This just in...

This is one of the kids books I bought the other day at a thrift store.

'Mommy and Daddy Are Divorced' (Remixed Dr. Monkey style)

Additional text by me, Dr. Monkey.

Not too long ago mommy and daddy were arguing all the time. Daddy said mommy was drinking enough bourbon to float a battleship. And mommy said that perhaps she wouldn't drink so much if she hadn't caught daddy going balls deep in his secretary those four times.

However, I'm pretty sure that daddy slept around because mommy had lousy fashion sense, heck fire, just look at her awful hair cut and that hideous necklace she's got on. And I think mommy drinks so much because I wet the bed and don't do so well in school.

So one day mommy and daddy decided to get a divorce. Which meant that they wouldn't live together anymore and that I'd have to split my time between them. And at first that made me sad.
So I milked it for all it was worth. I made mommy feel guilty and she bought me all kinds of cool toys to get over her guilt and I made daddy feel so guilty about abandoning us for his secretary that he went out and bought me some kick ass clothes.

Who among you does not dig those striped overalls I'm wearing? And you can't see it in that picture but I'm totally wearing crotchless Underoos, the kind I know Father O'Malley at our local Roman Catholic church likes his favorite altar boys to wear.

Anyhoo, mommy began to smoke pot after daddy left and her new vice opened up a new hobby for her, she began making ceramic bongs which she sold to tourists and to backsliding Baptists. She didn't tell daddy about her new source of income and I also kept my mouth shut about it after she agreed to split the profits 50/50 with me.

A few of our neighbors began to suspect things might be up at mommy's house what with all the cars coming and going at all hours of the day and night, so I took to hosing them down when I caught them snooping.

And sometimes they'd catch me and beat the snot out of me...the dirty snooping bastards.

After a while I got sick of mommy double dating Jack Daniels and George Dickel all the time and I got sick of her increasingly threatening looking pot supplier boyfriends so I ran away to live with daddy and his secretary who was now his new wife. Things there weren't great because daddy was still a cad who slept around. But even with that I wanted to be just like him.

So when his secretary wife called him a pussy hound, I became one too.

She was not amused by my joke.

So one day when she was at work with daddy I burnt their house down. Sure, I got into all kinds of trouble and I got sent off to juvenile prison and I have to go to psychotherapy most every day to deal with my parental issues, but in the long run I came out way ahead because I got shed of two crazy parents, a controlling step mother, and best of all
I got to keep my sweet striped overalls.

So guess what motherfuckers? I win,
I totally win.

What's my favorite kind of kids book? The free kind!

I stopped by the free book table that loiters out in front of one of our local used book stores and I picked up all these kids books for free. Free! Free, I tell you!

Some really cool illustrations in this one.


The cover of this one just screams, "Hey, look, it's the American version of 'Are You Being Served.' "

This is all about how cool and special the oil industry is. It came out in 1975, right around the time of the OPEC oil crisis, so I guess it was meant to calm our fears that we might lose all our precious oil.
This one is full of great photos of marching bands and parades.

This is only the second 'we live in' book I've owned, I previously had the one on East Germany which I scanned, put on Flickr, and got linked on Boing Boing. There's a whole series of them and they came out in the early 1980's. I'm on the look out for the rest of them, especially the ones on the old Soviet Union and it's satellites.
This is the fourth '...is for me' book I've owned. I've had the ones on bicycling, karate, and horseback riding. I really want the ones on serial killing, poisoning, and blaspheming.

Free picture books, epic win for Dr. Monkey and his blog empire!

Saving kids, one book at a time

I bought a bunch of kid's books at a friends of a local library sale today. Some of them are bizarre picture books, some are artsy picture books, and some of them, well, let's just say it was a good thing I bought them before they landed in the wrong little hands. Here's a smattering of some of the more subversive ones:
In case you can't read the title of that book it's Menstruation and it was written by a dude. That's right, a dude. I wonder how many times he rode his menstrual cycle.

Funny, you never see books celebrating the fact that Mommy and Daddy stay together in a marriage for the sake of their ungrateful brats who'll dump them in a shoddy nursing home the first chance they get.

