Sandra Boynton, Belle of the Board Books
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2027 will be the semicentennial of Sandra Boyton‘s first board book and The New York Times is getting a jump on celebrating the anniversary. Brian Goedde extols the virtues of Boynton and her books or here.
Now that Boynton’s books have crossed generations of child-rearing, they deserve another look.
We can start with “Hippos Go Berserk!,” which does not go berserk. If readers are paying attention — and here I mean grown-up readers, who are usually present at story time, if bored or preoccupied — they would notice that while the focus soon shifts from the original hippo “all alone” (who called “two hippos on the phone”) to the number of additional hippos arriving sequentially at the door in ever-larger groups, the number of hippos inside the house (not shown) is growing quadratically. At the point of going berserk, there are 1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8+9 = 45 hippos in the house, and you can count each one, although doing so takes some focus for a reader of any age because they’re all over the place.
Though it didn’t win any children’s book awards when it was published in 1977, “Hippos Go Berserk!” was inducted into the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute’s Mathical Hall of Fame in 2020.
Goedde supplies more numbers before going on to the life and times of Sandra:
[A]ccording to Simon & Schuster, her primary publisher, Boynton has sold more than 90 million books. In interviews, she has responded to this number by saying, “Mostly to friends and family.”
Also from The Times, this time by Aliza Aufrichtig, is “The Essential Sandra Boynton” (or here) a listing of the best of Boynton’s board books.
I want to start right at No. 1 (and then count to 9 and back again).
No. 1 is Hippos Go Berserk!
Back to Goedde for more about Boynton:
She concludes “The Unbelievably Fascinating Autobiography” on her website with these words:
I choose the projects I do and products I design somewhat at whim, and only if there’s a company that looks interesting to work with. I only “license” what I can develop and design myself, rather than letting companies adapt my characters according to their own sense and sensibility. I have no agent, no business manager, no contracts attorney. This is a rather haphazard way to do things, but it’s more fun than an actual plan. Since I’m not sufficiently committed to Optimizing Market Potential, I seem to be a bewilderment and, one hopes, a minor annoyance to many.
The website itself — a World Wide Web 1.0 collection of static, flat, long-scrolling web pages with minuscule font — is a case in point.
He and she are not wrong – Ctrl + is a must at SandraBoynton.com.
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