Jack Built Many Houses

I have heard the rhyme "The House That Jack Built" all of my life...but I never knew until today that he had a last name.

That's just one of the interesting things I learned when perusing several older versions of this poem, published between 1820 and the late 1860s. According to the Wikipedia, "The House That Jack Built" was "derived from a Hebrew hymn in Sepher Haggadah" and did not appear in print in English until 1755 "when it was included in NURSE TRUELOVE'S NEW-YEAR'S-GIFT, OR THE BOOK OF BOOKS FOR CHILDREN."

The oldest bound copy I've found was printed by J. Kendrew of York, circa 1820. Here's a sample of the text, illustrated with woodcuts. (For a larger image, click on the picture.)


This tiny book also includes an additional unrhymed story that reveals Jack's last name is "Jingle."

"The History of Jack Jingle" is subtitled "Showing by what means he acquired his Learning, and in consequence thereof got Money enough to build him a fine House, which is to this day called by the Country People 'The House that Jack built.'" In this story, young Jack is a good kid ("all the neighbors say it gave them pleasure to see him he was so industrious at work, so fond of his book, so dutiful to his parents, and so desirous of making every body happy, that there could not a better example for any children rich or poor.") always doing good deeds, like delivering a fish to his father's employer, Sir Luke Lovel. He encounters Sir Luke who is out and about in the middle of the day "much unlike our great folks now a days who lie in bed till one third of the day is over."

Sir Luke gives Jack a shilling, which Jack uses to buy a hen. When the hen lays eggs that "bring forth chickens" (no mention on how this was achieved with no rooster in the picture), Jack sells the chickens at market and buys a lamb. Now at this point we figure that Jack will continue buying and selling livestock and, in cumulative fashion, improve his lot in life until he builds his famous house. That doesn't happen here. Instead, Sir Luke sees him with the lamb, laughs "heartily" and immediately steps in to end the story with deus ex machina finality: "From this time Sir Luke grew so very fond of Jack that he ... sent him to school, where he behaved so well that he gained both the love of his master and school-fellows. Sir Luke also gave him a good estate, on which he built a House, which to this day is called 'The House that Jack built.'"

The next example of the poem is this version, printed by J.R. Orton of Binghamton in 1847:


As an afterward, it includes a violent story about a rat -- presumably the rat "that ate the malt that lay in the house that Jack built." In this tale, a mother rat goes out, "but strictly charged her young ones not to venture from home,lest they should fall under the claws and jaws of the cat." Of course they do go out ("Surely our eight eyes will be a match for puss with only two.") and of course one gets caught in a trap and has his leg snapped off. When the mother rat returns, the three-legged rat (let's call him Tripod) and his brethren lie about what happened, claiming a trap "came into the hole" and bit off his leg. Yeah, right. Mother rat doesn't buy it either and tells Tripod, "You have got sufficiently punished for your fault. But your brothers I shall punish severely, for being disobedient to my orders and going out when I charged them not to go, and then for trying to cover their fault by all joining to tell a great falsehood."

Well, those words certainly tell the moral of the story...yet the narrator nonetheless feels obliged to REALLY hammer the point home: "One woeful sin generally leads to another; and it is well if sin doesn't end in ruin. Lies are generally bungling things, and are almost always sure to be detected, when they bring with them shame and punishment."

By the 1860s, things had lightened up a bit. These editions of "The House That Jack Built," all published by McLoughlin Brothers during that decade, don't include side stories about good Jack Jingle or bad rats. In fact, in this 1860 edition (illustrated by John Absolon and Harrison Wier), the "man all tatter'd and torn" gets a little frisky with the "maiden all forlorn""



A few years later, "Aunt Louisa's Big Picture Book Series" included bright colored pictures of the tossed dog and forlorn maiden. I imagine that kids who only knew the black-and-white engravings, must have viewed this switch to color edition with the same awe we felt in the 1960s when we exchanged our black-and-white television for a color Panasonic.



Next came Aunt Friendly (Louisa's nicer sister) with a color edition featuring the tattered man and forlorn maiden in yet another clinch:



By far the most unusual version of "The House That Jack Built" that I've encountered is this one, printed on a silk handkerchief! We don't know the exact date it was manufactured, but someone has written "circa 1820" on an accompanying sheet of paper. The original cost, printed right on the handkerchief, is "one farthing."


How amazing to think that this piece of silk, printed with words and illustrations, has existed for nearly two hundred years...through monarchies and presidencies, through civil wars and world wars, long before airplanes were invented and now long after humans have walked on the moon.

