One fan’s video of the Naef Tip top in action.

A great article by Michael Chabon, from The New York Review of Books (July 16th, 2009):

When I was growing up, our house backed onto woods, a thin two-acre remnant of a once-mighty wilderness. This was in a Maryland city where the enlightened planners had provided a number of such lingering swaths of green. They were tame as can be, our woods, and yet at night they still filled with unfathomable shadows. In the winter they lay deep in snow and seemed to absorb, to swallow whole, all the ordinary noises of your body and your world. Scary things could still be imagined to take place in those woods. It was the place into which the bad boys fled after they egged your windows on Halloween and left your pumpkins pulped in the driveway. There were no Indians in those woods, but there had been once. We learned about them in school. Patuxent Indians, they’d been called. Swift, straight-shooting, silent as deer. Gone but for their lovely place names: Patapsco, Wicomico, Patuxent.

A minor but undeniable aura of romance was attached to the history of Maryland, my home state: refugee Catholic Englishmen, cavaliers in ringlets and ruffs, pirates, battles, the sack of Washington, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” Harriet Tubman, Antietam. And when you went out into those woods behind our house, you could feel all that history, those battles and dramas and romances, those stories. You could work it into your games, your imaginings, your lonely flights from the turmoil or torpor of your life at home. My friends and I spent hours there, braves, crusaders, commandos, blues and grays.

But the Wilderness of Childhood, as any kid could attest who grew up, like my father, on the streets of Flatbush in the Forties, had nothing to do with trees or nature. I could lose myself on vacant lots and playgrounds, in the alleyway behind the Wawa, in the neighbors’ yards, on the sidewalks. Anywhere, in short, I could reach on my bicycle, a 1970 Schwinn Typhoon, Coke-can red with a banana seat, a sissy bar, and ape-hanger handlebars. On it I covered the neighborhood in a regular route for half a mile in every direction. I knew the locations of all my classmates’ houses, the number of pets and siblings they had, the brand of popsicle they served, the potential dangerousness of their fathers.

Matt Groening once did a great Life in Hell strip that took the form of a map of Bongo’s neighborhood. At one end of a street that wound among yards and houses stood Bongo, the little one-eared rabbit boy. At the other stood his mother, about to blow her stack—Bongo was late for dinner again. Between mother and son lay the hazards —labeled angry dogs, roving gang of hooligans, girl with a crush on bongo—of any journey through the Wilderness: deadly animals, antagonistic humans, lures and snares. It captured perfectly the mental maps of their worlds that children endlessly revise and refine. Childhood is a branch of cartography.

Most great stories of adventure, from The Hobbit to Seven Pillars of Wisdom, come furnished with a map. That’s because every story of adventure is in part the story of a landscape, of the interrelationship between human beings (or Hobbits, as the case may be) and topography. Every adventure story is conceivable only with reference to the particular set of geographical features that in each case sets the course, literally, of the tale. But I think there is another, deeper reason for the reliable presence of maps in the pages, or on the endpapers, of an adventure story, whether that story is imaginatively or factually true. We have this idea of armchair traveling, of the reader who seeks in the pages of a ripping yarn or a memoir of polar exploration the kind of heroism and danger, in unknown, half-legendary lands, that he or she could never hope to find in life.

This is a mistaken notion, in my view. People read stories of adventure—and write them—because they have themselves been adventurers. Childhood is, or has been, or ought to be, the great original adventure, a tale of privation, courage, constant vigilance, danger, and sometimes calamity. For the most part the young adventurer sets forth equipped only with the fragmentary map—marked here there be tygers and mean kid with air rifle—that he or she has been able to construct out of a patchwork of personal misfortune, bedtime reading, and the accumulated local lore of the neighborhood children.

A striking feature of literature for children is the number of stories, many of them classics of the genre, that feature the adventures of a child, more often a group of children, acting in a world where adults, particularly parents, are completely or effectively out of the picture. Think of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, The Railway Children, or Charles Schulz’s Peanuts. Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy presents a chilling version of this world in its depiction of Cittàgazze, a city whose adults have all been stolen away. Then there is the very rich vein of children’s literature featuring ordinary contemporary children navigating and adventuring through a contemporary, nonfantastical world that is nonetheless beyond the direct influence of adults, at least some of the time. I’m thinking of the Encyclopedia Brown books, the Great Brain books, the Henry Reed and Homer Price books, the stories of the Mad Scientists’ Club, a fair share of the early works of Beverly Cleary.

As a kid, I was extremely fond of a series of biographies, largely fictional, I’m sure, that dramatized the lives of famous Americans—Washington, Jefferson, Kit Carson, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Daniel Boone—when they were children. (Boys, for the most part, though I do remember reading one about Clara Barton.) One element that was almost universal in these stories was the vast amounts of time the famous historical boys were alleged to have spent wandering with bosom companions, with friendly Indian boys or a devoted slave, through the once-mighty wilderness, the Wilderness of Childhood, entirely free of adult supervision.