Another example of the sick twisted effort to taint our American minds with the filth that is the metric system. Thank Jeebus that the fluoride in our water and the ink we absorbed through the lining of our anuses from the colored toilet paper President Reagan made us use kept our resolve strong and we were able to reject the attempt to make us adopt that socialistic European measurement system. We dodged a huge bullet on that one, no thanks to people like Jimmy Carter, Tom Brokaw, and Joyce DeWitt.

Sure, the above book looks cute and fun but it's yet another attempt to tempt our children into an alternative sexual lifestyle. Bestiality Avenue is a dead end street, so stay away from the off ramp that leads to it.

And finally, when will the Amazon lesbians in the media stop trying turning our girls into men? Young ladies don't need to fight, they need to learn how to snag jobs and pay bunches of money in Social Security taxes so the Social Security Administration will stay solvent long enough for us old geezers to keep collecting it until we die.

It's a damn good thing I'm looking out for your kids and working to keep them from seeing this propaganda. Otherwise they'd be all full of fancy book learnin' nonsense and they'd start spouting off that evolution stuff and shit.

Pretty pictures

I just put up a new set of illustrations from some vintage kid's books I bought recently at a library book sale on to one of my many Flickr accounts. I love them both but I'm leaning towards loving the ones from C is for Circus a bit more than the ones from Our Great Northwest.
You can see the complete sets by clicking here.

Shel Sliverstein's nightmare?

The sidewalk doesn't end, part of it is just closed.

The art and design of William Wondriska

I bought a kids book called A Cat Can't Count a few weeks ago and I was amazed by the art and design of it. I finally scanned the contents of said book and I put all the scans on Flickr. You can see them here.

The book is all about teaching kids to count but what really got me were the illustrations by William Wondriska. They jump off the page at you and they don't seem to be patronizing like a lot of kids books illustrations are.
I love his use of color and how spare the illustrations are.

This one reminded me of Bubs youngest daughter.

The "10 funny looking men" crack me up. Go on, check out the rest of the pictures on Flickr, you know you want to.

The art of Rocco Negri and Taro Yashima

I just finished uploading a new Flickr set and you can see it by clicking here. It's a set of art from children's picture books and so far it includes two artist's work, Rocco Negri and Taro Yashima.

Negri did these wonderful woodcuts for an adaptation of Androcles and the Lion. While I never cared much for stories where humans and wild animals interact and become "friends," I certainly can appreciate the artistic merits of this fine little book.


Taro Yashima did these wonderful colored pencil illustrations for his book about the village he lived in as a child. His words and pictures really take one back to pre war Japan and to a more unhurried, unspoiled time.
I recommend that you click on the All Sizes tab on Flick when you look at these pages from these children's picture books so that you can appreciate the artistry involved. These men have produced some beautiful art and I'm glad I could help keep it alive.

New Flickr set

**UPDATE**

I added the link to the set. Sorry I left it out of the initial post.

I just finished uploading some great pictures to a new Flickr photo set. It's all pictures from children's picture books from the late 60's, 70's, and early 80's. The photos remind me of the PBS kids show Zoom and the early days of Sesame Street when they'd show kids doing crafts and adults doing their jobs. The pictures I uploaded were from Rollerskating Mania, Let's Take A Trip to Thailand, Ethiopia: Mountain Kingdom, What Happens Inside a Skyscraper (which was about life in the Hancock building in Chicago), A Day in the Life of a Basketball Coach, Department Store Careers, and Handmade Crafts for Kids. All the books were discarded by a local elementary school library and I bought them at a local thrift store for a quarter apiece.

From What Happens Inside a Skyscraper.

From Let's Take a Trip to Thailand.

From Department Store Careers.

From A Day in the Life of a Basketball Coach.

From Handmade Crafts for Kids.

I also bought one called Lobsterman, which is all about a lobster fisherman, and it was written and illustrated by Dahlov Ipcar. It's a stunningly beautiful book full of insanely great illustrations. I'm going to scan it in it's entirety and put it in a Flickr set all by itself. Trust me when I tell you it's an amazingly beautiful book.