Just now, as I removed the handkerchief from its dusty protective envelope, I realized that I was probably the first person to touch this special piece of cloth in decades. ...Woo, it really is dusty. Ah-choo! But it's also valuable. That's why we keep this item stored away where it can't be damaged or harmed in any way.

Ah-CHOO!

Let me just stop and blow my nose for a second before I go on.

Oh no....

Let's Run Away to the Cummer Museum!

Hey, look at this photograph.

Taken over forty years ago, the black-and-white image is now dimmed by sunlight, maybe a little scratched and worn...but doesn’t it look familiar?


Here’s another old photo. It’s not a family member or one of your friends, yet somehow you’re certain you’ve seen this picture before....


If you’re a children’s book fan, you definitely know these images. They are familiar from the works of E.L. Konigsburg.

The first photo features Konigsburg's daughter and son, Laurie and Ross, posing for an illustration that appears early in her classic 1967 novel FROM THE MIXED-UP FILES OF MRS. BASIL E. FRANKWEILER. I’m amazed by how closely the photo matches the illustration. The only major change is that Laurie wore pants and Claudia wears a skirt:


The photograph of the boy-behind-the-door is Ms. Konigsburg’s son Paul posing for the cover illustration of his mom's 1970 novel (GEORGE):


I found these images in a fascinating volume called PAGES & STAGES : THE ART OF E.L. KONIGSBURG:


A must for any E.L. Konigsburg fanatic (and aren’t we all?), this 1999 booklet was published by the Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens in Jacksonville, Florida, in conjunction with a retrospective exhibition of Konigsburg’s work. It contains a piece the author wrote when her materials were archived at the Elizabeth Nesbitt Room of the University of Pittsburgh. There are holographic images of first draft manuscript pages (Konigsburg laments that such pages don’t exist for her later works because they were written on a computer: “Only a final draft exists. And it is on a disk. ... The computer has become Michelangelo’s fiery furnace and erased first and second drafts, numbered the pages and justified the text.” PAGES & STAGES also contains reproductions from the original hand-made edition of SAMUEL TODD’S BOOK OF GREAT COLORS (1989), letters to and from Konigsburg's editors, and pictures of the foreign editions of some of the author’s books. (I’m assuming SACRES SAMEDIS is THE VIEW FROM SATURDAY. What about CARODEJKA JENNIFER? I looked up “carodejka” and found that it means “enchantress, fairy, hag” in Czech. Apparently this edition of JENNIFER, HECATE, MACBETH, WILLIAM MCKINLEY, AND ME, ELIZABETH plays up Jennifer's witchlike qualities and leaves Hecate, Macbeth, and William McKinley -- not to mention poor Elizabeth -- off the cover completely.)

PAGES & STAGES concludes with a checklist, detailing each item in the exhibition -- many of which are not included in this booklet. For those of us who couldn’t get to the Cummer Museum to see the exhibit, reading PAGES & STAGES is the next best thing to being there.

And if PAGES & STAGES stirs up an interest in visiting another museum, why not pull out a copy of FROM THE MIXED-UP FILES OF MRS. BASIL E. FRANKWEILER and join Claudia and Jamie Kincaid on their extended visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art?

Brunch for Labor Day Weekend

This three-day holiday weekend includes the last day of August and the first day of September. I’ve always thought of September first as the beginning of a new year, probably because this is when school starts up again. Today’s Sunday brunch entry includes odds and ends about starting kindergarten and going to reform school (talk about the opposite ends of a spectrum!) as well as hurricanes, crayons, scarecrows, and other random opinions and information on children’s books old and new.

SCHOOL DAYS

My “stat counter” allows me to see what keywords people use on their way to finding this blog. Lately a lot of people have come looking for books on the first day of school. I'm assuming that’s a subject tackled mostly in picture books -- and picture books have never been my specialty. If anyone has any picture book suggestions on this topic, please include them in the comment section below.

Personally, the first day of kindergarten was very traumatic for me. I was very anxious to start school and remember getting dressed up in brand new clothes and going out the front door firmly clutching my “record” (a manilla envelope containing parental info, medical forms, and whatever else you had to present on your first day of kindergarten.) My mother took a movie of me stepping off the porch and heading down the walkway to the street. Then she accompanied me across the street (reminding me to “stop, look, and listen before you cross the street”) and around the block, then across another street (“stop, look, and etc., etc.”) to Horace Mann Elementary School.