Though the wilderness available to me had shrunk to a mere green scrap of its former enormousness, though so much about childhood had changed in the years between the days of young George Washington’s adventuring on his side of the Potomac and my own suburban exploits on mine, there was still a connectedness there, a continuum of childhood. Eighteenth-century Virginia, twentieth-century Maryland, tenth-century Britain, Narnia, Neverland, Prydain—it was all the same Wilderness. Those legendary wanderings of Boone and Carson and young Daniel Beard (the father of the Boy Scouts of America), those games of war and exploration I read about, those frightening encounters with genuine menace, far from the help or interference of mother and father, seemed to me at the time—and I think this is my key point—absolutely familiar to me.

The thing that strikes me now when I think about the Wilderness of Childhood is the incredible degree of freedom my parents gave me to adventure there. A very grave, very significant shift in our idea of childhood has occurred since then. The Wilderness of Childhood is gone; the days of adventure are past. The land ruled by children, to which a kid might exile himself for at least some portion of every day from the neighboring kingdom of adulthood, has in large part been taken over, co-opted, colonized, and finally absorbed by the neighbors.

The traveler soon learns that the only way to come to know a city, to form a mental map of it, however provisional, and begin to find his or her own way around it is to visit it alone, preferably on foot, and then become as lost as one possibly can. I have been to Chicago maybe a half-dozen times in my life, on book tours, and yet I still don’t know my North Shore from my North Side, because every time I’ve visited, I have been picked up and driven around, and taken to see the sights by someone far more versed than I in the city’s wonders and hazards. State Street, Halsted Street, the Loop—to me it’s all a vast jumbled lot of stage sets and backdrops passing by the window of a car.

This is the kind of door-to-door, all-encompassing escort service that we adults have contrived to provide for our children. We schedule their encounters for them, driving them to and from one another’s houses so they never get a chance to discover the unexplored lands between. If they are lucky, we send them out to play in the backyard, where they can be safely fenced in and even, in extreme cases, monitored with security cameras. When my family and I moved onto our street in Berkeley, the family next door included a nine-year-old girl; in the house two doors down the other way, there was a nine-year-old boy, her exact contemporary and, like her, a lifelong resident of the street. They had never met.

The sandlots and creek beds, the alleys and woodlands have been aban- doned in favor of a system of reservations—Chuck E. Cheese, the Jungle, the Discovery Zone: jolly internment centers mapped and planned by adults with no blank spots aside from doors marked staff only. When children roller-skate or ride their bikes, they go forth armored as for battle, and their parents typically stand nearby.

There are reasons for all of this. The helmeting and monitoring, the corralling of children into certified zones of safety, is in part the product of the Consumer Reports mentality, the generally increased consciousness, in America, of safety and danger. To this one might add the growing demands of insurance actuarials and the national pastime of torts. But the primary reason for this curtailing of adventure, this closing off of Wilderness, is the increased anxiety we all feel over the abduction of children by strangers; we fear the wolves in the Wilderness. This is not a rational fear; in 1999, for example, according to the Justice Department, the number of abductions by strangers in the United States was 115. Such crimes have always occurred at about the same rate; being a child is exactly no more and no less dangerous than it ever was. What has changed is that the horror is so much better known. At times it seems as if parents are being deliberately encouraged to fear for their children’s lives, though only a cynic would suggest there was money to be made in doing so.

The endangerment of children—that persistent theme of our lives, arts, and literature over the past twenty years—resonates so strongly because, as parents, as members of preceding generations, we look at the poisoned legacy of modern industrial society and its ills, at the world of strife and radioactivity, climatological disaster, overpopulation, and commodification, and feel guilty. As the national feeling of guilt over the extermination of the Indians led to the creation of a kind of cult of the Indian, so our children have become cult objects to us, too precious to be risked. At the same time they have become fetishes, the objects of an unhealthy and diseased fixation. And once something is fetishized, capitalism steps in and finds a way to sell it.

What is the impact of the closing down of the Wilderness on the development of children’s imaginations? This is what I worry about the most. I grew up with a freedom, a liberty that now seems breathtaking and almost impossible. Recently, my younger daughter, after the usual struggle and exhilaration, learned to ride her bicycle. Her joy at her achievement was rapidly followed by a creeping sense of puzzlement and disappointment as it became clear to both of us that there was nowhere for her to ride it—nowhere that I was willing to let her go. Should I send my children out to play?

There is a small grocery store around the corner, not over two hundred yards from our front door. Can I let her ride there alone to experience the singular pleasure of buying herself an ice cream on a hot summer day and eating it on the sidewalk, alone with her thoughts? Soon after she learned to ride, we went out together after dinner, she on her bike, with me following along at a safe distance behind. What struck me at once on that lovely summer evening, as we wandered the streets of our lovely residential neighborhood at that after-dinner hour that had once represented the peak moment, the magic hour of my own childhood, was that we didn’t encounter a single other child.

