The Indoor Noisy Book by Margaret Wise Brown
The Indoor Noisy Book by Margaret Wise Brown
Illustrated by Leonard Weisgard
Let’s start the Very Quiet Custard with Margaret Wise Brown. After all, she’s the one who wrote the phrase “Very Quiet Custard”. And her books are where Kids Lit - at least our modern version of it - is said to have sprung.
My shelves are groaning under piles of kids’ books, but before this project, I owned almost no MWB books. Her books weren’t ones I pored over as a kid, imprinted on my brain the way Charlotte Zolotow or James Marshall books or Ezra Jack Keats are. So then, why call this endeavor Very Quiet Custard? [1] Once upon a time, I had read the phrase, liked the sound of the three words together, and wrote it down in a notebook. When I came upon it again, I couldn’t remember where I had first found it. Thanks to Google, I could tell it appeared in one of MWB’s Noisy Books, but not exactly which one. It turns out that MWB wrote eight Noisy books, some of her earliest works:
The Noisy Book, illus. Leonard Weisgard (W. R. Scott, 1939)
The Country Noisy Book, illus. Leonard Weisgard (W. R. Scott, 1940)
The Seashore Noisy Book, illus. Leonard Weisgard (W. R. Scott, 1941)
The Indoor Noisy Book, illus. Leonard Weisgard (W. R. Scott, 1942)
The Noisy Bird Book, illus. Leonard Weisgard (W. R. Scott, 1943)
The Winter Noisy Book, illus. Charles Green Shaw (W. R. Scott, 1947)
The Quiet Noisy Book, illus. Leonard Weisgard (Harper, 1950)
The Summer Noisy Book, illus. Leonard Weisgard (Harper, 1951)
I had to order all of them to try to unearth “a very quiet custard”. [2] It wasn’t a hardship; the Noisy books are actually delightfully direct and sensory-laden at the same time, and they were reprinted in the 1990s so they aren’t scarce or expensive. So I placed my orders and waited.
Book after book came through the mail, I unwrapped them eagerly- but no “very quiet custard”. There are repeating tropes in the books:
A little dog named Muffin [3] is the protagonist, investigating the household or the outdoors for noisy noises.
A question on each page, practically begging a child to shout “No!” This is the dream of every storytime librarian. Those beautiful intricate illustrations and long descriptive sentences that work so well when you are sitting an inch over the page or in the lap of a loved one, don’t work in a Storytime session. The Noisy books, if I’d known of them, would have been sure-fire books for my school library, letting me whisper and raise my voice in crescendos. MWB knew why this was important. “A picture book must be dramatic and much of the drama is turning over the pages,” she said [Bliven 64]. She knew this in part because early on in her career, she worked at the Bank Street Writing Laboratory, with their innovative use of topics and language and connecting writers with real children.
Use of onomatopeia. This is what the scholar Rivinus said about her Noisy Book works:
“Brown helps pull the children up to a new level of linguistic knowledge by exposing them to words and structures slightly above their developmental level. Repetitive and onomatopoetic forms are used to engage the child; for example, in The Indoor Noisy Book, the dog, Muffin listens to old as well as new and unknown sounds:
Then he could hear the little boy's mother's footsteps patter patter patter
Then the little boy's father's footsteps How was that? clump clump clump Then the cook's footsteps How was that? Dump Dump-de-dump de Dump The repetitive conjunctions and verbs ("clump, clump, clump") are the speech of a young child. At the same time, new words (footsteps and patter) are introduced. Brown understood how children develop conversational skill” [Rivinus]MWB talked about the Noisy Books in an “imaginary interview” with Leonard S. Marcus [4]:
MWB: I love children but distrust teachers, librarians, and policemen [5]. The Noisy books are a device I worked out with very young children to draw the children into the story by questions and rhythms and repetitions and by using every quality of a book in timing and action, from the turning of the pages to the final closing of the book.
LSM: Parents and children discovered your books before the library world did. Tell me about the letters your readers have sent you.
MWB: One child was disturbed because I said in one of the Noisy books, "The stars came out." He said the stars were always there, and I wrote that he was right and I would change it next time. My favorite letter is one from a little rich boy's father in Chicago. He said that after reading Five Little Firemen his little boy went down and set fire to the house. My answer was: "Dear Sir, I am glad you caught your son in time."