It was the perfect autumn day -- bright but sunny, with the first hint of autumn in the cool breeze and just-starting-to-change-color leaves. I wanted to run right up to the big wooden school doors and rush inside, but my mother had to film me walking slowly up the concrete path and standing next to the fence, waiting for the school bell to ring.

We still have the movie.

This scene starts with me proudly grinning and holding my manilla record, the first in line for the first day of school!

After a couple minutes, my smile starts to fade a bit. ...Where are the other kids?

A couple minutes later I’m looking worried. Where is everyone? Why is the building dark inside? Why hasn’t the bell rung?

That’s around the time we figured out that we’d come on the wrong day.

Can you imagine what a letdown that was? Especially for an excited four-year-old? I didn’t learn to spell the word “traumatic” until sixth grade. But I learned what it MEANT before I even started kindergarten.

My brother’s first day of school was equally traumatic. My mother knew what day school started (she wasn’t going to make THAT mistake again) but she wasn’t prepared for my brother refusing to wear the brand new clothes she’d laid out for him AND refusing to carry his manilla record. He decided he was going to wear what HE wanted to wear and carry a PHONOGRAPH record to school. ...Fortunately, by the time he got to school and saw all the other kids carrying their manilla folders, he got scared and was more than willing to trade his 45 RPM single for the manilla envelope our mother had in her purse.

I guess starting school is traumatic for every kid in his or her own way. Remember Ramona Quimby’s first day of school in RAMONA THE PEST by Beverly Cleary (1968)? When her kindergarten teacher Miss Binney tells her to sit at a certain table “for the present,” Ramona refuses to budge because she’s waiting for her present. ... And then there’s that confusing song they have to sing about “the dawner lee light.” Ramona decides that a “dawner” is some kind of lamp that gives off “lee light” -- whatever THAT is!


The whole book is great, but there are two brilliant touches that I’ve never heard anyone mention with regard to RAMONA THE PEST. One is that Ramona’s classmate Davy is clearly dyslexic, though that term is never used in the book. The other is the name of the kindergarten teacher, Miss Binney. Up until very recently Crayola Crayons were manufactured by the Binney-Smith Company and that name was on every box (possibly on ever single crayon) so it’s a word that kindergarteners would know or at least recognize when they read about Ramona.

THREE YEARS AFTER KARINA

As I write this blog entry, Hurricane Gustav is in the Gulf of Mexico and heading toward Lousiana. No one knows yet if this is a hurricane to equal Katrina or whether it will fade to a Category 1 or 2 before it makes landfall. Will Gustav find its way into a children’s or young adult book someday?

Katrina has appeared in a couple YA novels, starting with SOMEONE LIKE SUMMER by M.E. Kerr. Katrina’s approach is mentioned in the final couple pages of Kerr’s book and is used to tie to together one of the book’s themes in a brilliant fashion. And now there’s a new young-adult novel about that storm by Paul Volponi called HURRICANE SONG:


I haven’t read Volponi’s book yet, but I did read this new release by Terry Trueman, which has a similar title and cover image:


However, Trueman’s book concerns Hurricane Mitch, which hit Honduras in 1998. I wasn’t wildly impressed with this novel, finding it somewhat rushed and businesslike instead of emotionally involving. As books go, it’s the equivalent of a Category 1 hurricane -- rather weak.

Incidentally, even though Mr. Trueman is American and most of his books have been originally published in the States by Harper, HURRICANE is a rewritten edition of the author’s book SWALLOWING THE SUN, which was published in Great Britain in 2003. I wonder how that happened.

HUNGRY?

If you’ve been hearing lots of buzz about Suzanne Collins’s new novel, THE HUNGER GAMES, I’m happy to report that the book has finally hit the stores. Sure to be one of the most-talked about novels of the year (some love it, some hate it), it’s already on its way to the bestseller lists. A number of knowledgable people have told me they think THE HUNGER GAMES will be a major contender for this year’s book awards too. So why be late to the party? Get your copy now!


Incidentally, I had to laugh when I saw the book’s dedication. THE HUNGER GAMES, one of the darkest and most violent children’s books of recent years, is dedicated to James Proimos, author JOHNNY MUTTON and other volumes which happen to be among the sunniest and funniest children’s books of recent years. Talk about strange bedfellows.

JUMPING FOR JOY

Speaking of James Proimos, every time I see that animated TV commercial for Soyjoy in which a woman eats a soy bar and begins jumping rope, I’ve wondered if he didn’t do the artwork. The style looks very similar to his.

Today I did some research and discovered the artist who did the Soyjoy commercial is named Roman Klonek. He’s definitely got a style compatible with today’s children’s books. Some smart and savvy editor should track him down to illustrate a picture book. Then send a 10% “finder’s fee” to me at Newbery13@aol.com.

