06/21/09

Literary Frogs

I worked in children’s book publishing for ten years, and we published A LOT of books with frog characters, among them The Mysterious Tadpole by Steven Kellogg, The Frog Prince, Continued by Jon Scieszka, and A Boy, a Dog, and a Frog by Mercer Mayer, not to mention The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher (we published all the Beatrix Potter books). Those are just the few I came up with off the top of my head. I thought I’d catch up on all the recently published froglit, but there are too many new books to list, so I’m reading them all and will report back on my favorites.

It did get me thinking however…the children’s book industry has a vested interest in keeping frogs healthy! So perhaps a portion of the sale of some of these books should go toward saving frogs and other amphibians (after all, there are LOTS of books about salamanders and toads too).

The classic children’s book with amphibian characters is, of course, Frog and Toad Are Friends by Arnold Lobel.

frogandtoad

I was delighted to discover that a new book by Arnold Lobel about frogs and toads has just been published: The Frog and Toads All Sang.

Lobel died in 1987, but his daughter, Adrianne Lobel, recently discovered poems about frogs and toads that her father illustrated with little sketches. Here’s an illustration from the book:

frogs-sang

copyright 2009 by the Estate of Arnold Lobel