curator than of successor. The only real attempts to create some semblance of the intended narrative from the Professor’s notes was the Silmarillion and the recent Children of Hurin, and even those are billed as “edited by” than any kind of co-author credit.
I always loved my Richard Scarry books…the illustrations were awesome.
Loved them as a kid but, as a cranky old man, I’m not up to buying those new-fangled “updated” editions for the kids.
I think one of the things I loved most as a kid was that there was always stuff going on in the background and the little meta-events were more entertaining than the main focus of the picture.