Books: CHILDREN'S BOOKS

There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.

—Charles Dickens

Especially children's books. At the Christmas season hundreds of new volumes beckon, each with an appealing dust jacket, each with the promise of juvenile delight. It is only upon close examination that the fantasy turns out to be a dream of Ebenezer Scrooge: volumes shaped like rabbits, turtles—everything but books; "relevant" accounts of crime and strife; the latest data on the making of babies—but little about the meaning of love. Still, along the shelves a few items always glitter—works that will be read and reread long after the backs and covers are coated with crayon, spilled milk, tears and time.

In Anno's Alphabet (Crowell; $6.95), Artist Mitsumasa Anno exhibits a gifted mind as well as hand. Twenty-six illustrations mount ingenious optical illusions in the shape of letters (see story head above—© 1974 by Fukuinkan-Sho-ten);on the opposite pages are objects beginning with those letters. With scrupulous detail Anno simultaneously dazzles, entertains and instructs in the best alphabet book of the year.

For Pezzettino (Pantheon; $4.95), Leo Lionni manages a feat of Klee: his collages and swirls of paint evoke the sensations of childhood. Pezzettino is a minuscule symbol, and all his friends are large, adventurous ones—until the boy sails off to the isle of Wham. The result is a pleasing metaphor for growing pains, and a consolation for that temporary period when the very young are dwarfed by parents, siblings, and sometimes life itself.

"Every child must have something to ignore/ And that's what parents were created for." So observed Ogden Nash, and as if in agreement, Mercer Mayer has produced Two More Moral Tales (Four Winds; $3.50). No adult is needed to explain these textless jokes about pigs who put on elaborate evening wear and then head for mud, or about a venal fox who sells fur coats that are still alive. The Chicken's Child, by Margaret A. Hartelius (Doubleday; $4.95) is similarly pictorial. A chicken accidentally hatches an alligator egg. The green baby thereupon eats corn, pies, wash-tubs and tractors, yet still manages to win himself an honored place on the farm and in the child's library.

Parents are back in style in three books of poems for the young. John Lawrence's Rabbit & Pork: Rhyming Talk (Crowell; $6.95) revives the old cockney custom of jingling euphemisms: "Johnny Homer" to mean corner. By means of fine-lined wood engravings, Lawrence invests each miniverse with whimsy and bite (from "Inky Smudge": Judge, to "Noah's Ark": Park); his pageant of animals educates almost as much as it amuses. Perhaps the most diverting beast of the season is the dragon of Magic in the Mist (Atheneum; $4.95). Margaret Mary Kimmel's happy reptile—illustrated by Trina Schart Hyman—is the best igniter since the match.