THE NEW FLEXIBILITY OF THE BOARD BOOK

Author: By Liz Rosenberg

Date: SUNDAY, October 19, 1997

Page: P5

Section: Books

Happily, a few children's authors and illustrators have turned their attention to this homeliest of genres. I am thinking especially of Rosemary Wells's ingenious Max board books, which teach skills (counting, colors, etc.) and compress wild adventures featuring Max and his forbearing big sister, Ruby, into the few pages the board book format allows. ``Max's Toys: A Counting Book,'' ``Max's First Word,'' and ``Max's Breakfast'' are all distilled comic classics in their own right, the Charlie Chaplins of children's literature, and would have been even if they had been printed on tissue paper. But they wouldn't have held up nearly as well. Mine are 10 years old and still going strong, though the cardboard edges do have a tendency to separate and curl after a while.

Some of the newest board books -- many of them adaptations of picture books -- likewise combine durability and ingenuity, proving that, as with Picasso's early paintings, it is possible to create real works of art on cardboard.

The well-beloved Mem Fox's ``Time for Bed,'' exquisitely illustrated by Jane Dyer, certainly would have been included in a recent column on bedtime chants had I discovered it in time. Though originally published in picture-book form in 1993, this lilting goodnight book translates beautifully into its square, hand-sized, board-book format. Fox's couplets are printed in legible white ink: ``It's time for bed, little goose, little goose, / The stars are out on the loose.'' Dyer's double-spread paintings are as musical as the words, so full of soft, effulgent light that one cannot tell if the words carry the pictures aloft, or vice versa.

``Drummer Hoff'' won the Caldecott medal 30 years ago, and continues strong in its board-book incarnation, as full of ferocity and wit as ever, from the initial charge -- ``Drummer Hoff fired it off'' -- to its full-blown chant, added to cumulatively, page by page: ``General Border / gave the order, / Major Scott / brought the shot, / Captain Bammer / brought the rammer, / Sergeant Chowder / brought the powder, / Corporal Farrell / brought the barrel, / Private Parriage / brought the carriage, / but Drummer Hoff fired it off.'' Barbara Emberley's adaptation is a galloping tour de force, and Ed Emberley's pictures a wild combination of the antique and the psychedelic. The thick bright-red covers, all colored in blue and green and canary yellow, look like a holiday present neatly wrapped. Peace-loving parents will be glad to see that the offending cannon is covered in flowers, nesting birds, and cobwebs in the book's last pages -- a happy ending for all tools of war.

``Peek-a-boo,'' an American Library Association Notable Book published originally in 1981, makes a 1997 debut in board-book form, still with the circular die-cut pages that allow us first the baby's-eye view and then a panoramic vision of the very young child's world: bedrooms, parks, back yards. Janet and Allan Ahlberg seem to have remembered that babies focus on the most minute and particular details -- this is probably why they are so quick to scoop up rubber bands and bits of thread and swallow them -- while the world carries on in its abundant chaos all around them.

The close-up circle pictures surrounded (with a turn of the die-cut page) by detail is a clever device for finding and naming everyday objects: ``the tassle blowing / On his grandma's shawl / And the fringe on the stroller / And his teddy / And his ball.'' Peek-a-boo is a game all about losing and finding ordinary objects -- about testing, if you will, the limits of reality, memory, and imagination. That is why children love it, and why they might also love this book.

``The Book of Bedtimes'' is one in a series of three board books by Karen Gray Ruelle, with illustrations by Lizi Boyd. (The others, also good, are ``The Book of Breakfasts'' and ``The Book of Baths.'') This series is not adapted or reissued from a previous publication, but sui generis, new board books with streamlined and elegantly poetic text and pictures. I love the simplicity of these books, with their nursery-room colors (aqua, lilac, orange, gold) and two-word pages: ``fish stays'' opposite ``bug sways.'' The cardboard stock is a little thinner and more flexible than the average book: The effect is of an altogether new and delicate thing, married to some of the sturdiness of the tried and true.