THE SWEET VALLEY HIGH CHORUS AND TAP DANCE TROUPE

Yesterday I was listening to a CD of the 1968 Broadway musical, GEORGE M! (which starred Joel Grey and a young Bernadette Peters) and noted that one of the writers was “Fran Pascal” who later became even more famous as Francine Pascal, the author of “Sweet Valley High” paperback series, which sold upwards of 150 million copies.


I wonder what she found more exciting -- the opening night of her first Broadway play or holding the first copy of her book?

And which award would she rather have won -- a Tony or a Newbery?

I’ve actually touched both awards (Angela Lansbury’s Tony and Joan Blos’s Newbery) and BOTH events were exciting!

A STORY WITHIN A STORY

I’m currently reading LOVE & LIES : MARISOL’S STORY by Ellen Wittlinger, a sequel to HARD LOVE, which was an Honor Book for the very first Printz Award. In this book, the protagonist, Marisol, is attempting to write her first novel. One of the passages she writes seemed particularly apt for a book collecting blog. In the story, a girl goes into a bookstore that is soon to close. She asks the owner what will happen to all the books.

“I’ll put them into storage and sell them online,” she said. “Most people want to shop that way now, anyway.”

Christina made a face. “They do? You can’t make a surprise discovery online! You can’t see if someone has written notes on the pages! You can’t find the book you wanted fallen on the floor between the bookcases! Where’s the joy?”

The cashier smiled at Christina. “That’s true, but most people don’t want to spend time on the possibility of finding joy. They’re too busy for joy.”


Incidentally, it’s amazing how much the world has changed just since HARD LOVE was published in 1999. That book concerned teens expressing themselves in “zines.” I imagine that blogs have now taken that role instead. HARD LOVE was only 224 pages and LOVE & LIES is 245. As much as I rail against the increasing size of today’s young adult books (many of which are 400 or more pages these days), I do think that LOVE & LIES feels a bit skimpy. There are so many characters and so many plot twists, that it actually needs about a hundred more pages to fill out the story. But Marisol remains a fascinating and complex character, just as she was in HARD LOVE. Perhaps we’ll read more about her in a third volume...?

LABOR DAY

To celebrate Labor Day, I’m going to read SISTERS IN SANITY by Gayle Forman, which starts with a girl and her father taking a Labor Day weekend trip to the Grand Canyon (or so she thinks!) that ends with her being dropped off at a “residental treatment center for unstable teenagers.”


I hope it has the same appeal (and momentum) as one of last year’s hard-to-put-down books, BOOT CAMP by Todd Strasser, which concerns a teenage boy sent to an abusive reform center



SOON AFTER LABOR DAY

Earlier I spoke of the year beginning in September, but here’s a book to remind us that things end in September as well. According to the dustjacket flap: “September is a time for changes. The green leaves on the trees and bushes turn yellow, red, and gold. The chipmunks, squirrels, and snakes are changing -- toads and caterpillars too. But -- have you ever wondered what happens to plants and animals when winter comes?”


You don’t hear much about these old science books by written by Glenn O. Bough and illustrated by Jeanne Bendick nowadays, but I like the look of them and think the information they contain about nature still remains timely from year to year, from September to September.

FOR THE RECORD...

Finally, in case you were wondering what phonograph record my brother insisted on carrying to kindergarten, I wish I could tell you it was something either super cool (like an early rock group) or super sophisticated (like Bach.) But it was just a children’s song...back from the days when such tunes were recorded by anonymous singers and sold in the grocery store for thirty-nine cents. The name of the record was “Happy Glow” and though I can’t remember all the words, here are a few of the lyrics I remember. Does it ring a bell for ANYONE else or we were the only people in the world who owned this forty-five?

There’s a scarecrow that I know
Who always has a happy glow
He’s happier far than either you or me.
He has the sun, he has the trees,
He has his friends the birds.
With all of these he has such fun,
He has no need for any words.

So you and I should (something something)
And we would have that happy glow
If we would take it easy just like him!

Have a happy glow!
Life will be much easier if you will!
Have a happy glow!
(Something something something.)

Obviously, I don’t remember it all. Can anyone fill in the “something somethings”? And tell me which other words I have wrong?

It was a silly song but, the older I get, the more it sounds like good advice!

So...have a Happy Labor Day! A Happy Last-Day-of-August! A Happy First-Day-of-September! A Happy Start to the School Year.

And, most of all, Have a Happy Glow!