"a marriage of picture and tale that is perfectly balanced"

March 11, 2019 11:01 AM

The Oldest American Picture Book Still In Print Is Obviously About Cats: Happy birthday to Wanda Gág, a free-thinking, sex-positive leftist, artist and lithographer who designed her own clothes, translated fairy tales, and wrote and illustrated Millions of Cats. More on her amazing life previously.
posted by not_the_water (14 comments total)

Happy birthday, Wanda!

I enjoyed introducing Millions of Cats to Little Random's bedtime reading repertoire. The cadence of "hundreds of cats, thousands of cats, millions and billions and trillions of cats" is not only catchy and hypnotic, but a good introduction to large numbers.
posted by Quasirandom at 11:26 AM on March 11, 2019 [1 favorite]

I love this book and can still, in my 40s, recite significant sections of it from memory. Wonderful writing and art. I have never known much about the author but she sounds really interesting.

Thank you for the post!
posted by Dip Flash at 11:46 AM on March 11, 2019 [1 favorite]

Okay, don't all the cats....fight each other until only one is left? I found this a very upsetting book, tbh!
posted by Frowner at 11:49 AM on March 11, 2019 [1 favorite]

madcapsoprano likes this book. (I think she's a soprano, she doesn't really know how to talk yet so it's hard to characterize her voice.)
posted by madcaptenor at 12:01 PM on March 11, 2019

another lovely Gág book, Gone is Gone, has zero fatalities
posted by ivan ivanych samovar at 12:10 PM on March 11, 2019 [1 favorite]

This was my favorite book as a child.
posted by all about eevee at 12:28 PM on March 11, 2019

It is indeed an upsetting book. My experience in reading it to young people is that it helps to a) add commentary about the old man's bad decision making, b) play up the ecological catastrophe of the migration, and c) treat the climactic battle as absurdist comedy. Swing it both more and less realistic, as you go.
posted by Quasirandom at 1:52 PM on March 11, 2019 [1 favorite]

Wow, thank you for this post--I loved reading about Wanda Gag and her life. I remember her books very clearly but I didn't know anything about her life. Those are fabulous photos of her and her siblings. I particularly like the one captioned "The young working artist."
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 2:03 PM on March 11, 2019

I never found it upsetting (and there is a reason it is still in print, kids love it) but it isn’t a Disney cartoon either, that is for sure.
posted by Dip Flash at 2:07 PM on March 11, 2019 [1 favorite]

Because of the coincidence of names and picture-book titles, I always find myself thinking of her as the grown-up version of Wanda from The Hundred Dresses.
posted by huimangm at 2:29 PM on March 11, 2019

I loved Millions of Cats as a kid! And fwiw, I never thought it was upsetting until I started reading it to my own kid, who himself doesn't find it upsetting, even though I do now. I think it's the unrealistic nature of the story. If this were a book about five cats in which four fought to the death, it would be really traumatic. But there are trillions of cats, and they eat each other up, leaving no trace of their ever having existed. It's very easy to divorce the story from any sort of reality.

And not to mention that it has a sweet ending!
posted by lollymccatburglar at 2:47 PM on March 11, 2019 [3 favorites]

This phrase, from a New York librarian, gave me the chills: [Moore] thought the handlettering would make a child "almost feel that he has made this book."

Why? Because when I was three, in 1955 or so, this was the book that I decided to hand-copy, letter for letter, when I was three, before I knew the alphabet. I just knew that the act of writing words was magical, so I sat down and meticulously copied a few pages at my little desk by my bedroom window. I didn't pick the book with the easiest type to copy. (Dr. Seuss books were coming out at this time.) But there was something special about the way the words looked...

The following year I learned how to write my name in caps, although I wasn't sure how many horizontal lines there were in "E." I knew it was more than two but less than five.

I finally got the hang of it and now I am fully literate. Thank you, Wanda Gág.
posted by kozad at 8:14 AM on March 13, 2019 [5 favorites]

My son still has no idea when to stop putting horizontal lines in E (the "when do I stop spelling Mississippi" problem)
posted by ivan ivanych samovar at 2:09 PM on March 13, 2019

I thought that was the "I don't know when to stop spelling 'banana'" problem.
posted by madcaptenor at 11:45 AM on March 14, 2019