October 22, 2024
Ellen and the Lion
One of the most interesting things about raising kids in our neighbourhood has been our proximity to the Lillian H. Smith Library, home to the Osborne Collection of Early Children’s Books (which plays a cameo in my most recent novel!), and whose circulating collection was born out of the Toronto Library’s Boys and Girls House, the first dedicated children’s library in the British commonwealth. When the Lillian H. Smith Library opened on College Street in 1995 (named for the first head of Toronto Public Library’s Children’s Department), the Boys and Girls House collection moved in, which means that on the shelf with books by all the authors you might expect (Shirley Hughes, Jon Klassen, Ruth Ohi, Pat Hutchins, Ezra Jack Keats, Mo Willems) are some obscure vintage gems you might not find at other branches that haven’t been around since 1922, usually trippy 1960s picture books (SPECTACLES, by Ellen Raskin!), and the most legendary of all of these for me (I loved them so much I ended up ordering my own secondhand copies online) has been the two Crockett Johnson books (he of the HAROLD AND THE PURPLE CRAYON fame) about an imaginative girl called Ellen and her stuffed lion, each book a collection of stories, mostly text, and they’re so wonderful, tricky, and funny. Now that my youngest is 11 and we don’t read picture books together so often anymore, we do enjoy these stories and taking turns with the deadpan dialogue.
The bane of my existence, however, is that if you google ELLEN’S LION and the title of Mo Willems’ 2011 book HOORAY FOR AMANDA AND HER ALLIGATOR, the sole search result is the blog post I wrote in 2013 about how Willems was surely inspired by Johnson’s book. And all I want in the world is somebody else to talk about this with, the wit and warmth that these books have in common.
