What Crocodiles Eat for Dinner Besides Clocks, Pirate Captains, and Elephants’ Children

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The number of crocodiles and alligators in picture books have proliferated over the last few decades for no obvious reason.  Increasing the representation of reptiles might be a good thing if we think their stories should be told alongside those of creatures with fur and feathers.  They aren’t the usual friendly beasts in children’s  books.  Just watch a crocodile bring down a wildebeest on a BBC Earth or a YouTube video of a gigantic alligator marching across a Florida golf course.

F. D. Bedford’s illustration of Captain Hook’s demise from J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan and Wendy (1911).

Famous literary crocodile characters tend to be wily predators, like the ticking one waiting for its chance to nab the rest of Captain Hook or the soft-spoken “large-pattern leather ulster” that grabs the Elephant Child’s nose to drown him for dinner.  After its fifteen-minutes of fame in Paris as the Egyptian sensation, the reptile in Fred Marcellino’s I, Crocodile (1999) eludes Napoleon’s cook by slithering down a manhole into the sewer, where it can pick off unwary merveilleuses for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.Hippos can take on crocodiles in nature, a situation playfully recreated in Catherine Rayner’s Solomon and Mortimer (2016), where two bored male juveniles find themselves at the receiving end of their own practical joke.

Solomon and Mortimer. London: Macmillan Children’s Books, 2020. (Cotsen)

Humans fare less well. Thomas in Patricia McKissack’s A Million Fish…More or Less (1992) illustrated by Dena Schutzer doesn’t stand a chance against Old Atoo, the grand-pere of the Bayou Clapateaux’s alligators, when he claims share of the enormous catch.

A Million Fish…More or Less. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996. (Cotsen 41816)

Girls seem better at eluding crocodile incursions than boys. In Sylviane Donnio’s I’d Really Like to Eat a Child (2007) illustrated by Dorothee de Monfried, a girl so effortlessly repels scrawny Achilles’ attack that he realizes that he will have to consume mountains of bananas to grows big enough to catch tasty young humans.

I’d Really Like to Eat a Child. New York: Random House, ©2007. (Cotsen)

Poling through the bayou in her flat boat, the girl in Candace Fleming’s Who Invited You? (2001) illustrated by cartoonist George Booth has to let a heap of bold animals cadge rides. The low-riding boat catches the attention of “a-smilin’, a-slinkin’, a-blinky-blanky-winkin’” old gator who tries to clamber in too.  When the original nine freeloaders tell him there’s no more space, he just grins as wide as he can, “That’s all right…’cause I have room for YOU.” The girl escapes without a scratch.

Who Invited You? New York: Atheneum Books for Young Readers, ©2001. (Cotsen)

The heroine of author-illustrator Sophie Gilmore’s Little Doctor and the Fearless Beast (2019) runs a jungle clinic catering to sick crocodiles. One day Big Mean, the largest and surliest of them all, turns up at the door and isn’t especially uncooperative.  While the monster takes a cat nap, the little doctor finally succeeds in prying open her jaws.  By falling accidentally into Big Mean’s mouth, she finds the real patients, little hatchlings that need untangling from plastic waste.  For freeing them without a second thought about ng her own safety, Big Mean pronounces the little doctor  a “fearless beast…who could not rest until she had helped her fellow creature.”

Little Doctor and the Fearless Beast. Toronto, ON: Owlkids Books, [2019]. (Cotsen)

Of all the scene-stealing reptiles, the one in Laura Amy Schlitz’s Princess Cora and the Crocodile (2017) takes the prize.  The princess begs her fairy godmother for a dog and receives a crocodile instead, who has been charged with rescuing the princess from her overly fastidious nanny and slave-driving royal parents.  The crocodile will impersonate the princess and refrain from biting or eating anyone so she can have a day off to do exactly what she pleases.  During her absence, he stays more or less within parameters, but uses deliberately inappropriate methods of sensitizing the nanny, queen, and king to her discontents.  But they do set the stage for Princess Cora to calmly renegotiate the terms of her daily routine, which earns him in perpetuity a place in the royal lily pond and all the chocolate and vanilla cream puffs he can gobble up.

Princess Cora and the Crocodile. Somerville, Massachusetts: Candlewick Press, 2017. (Cotsen)

Princess Cora and the Crocodile.

The gaping jaws need never be opened to make a wonderful picture book starring crocodiles, as the last two featured titles demonstrate. The quiet crocodile Fossil, created by Natacha Andriamirado and Delphine Renon, cheerfully plays along with his small herd of animal friends who clamber onto his back to form and reform into living sculptures until commanded to roar and send them flying.

The Quiet Crocodile. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2017. (Cotsen)

Instead of imagining a friendly crocodile at play, Giovanna Zoboli and Mariachiara di Giorgio celebrate the daily routine of a contented working reptile in their wordless Professional Crocodile (2017).  If you want to know his place of employment, you’ll have to read the book!

Professional Crocodile. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2017. (Cotsen)

With apologies to Bernard Waber and Maurice Sendak for not having room for Lyle, Lyle Crocodile and No Fighting, No Biting!

Wood Blocks for the Illustrations of Newbery Children’s Books Acquired

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Simon Lawrence, the proprietor of the Fleece Press in Upper Denby near Wakefield (above), is the descendant of Victorian block makers. For over forty years, Mr. Lawrence has been printing handsome limited edition books by and about wood engravers with wood engraved illustrations.  Mr. Lawrence is not only master printer of illustrations from antique wood blocks, but a discriminating collector of them as well. While searching E-Bay in 2010 he came across some very intriguing descriptions and contacted the consigner to see if there were more where they came from. It turned out that the then owner, a house clearance dealer, had discovered a cache of nearly 650 printing blocks in a house in Kingsbridge,  Devon, but didn’t know anything beyond that about the blocks’ provenance. His plan was to sell them piecemeal.  Rather than have the group dispersed and destroying its research potential, Lawrence decided to purchase the entire lot from the dealer.

What must have looked like a very risky proposition at the time has proven to be well worth it because the majority of the blocks were made to illustrate eighteenth-century children’s books.  And not just any children’s books, but those of John Newbery, the most important publisher for children of the 1700s, his step-son Thomas Carnan, a notable children’s book publisher in his own right, and Carnan’s successor Philip Norbury in Brentford near London.  There are also forty copper printing plates from the Norburys. The box below contains the block illustrating the first stanza of the accumulative nursery rhyme “This is the House that Jack Built, which can be easily picked out because the image has been dusted with chalk.  No earlier set of illustrations are known and they appeared in John Newbery’s Nurse Truelove’s New-Year’s-Gift (1750). The survival of so many wood blocks made for this particular publishing house is truly miraculous, and scholars will thank Simon Lawrence for recognizing their value.

The blocks and some forty copper plates has been acquired by the Cotsen Children’s Library, as a  very welcome addition to its superb collection of juveniles published by the three generations of Newberys.  The four blocks below illustrate four lots knocked down at Charly Chatter’s Lilliputian Auction (1773): Friar Bacon’s brazen head which could see into the future, a bottle, a book, and a mirror, each with magical properties.  Of course, the forthcoming descriptive catalogue of the Newbery collection will illustrate samples of the blocks. As soon as the collection has been unpacked and rehoused, the individual blocks will be scanned so that work can begin on an on-line searchable database so that the blocks and the images they bear will be widely available to researchers.