Media Monday

Giving a post a name like that kind of sets me up for a weekly event, non? I was going through Curly Girl's bookshelf trying to weed it out, and I realized that there are some books that are harder to give up than others. A weekly blog feature possibility popped into my head where I would somehow spotlight some of these books, but there is no day of the week that starts with B and what's a weekly feature without alliteration? Then I realized that if I expand to include CDs, DVDs, and videos that I could not only subject my readers to more of my life's minutiae but also get that alliteration.

Today's subject is Tip. My kindergarten reading group read this book, and I found a copy of it in a stack of books another school was discarding decades later. The copyright of this book is 1963, but I was introduced to Tip, the lovable scamp, in 1973.

The text is simple and repetitive, in the Dick and Jane tradition. There is lots of dialogue like, "No, Tip, no. Tip, no!" The drawings make me wonder about the fashion of the time: did little girls really wear flaring skirts that were extremely short?







I wonder, too, about men raking leaves in felt hats. More importantly, though, this picture makes me wonder about the artist's ability to see into the future. Since the book's second printing was in 1963, the year that Norm MacDonald was born, how did the artist know what he was going to look like? And do you think Norm has hidden Tip in that basket of leaves?