A Mixture of Humor and Wonder

By Stefan Kanfer

Eleven volumes to instruct, entertain and amuse o book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally (and often far more) worth reading at the age of 50 and beyond." So wrote Oxford Don C.S. Lewis, author of the immortal Chronicles of Narnia. The statement is true enough, but the ability to write a children's book that will last decades is granted to few. Of the hundreds of juvenile volumes published this year, only a handful will endure to New Year's Day. Among those that have a chance of surviving:

Four centuries are represented in The Random House Book of Poetry for Children, selected by Jack Prelutsky ($13.95). William Blake is here; so are Shakespeare and Charles Lamb, alongside such modern versifiers as Spike Milligan, Eve Merriam and Karla Kuskin. A zoo of creatures passes in review, from pachyderms ("I think they had no pattern/ When they cut out the elephant's skin;/ Some places it needs letting out,/ And others, taking in") to birds ("The song of canaries/ Never var ies,/ And when they're moulting/ They're pretty revolting"). Anthologist Prelutsky gives equal time to children's resentments and fears, but his best selections feed the youthful sense of wonder expressed by Emily Dickinson's argument for reading poetry aloud: "A word is dead/ When it is said,/ Some say./ I say it just/ Begins to live/ That day."

Pastels and magic are the main components of The Wreck of the Zephyr, written and illustrated by Chris Van Allsburg (Houghton Mifflin; $14.95). A small sailboat sits wrecked at the edge of a cliff. How did it get up there? An old salt describes the journey to a place where boats glide above the water like seagulls. Van Allsburg's dark, hypnotic illustrations follow the craft through massed clouds and starry evenings, until it crashes to earth with the surprise of a joke and the power of a folk tale.

There are two works of art in A Medieval Feast, written and illustrated by Aliki (Crowell; $9.95): the regal meal, and the author's rendering of it. Preparations at the manor house, the pursuit of pheasants by falcons, and boars by aristocrats, the serving of the rare Cockentrice (a capon and suckling pig cut in half, stuffed and sewn each to the other's half), and finally the ravenous consumption of the endless courses are researched and represented with the serene detail of an illuminated manuscript.

"After painting action scenes I have ached for hours because of having put myself in the other fellow's shoes as I realized him on canvas." The other fellow in this case was Robinson Crusoe, by Daniel Defoe (Scribners; $17.95), and the artist was N.C. Wyeth, whose paintings gave the 18th century story a legendary radiance. This version, long out of print, is part of Scribners' admirable attempt to bring back the great days of classics illustrated by giants like Wyeth and Howard Pyle. Treasure Island and Kidnapped have previously been resurrected; can Robin Hood and The Last of the Mohicans be far behind?

1) It has four legs and a foot and can't walk. It has a head and can't talk. What is it? 2) What lives in winter, dies in summer, and grows with its root upward? These are only a small sampling of Monika Beisner's Book of Riddles (Farrar, Straus & Gir-oux;$11.95). The mystification is alleviated by Beisner's teasing illustrations, which scatter clues for those who know how to observe. The answers, incidentally, are: 1) a bed, 2) an icicle. And those are the easy ones.

There are 98 more inside.

Once upon a time there was a man named Marshall Taylor, nicknamed Major Taylor because he stood so straight. Major Taylor had two other attributes worth noting: he was the world's fastest bicycle rider, and he was black. The story is the stuff of juvenile fiction, but every word of it is true, and it is truly narrated in Bicycle Rider (Harper & Row; $9.95). Abetted by Ed Young's exuberant illustrations, Author Mary Scioscia raises Taylor from obscurity to role model. Her descriptions of turn-of-the-century black life in rural America never moralize; perhaps that, even more than the headlong pace, accounts for the most emotionally satisfying cyclist's story since Breaking Away unreeled in 1979.

Once the lights go out, it is still the 19th century as far as children and ghosts are concerned, reason enough for the perdurability of tales about phantoms, poltergeists and demons. A case in point: Esteban and the Ghost, adapted by Sibyl Hancock (Dial; $10.95). The hero, a wide-eyed tinker, plies his trade in the hills of Spain until he learns of a reward for anyone who can exorcise the ghost from a forbidding castle. The sprite can overwhelm anything except innocence, and Esteban not only survives but prevails. Together, he and the ghost recover some stolen treasure, a feat that lands one in paradise and the other on the Iberian version of Easy Street. Dirk Zimmer's illustrations have the amiable quality of cartoons; the only people likely to be disturbed by this refreshing tale are those who wonder where they mislaid their sense of humor.

The greatest thief of childhood is conformity, an insight that informs The Most Wonderful Egg in the World by Helme Heine (Atheneum; $11.95). Three hens are driven by that ageless query: Which is the most beautiful? The king makes a Solomonic decision: whoever produces the most wonderful egg will be made a princess. One hen immediately lays a perfectly shaped egg; another creates an egg so large that it would make an ostrich jealous; the third gets up from her nest to reveal an egg in shape and shades not unlike Rubik's Cube. In the end, the king awards all three contestants a crown, proving the royal dictum: "What you can do is more important than what you look like," wisdom that applies all the way up the food chain.

Irv Irving is a shoe salesman with only one thing missing from life: his head.

Irv's wife Irma, a resourceful creature, fashions a substitute from old socks and a pillowcase. Thus equipped, Irv sets out in search of his prized possession. It is no accident that this antic tale is set in Russia, the background for Nikolai Gogol's The Nose, about a man whose proboscis goes wandering off on its own. It Happened in Pinsk by Arthur Yorinks (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $11.95) wittily echoes its predecessor's tone of plausible lunacy, and Richard Egielski's illustrations add a few jokes of their own: when the head is recovered, it bears an eerie resemblance to the one that belongs to the artist's friend and mentor Maurice Sendak, the doyen of children's book writers.

There is no better way to understand a child's point of view than to sit on the floor and look up at the underside of furniture. Tales from the Land Under My Table by Hans Wilhelm (Random House; $8.95) is a book of short stories designed for all those who can walk under tables. King Cabbage concerns a tyrannical vegetable undone by a tiny worm; The Little Gray Bird follows the hero who makes himself beautiful by pasting on feathers and baubles, only to wind up in a cage--until he sheds his false front, repels his captors and gains his freedom.

Other stories with other characters extol the values of patience, music and art, subjects about which Writer-Illustrator Wilhelm evidently knows enough to fill a shelf.

The four volumes Who?, What?, Where?, When? by Leo Lionni (Pantheon; $3.95 each) attempt to give those interrogations some personality and dimension by presenting "pictures to talk about." Each volume features collages of curious mice who roam silently around objects and animals.

Lionni's bright and lucid rodents are irresistible, and the thick-paged, well-bound books that hold them are manifestly meant to be carried from nursery to high chair and even to bathtub without injury. And who knows? For the very young this season, they may provide the best answer to the eternal question: What did you bring me? --By Stefan Kanfer This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.