It’s the 50th anniversary of Richard Scarry’s Cars and Trucks and Things That Go and there’s a new edition out to celebrate it.
In his essay for The Yale Review, cartoonist Chris Ware (Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth, Building Stories, and the Acme Novelty Library) examines Richard Scarry’s evolution as a children’s book author and illustrator, tracing his journey from conventional commercial artist to creator of the beloved Busytown series, while weaving in personal memories of encountering Scarry’s books as a child, the business history of Golden Books publishing, and his analysis of how Scarry’s switch to animal characters and looser drawing style made his work more universally appealing.
The Busytown books were enormous successes in America. But Scarry wrote and drew them in Switzerland, where he decided to move in 1967 after a three-week ski vacation with his son. What seems to have been an impulsive decision starts to makes sense if you’ve spent a few days immersed in Scarry’s work writing an essay for The Yale Review: a decidedly un-American tone runs through much of it. By “un-American” I don’t mean anti-American. Instead, I mean there’s a top-down, citizen-as-responsible-contributor, sense-of-oneself-as-part-of-something-bigger that feels, well, civilized. Even as a kid, I noticed that something about Best Word Book Ever felt odd, and I decided that Scarry was a balding Englishman, tweedy with possible pipe and maybe even one of those mountaineering hats with a feather in it. He was not any of those things. But the more one looks at his work, the more one sees how the European daily grocery trip, the walk to a nearby shop or tradesman’s guild, the tiny apple car fit for a worm are not part of the blowout-all-in-for-oneself-oil-fueled-free-for-all toward which America was barreling in the late 1960s. (Except, perhaps, in Cars and Trucks and Things That Go — though Europe has traffic, too.) So it’s perhaps unsurprising that Scarry spent the rest of his life first in Lausanne and then Gstaad, in a lovely chalet, hardly looking back while America slowly ground itself to pieces.
It’s a long essay, but as a fan of both Ware’s cartooning and Scarry’s children’s books, I was engrossed by Ware’s childhood memories of reading Scarry and his account of Scarry’s life, including his unusually comfortable service during WWII.
Previously:
• Richard Scarry’s 21st Century Classroom
• Richard Scarry’s Busy Town in the 21st Century
• Differences between 1963 and 1991 editions of Richard Scarry kids’ book
• Richard Scarry’s Busy, Busy Day in Trump’s America
• Disrupting Richard Scarry
• More Richard Scarry’s 21st Century Busy Town Jobs
• Tom the Dancing Bug: A Busy, Busy Day at the Republican National Convention
This post was originally published on here
