A Shelf of Small Wonders

By Stefan Kanfer

C.S. Lewis, author of the classic Narnia tales, once described his method of writing for the young: "With me the process is much more like bird watching than like either talking or building. I see pictures . . . Images always come first." This year that analysis also serves as advice: the best books for children bear illustrations that attract the eye before the text can beguile the mind:

Any year with a new Maurice Sendak production is an occasion; a season with two is a festival. In In Grandpa's House by Philip Sendak (Harper & Row; $9.95), the doyen of American illustrators augments an Old World fiction related by his late father. In a manner that recalls I.B. Singer and Marc Chagall, the elder Sendak tells a miraculous story of birds and fish, kings and slaves, and ends with a reassuring biblical moral. His son's black-and- white drawings provide the real enchantment, lending an old man's saga the energy and aura of European village life when even the trees were young. Rudolf Tesnohlidek's The Cunning Little Vixen (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $19.95) inspired the opera by Czech Composer Leos Janacek; Maurice Sendak designed the set and costumes for the celebrated New York City Opera production. In this prose version, the artist follows the connivances and comeuppances of a forester, Bartos, and his antagonist, Vixen Sharp-Ears, defining the animal nature of human creatures and the human characteristics of the forest dwellers. The narrative will have to be read aloud to small children, but the pictures sing for themselves.

Of all the giant creatures that ever walked the earth, none have more enduring fascination for children than the dinosaurs, possibly because no grownup has ever seen them either. In Dinosaurs Are Different (Crowell; $11.50), Aliki accurately re-creates the monsters, as a group of children wander around the drawings. When it is pointed out that Anatosauruses had more than 1,400 teeth, one onlooker remarks, with the good sense that runs through the book, "It's a good thing they didn't have to brush them."

Sometimes the title tells it all. The People Could Fly (Knopf; $12.95) is a compilation of American black folktales retold in an eloquent oral history. Virginia Hamilton has ransacked the past, and Illustrators Diane and Leo Dillon have given it a new radiance. The con games of Bruh Bear and Bruh Rabbit, the capers of magicians and devils, slaves and free men are related simply and without condescension. "They did so love firelight and Free-dom, and tellin," says one of the narrators, and the proof is on every page.

Everybody knows the surfaces, but how does the Statue of Liberty appear from the inside, looking out? What about St. Patrick's Cathedral? Or the cages at the Bronx Zoo? The Inside-Outside Book of New York City by Roxie Munro (Dodd, Mead; $13.95) provides all the answers, peeping through wittily rendered windows and behind bars, around apartment foyers and across footlights. Mayor Ed Koch himself could get no closer to the stem, core and seeds of the Big Apple.

"I have a little guppy./ I would rather have a puppy." This and other examples of the way children really think are presented without ceremony in Karla Kuskin's sprightly Something Sleeping in the Hall (Harper & Row; $8.95). "It makes me squirm/ to watch a worm" and "Spiders are all right, I guess,/ or would be if their legs were less" are reports in rhyme from the world of the very young--and reflect the feelings of those who are a great deal older/ but certainly not any bolder.

Granpa by John Burningham (Crown; $8.95) is a matter of life and death. The elliptical dialogue of little girl and old man is exactly right: "When we get to the beach can we stay there for ever?" "Yes, but we must go back for our tea at four o'clock." And their long walks have the poise and timelessness of a work that will endure. Toward the end of the story, when the girl stares at an empty chair, Burningham suggests more with a few strokes of the pen than other writers have said in whole novels. When Hannah asks her father for an animal, he responds by giving her a stuffed toy. But this is no ordinary present. In Gorilla by Anthony Browne (Knopf; $7.95), the little primate becomes the real thing at night, big enough to put on Daddy's clothes and swing over to the zoo to introduce Hannah to his family. Whimsy predominates--the animals do a lot of monkeying around with movies and dances --but Browne knows how to ape King Kong without going bananas.

When the city grows oppressive, Pig and Duck decide to get away. Therein lies the trouble. A Weekend in the Country by Lee Lorenz (Prentice-Hall; $11.95) catalogs every type of vacation catastrophe, from being confounded by bus, train and plane schedules to getting attacked by giant mosquitoes. In the end, urban chaos seems peaceable by contrast. The author is the cartoon editor of The New Yorker, and he could wring a laugh out of a rock.

A story outlasts its time and place by attracting new translators and artists. Take Hans Christian Andersen's 19th century tale The Nightingale, the chronicle of a Chinese emperor who exchanges a real bird for a mechanical one, only to find that there is no substitute for na- ture. Beni Montresor's drawings (Crown; $12.95) grant the story an alternately tragic and shimmering aura, as if William Blake had collaborated with a butterfly. In the rendition illustrated by Demi (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; $13.95), the nightingale's redemption is presented as a suite of Chinese scrolls, complete with delicate pagodas and gardens. Which is more appealing? It depends on the child. In both cases the emperor really does have new clothes, and either outfit becomes him.

When Andersen was not writing about mermaids, ugly ducklings and such, he was helping a Danish friend, Adolph Drewsen, fill his granddaughter's scrapbook with beautiful prints and original paper shapes. Christine's Picture Book (Holt, Rinehart & Winston; $35) is not, strictly speaking, a storybook. But its rare old scenes are so carefully preserved and reproduced that they bring the past alive. A bather rescued by a dog, a knight facing a three-headed dragon, a silhouetted dancer in the shape of a crab--all are reminiscent of the master himself, working with scissors and paste and pen to amuse the world.

At 78, William Steig seems to have found the secret of eternal freshness: compose a children's book nearly every year. For 1985, it is Solomon the Rusty Nail (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $12.95). A jaunty rabbit finds that he can turn himself into the useless metal object any time he wants to. But Solomon shows off once too often, and he is captured by Ambrose the hungry cat. Although the rabbit avoids becoming a dinner by remaining a nail, he is trapped in that role when the angry feline hammers him into the side of a house. The nail whiles away the time by counting to a zillion, until the cat accidentally sets the house on fire, allowing Solomon to change into the first of the red-hot bunnies. Somehow, the author-artist never strains credulity and seldom fails to make the risible visible. Like the best cartoonists, Steig has always known exactly where to draw the line.

In 1938 Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings published a novel about a boy and his pet, a doomed young fawn. It won the Pulitzer Prize and passed into many editions. The most valuable remains the version decorated with paintings by N.C. Wyeth (1882-1945), the great illustrator of Robin Hood and Treasure Island. Now, as a Reissued Classic, The Yearling (Scribners; $19.95) is again available. Once more the tragic but redeeming life of the Florida backcountry is illuminated by a giant of the genre.

Late one Dec. 24, a boy finds a train stopped outside his house. A conductor beckons him aboard. It is the first of many astonishments in The Polar Express + by Chris Van Allsburg (Houghton Mifflin; $15.95). Other surprises include club cars full of similarly dazed children in pajamas and nightgowns, woods full of wolves and, finally, the frozen sea of the polar ice cap--Santa Claus country. Van Allsburg has given the commonplace a legendary air, and the boy's return seems every bit as gilded as the elves, Santa's airborne sled and the homeward-bound express train, with its conductor, instead of announcing stations, calling out the best destination of all: "MERRY CHRISTMAS."