The illustrations by Leonard Weisgard in these 1993 reissues seem impossibly modern to be the originals, but they are. 1939-1951: geometric shapes and patterns, bright primary colors, simple and active at the same time. Wesigard went to Pratt and the New School and Wesigard and MWB worked together many times, even after he moved to Copenhagen, Denmark. The original publisher, Bill Scott, apparently found Weisgard’s work too dark and disturbing for American taste but MWB suspected it was because his techniques made printing more expensive. [Gary 92] MWB and Scott had a falling out over his reluctance to move on to new printing techniques and really highlight Leonard’s work, and she ended up switching publishers. A friend, Ken Chowder, described Leonard [Dec 1916-Jan. 2000] like this:
“There was no one like Leonard, even Leonard himself. Leonard was gracious and generous and beautifully well-spoken and -dressed; he was also reclusive and agoraphobic and capable of saying virtually anything, or nothing at all. He reveled in attention, and hated it. He loved conversation and adored people, then lived far out in the country (in two countries, in fact) where he saw very few of them. He was politically active for years, and hated politics. He worked like a dog for some 30 years, illustrating many hundreds of books and writing many more [6] ; then he simply stopped far before what one could call retirement, and spent about 25 or 30 more years not working much more than a stitch”.
But MWB was a star no matter who illustrated her words. In a quirky and delightful Life Magazine profile of MWB, from December 2, 1946 come these statistics of her then only 10-year old career:
53 books published
7 different publishers
3 nom-de-plumes
$836,000 in sales (In 1946! for reference, the average income of 1946 was $2,600)
She was apparently “elated” by the Life magazine feature, pasting it in her scrapbook and feeling like it was a real recognition of her talent in an area some still thought of as, well, juvenile. [Gary 168]. The article also highlighted one of her two most delightful houses, the Cobble Court cottage, tucked away on York Avenue between 71st and 72nd Street, as well as her dog Crispin’s Crispian who was the model for the Garth Williams illustrated Mister Dog. My next trip to New York City will definitely include a walk past Cobble Court. Her penchant for quirky houses included her house on Vinalhaven Island in Maine, which had a “door to nowhere” she called Witches Wink.
I should have told you at the beginning that you could skip this whole piece and just pick up Mac Barnett’s book “The Important Thing About Margaret Wise Brown”. At the 2020 WWU Children’s Literature Conference, he read the entire book out loud to us, the audience, and I’ve re-read it many times since and it’s perfect. Just perfect. I almost begrudge liking Mac Barnett, with his easy-breezy California charm but dang, he’s so good. I reiterate, TITAMWB is perfect. So go read it instead. It is exactly 42 pages long, longer than the 32 pages most picture books are allotted, a move its subject would have likely appreciated as she didn’t like anything to be too predictable for children’s books. The 42, in this case, references the 42 years MWB lived, dying in 1952 Paris after a post-surgery embolism. Imagine if she’d lived another 42 years, up through what I consider the real golden age of Children’s Literature, the 1960-70’s, and all that she could have been written.
Finally, finally, the last book came: The Indoor Noisy Book.
And there it was. Very Quiet Custard.
And here it is. The first essay on The Very Quiet Custard.
That’s what this section of the VQC will be all about. Children’s Literature, new and old, the books, the people who made them, the publishers, the memories, unacademic writing in an academic vein. And so, we begin.
It was the New Day.
Margaret Wise Brown
“The Quiet Noisy Book”
Footnotes
[1] This project umbrella called Very Quiet Custard will, as far as I can tell now, encompass kids lit, nostalgia, zines, chapbooks, and LFL reviews.
[2] I ordered them all through Abe Books (which I just found out is owned by Amazon and broke my heart) and my most delightful order came from Cattermole 20th. Century Children’s Books with a personal note and their beautifully curated catalog. From a 2006 article about Cattermole:
“Cattermole Books doesn't sell what is most popular, but "We sell books to people who fondly remember them from their childhood," Bill McCullam said. "We try to have only books that we know are good for kids. We don't put any book in the catalogue unless we've read it.""That's why we're not very rich," Jane McCullam said, laughing.The McCullam’s only sell high-quality books that can be read over and over again painlessly."The quality of text is very important," Jane McCullam said. "There's so many books that you don't want to read more than once to children."I personally want to buy every book they list.
