On my spookshelf
A few of my most favorite Halloween kids' books
Folks, I love books. You know this. I buy more of them than I need, because I need more than I have. In my home every day I am surrounded by books, and when I go out, I can’t imagine anything more delightful than finding more. Books books books.
I also love Halloween, as I’ve been incessantly reminding you for a couple of weeks. It’s in the best season, I love the spirit and iconography, fake horrors are a wonderful balm against real ones, etc.
So does my love of books in any way intersect with my love of Halloween? It might. It just might.
I own plenty of vintage Halloween books - some that I remember from being a kid in the ‘80s, and more that I’ve tracked down on my own over the years. As with Halloween specials (and anything else intended for kids), the quality ranges from trash to treasure - but I’ll take a mediocre Halloween book over a mediocre book on pretty much every other topic any day.
I’d like to share a few of my favorites with you.
Monster Holidays, by Norman Bridwell
You probably know Clifford the Big Red Dog - but did you know his creator, Norman Bridwell, had a prolific sideline with spookier characters? His 1965 book The Witch Next Door launched its own modestly successful series about a friendly neighborhood hag, and in 1970 he wrote a tongue-in-cheek manual for slightly older readers called How to Care for Your Monster, with sections on tending to pet vampires, werewolves, mummies, and Frankenstein-style monsters. He followed that one up in 1974 with one of my personal favorites, Monster Holidays. Yes, it turns out that these same monster characters also celebrate Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, St. Patrick’s Day, and so many others - but of course Halloween is the centerpiece.
Let’s Find Out About Halloween, by Paulette Cooper and Errol Le Cain
This one is pretty rare, and it took me a couple of years to find an affordable copy. It’s coveted not because of the prose, which has about as much flavor as a ball of wax, but for the illustrations. Errol Le Cain was a Singaporean-British artist who left indelible stamps in the worlds of both animation and children’s literature. As an animator, he was closely associated with the legendary Richard Williams, designing sumptuous backgrounds for Williams’ doomed feature The Thief and the Cobbler, among other projects. As an illustrator, Le Cain set a new post-Golden Age standard for fairy-tale imagery, and his books - mostly out of print - can sell for hundreds of dollars. This particular paperback is drawn in a cross-hatched, cartoony style that’s miles away from his lush fantasy paintings, but it’s still stuffed with charm and weirdness. Alas, Le Cain died tragically young, at age 47, in 1989. Do yourself a favor and check out some of his work and biography in this excellent Animation Obsessive post.
Halloween, by Helen Borten
This is another one that took me a while to track down at a reasonable price. Helen Borten created a number of atmospheric picture books throughout the 1960s, using an oil-on-glass print method to combine a mid-century graphic style with the spirit of vintage woodcuts. In this history of the holiday, she has great fun evoking the pagan past and the Middle Ages, saturating her images with rich purple and orange color separations. There’s no other book that feels like such an elemental evocation of Halloween’s deep past. Amazingly, after retiring from picture books, Borten launched an equally successful second career as a Peabody-winning radio journalist and producer, developing critically acclaimed documentary series into the 21st Century. She still seems to live on the Upper West Side at around 93 years of age.
It’s Halloween, by Jack Prelutsky and Marilyn Haffner
Jack Prelutsky is a prolific children’s poet who apparently counts Bob Dylan as a friend and fan (thanks, Wikipedia!). This 1977 collection of Halloween rhymes is pleasant enough on its own, but fully enlivened by the drawings of Marilyn Hafner, a journeywoman illustrator who passed away in 2008 after a lengthy career. Her work in this book absolutely screams ‘70s to me, with its bemused, weirdly mature kids, its lumpy, middle-aged ghouls, and its avocado-and-rust color scheme. The whole thing unfolds like a walk through a haunted house, with little rooms set aside for different stories and creative graphic approaches.
The Candy Witch, by Steven Kroll and Marilyn Haffner
Finally, here’s another book illustrated by Hafner, this one from 1979. We had a copy of this when I was a kid, and as far as I’m concerned, it’s not Halloween without it. In the only book on this list with an actual narrative, Steven Kroll’s text follows Maggie, the youngest in a family of do-gooder witches. Feeling neglected, she starts to pull pranks around town, which culminate in the disappearance of every kid’s candy on Halloween night. Somehow, the gleeful chaos and, yes, greed of the holiday are perfectly summed up in the predicament - you’re bereft the moment the night is over, but at least under normal circumstances you have sugary souvenirs to keep you warm. Employing an orange-and-purple color palette similar to Borten’s Halloween. Hafner portrays an endless array of candy baubles that I still pine for - screw the stuff you buy in bulk at Target, nothing tastes as good as these things look.
That’s all for this year. Don’t worry, I have plenty more for next time!