Notes about children’s books

January 30, 2012 permalink

Dr Suess Mulberry Street Perseverance

The manuscript was rejected by 27 publishers. Dr. Seuss was about to burn it when a classmate from Dartmouth, who was new to the children’s book business, bought it. By the time it was published, in 1937, the author was 33.

On the 75th anniversary of the publication of And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, Dr. Suess’s first children’s book. Persevere, creative types!

Quote from the NY Times article Mulberry Street May Fade, but ‘Mulberry Street’ Shines On, which investigates the real-life eponymous street in Springfield, Mass., for evidence that the city shaped Suess’s creative works.

October 20, 2010 permalink

Physicist’s Goodnight Moon

What happens when a physicist considers the passage of time in Goodnight Moon? Chad Orzel, physics professor and blogger, attempts to measure it using the illustrated passing of the moon versus the wall clocks:

These two methods clearly do not agree with one another, which means one of two things: either I’m terribly over-analyzing the content of the illustrations of a beloved children’s book, or the bunny’s bedroom is moving at extremely high velocity relative to the earth, so that relativistic time dilation makes the six-minute rise of the moon appear to take an hour and ten minutes. Calculating the necessary velocity is left as an exercise for the interested reader.

(Photo credit: Chad Orzel)

Pagination