[3] MWB had a Kerry blue terrier named Crispin's Crispian that she walked “on a Kelly Green leash” and who was the inspiration for her last book, Mister Dog, the pipe-smoking dog illustrated by Garth Williams for Golden Books.
[4] The conceit being that LSM constructed the questions and filled in her answers using quotes from previous interviews, as she died in 1952, 58 years before this “interview” was published.
[5] Librarians, hold your fire. MWB had a singularly contentious relationship with the NYPL children’s librarian Anne Carroll Moore and even the library itself. ACM may not have been the villain she is portrayed as, but can we all agree that her wooden doll Nicholas was creepy and Stuart Little was worth publishing?
[6] He even designed a version of The Nutcracker for the San Francisco Ballet, which I would love to see. I’ve seen the Maurice Sendak and the Ian Falconer version from Pacific Northwest Ballet and the piles of cakes and sweetmeats had a very big influence on the Very Quiet Custard logo, such as it is.]
References
1940s: Crispin’s Crispian, the Terrier of Cobble Court in NYC’s Lenox Hill, Part I - The Hatching Cat http://hatchingcatnyc.com/2016/11/18/crispins-crispian-terrier-cobble-court-part-i/. Accessed 3 Aug. 2021.
2020 Conference - Western Washington University’s Children’s Literature Conference | Bellingham, WA. https://wwuclc.com/past-conferences/presenters-for-2020-conference. Accessed 3 Aug. 2021.
A Short Biography of Leonard Weisgard -. http://leonardweisgard.com/about-lw/. Accessed 3 Aug. 2021.
Ben. Mister Dog. https://newyorkwanderer.com/mister-dog/. Accessed 3 Aug. 2021.
Bird, Elizabeth. “The Quintessential Librarian Stereotype: Wrestling With the Legacy of Anne Carroll Moore.” A Fuse #8 Production, 4 Mar. 2019, http://blogs.slj.com/afuse8production/2019/03/04/the-quintessential-librarian-stereotype-wrestling-with-the-legacy-of-anne-carroll-moore/.
Bliven, Bruce Jr. "Child's Best Seller." Life Magazine, 2 Dec. 1946: 59-68.
CSIMS. “The Changing Look of Nutcracker: Program Books Over 75 Years.” SF Ballet Blog, 22 Nov. 2019, https://sfballet.blog/2019/nutcracker-style-through-the-decades/.
“Goodnight Nobody.” 99% Invisible, https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/goodnight-nobody/. Accessed 3 Aug. 2021.
Julia Fine. “Once Again, @harperbooks Has Made My Dreams Come True. On the Right, Margaret Wise Brown at Home in Maine. Https://T.Co/KZGvx5Xf3w.” @finejuli, 22 July 2020, https://twitter.com/finejuli/status/1286023674525605889.
Gary, A. M. Y. (2018). In the Great Green Room: The Brilliant and Bold Life of Margaret Wise Brown. Flatiron Books.
Literary ManhattanPlace | | Cobble Court. https://www.literarymanhattan.org/place/cobble-court/. Accessed 3 Aug. 2021.
Marcus, Leonard S. (2010). Over the moon: An imaginary interview with Margaret Wise Brown. The Horn Book Magazine (1945), 86(3), 26.
On the Delightfully Odd Homes of Margaret Wise Brown. ‹ Literary Hub. https://lithub.com/on-the-delightfully-odd-homes-of-margaret-wise-brown/. Accessed 3 Aug. 2021.
Popova, Maria. “The Quiet Noisy Book: A Little-Known Vintage Gem by Margaret Wise Brown.” Brain Pickings, 4 Nov. 2015, https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/11/04/the-quiet-noisy-book-margaret-wise-brown/.
Remcheck, Allison. “Classic Books Rediscovered.” KentWired.Com, http://www.kentwired.com/latest_updates/article_7b749c8e-5613-5f5b-83bc-2e909495399b.html. Accessed 3 Aug. 2021.
Rivinus, T.M., Audet, L. The psychological genius of Margaret Wise Brown. Child Lit Educ 23, 1 (1992). https://doi-org.ezproxy.library.wwu.edu/10.1007/BF01131366
The Battle Over E. B. White’s “Stuart Little” | The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/07/21/the-lion-and-the-mouse. Accessed 3 Aug. 2021.
The Important Thing About Margaret Wise Brown | IndieBound.Org. https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780062393449. Accessed 3 Aug. 2021.