Even if I do send them out, will there be anyone to play with?

Art is a form of exploration, of sailing off into the unknown alone, heading for those unmarked places on the map. If children are not permitted—not taught—to be adventurers and explorers as children, what will become of the world of adventure, of stories, of literature itself?

Make six different animals, or create your own!

The Ornabo puzzle by Naef

Three must-have books for toy/design lovers:
✺Inventing Kindergarten: on Friedrich Froebel and his “Gifts”. Author Norman Brosterman traces the influence of Froebel’s work not just on modern pedagogy, but on artists and designers such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Buckminster Fuller, Paul Klee and many other 20th century thinkers.

✺Antonio Vitali: The timeless toys of one of the 20th century’s greatest designers. Mostly wooden toys informed by the Steiner philosophy, produced by Vitali on his own and with toymakers such as Naef, Creative Playthings and Kathe Kruse.

✺Kurt Naef / Toymaker: A Swiss designer (like Vitali) whose company produced wooden toys to be enjoyed by children and adults alike.

The first two are hard to come by, but well worth a search. If you have any interest in designing toys (or just drooling over beautiful objects) all three and highly recommended.

I have always loved the work of William Steig: his novel Dominic has been one of my favorites since 2nd grade, and you can’t really go wrong with any of his picture books. And it is no wonder, for he took his work as an author of children’s books very seriously, as you may read in his moving and inspiring Caldecott Award acceptance speech from 1970 (below).

The last time I spoke formally to a group of people anywhere near this size was over a half-century ago, at P.S. 53 in the Bronx. I very quickly got tongue-tied and forgot what I was supposed to say. I have avoided this kind of confrontation ever since then. I was a poor speaker at age ten, and I’ve grown rustier with the years. So — to reduce my discomfort, and yours — I shall make this a short speech. Anyway, as a matter of form, it should not be as long as the little book that landed me here.

Among the things that affected me most profoundly as a child — and consequently as an adult — were certain works of art: Grimm’s fairy tales, Charlie Chaplin movies, Humperdinck’s opera Hansel and Gretel, the Katzenjammer Kids, Pinocchio. Pinocchio especially. I can still remember after this long stretch of time the turmoil of emotions, the excitement, the fears, the delights, and the wonder with which I followed Pinocchio’s adventures.

Often, at work, or in everyday living, I do things or have experiences for which I find symbols that somehow derive from Collodi’s great book. Recently I had a dream in which I was being led towards a place of judgment by two policemen, each with a firm grip on one of my arms. No doubt I was feeling guilty about something. But the scene was right out of a similar episode in Pinocchio, and I am sure that was its derivation. And it is very likely that Sylvester became a rock and then again a live donkey because I had once been so deeply impressed with Pinocchio’s longing to have his spirit encased in flesh instead of wood.

I am well aware not only of the importance of children — whom we naturally cherish and who we also embody our hopes for the future — but also of the importance of what we provide for them in the way of art; and I realize that we are competing with a lot of other cultural influences, some of which beguile them in false directions.

Art, including juvenile literature, has the power to make any spot on earth the living center of the universe, and unlike science, which often gives us the illusion of understanding things we really do not understand, it helps us to know life in a way that still keeps before us the mystery of things. It enhances the sense of wonder. And wonder is respect for life. Art also stimulates the adventurousness and the playfulness that keep us moving in a lively way and that lead us to useful discovery.

Books for children are something I take seriously. I am hopeful that more and more the work I do for children, as well as the work I do for adults, will approach the condition of art. I believe that what this award and this ceremony represent is our mutual striving in the same direction, and I feel encouraged by the faith you have expressed in me in honoring my book with the Caldecott Medal.

I want to express my appreciation and gratitude to my friend and publisher, Bob Kraus of Windmill Books, who has the insight that I — and others like me — could make a contribution in this field, and who, because he himself is an artist, recognizes that the artist-publisher relationship is a symbiotic relationship, mutually beneficial not only in terms of monetary reward but in the more lasting reward of producing worthwhile work and being culturally useful.

Finally, I want to say that I still feel the pleasure and the gratitude that I felt when Mary Elizabeth Ledlie telephoned me from Chicago. And I love you all. I love you because you must love me. Anyway, that’s how I understand your liking my work, which is a large part of me. Thank you.

My thanks to Letters of Note for bringing this speech (and a nervous Steig’s letter about delivering the speech) to my attention.

Visitors to our site may have noticed a recent addition to our categories: the Books link at the top right of each page. In addition to the crafts books we sell along with our arts and crafts supplies, we have put together an Amazon store featuring a selection of picture books, fairy tales and mythology collections we think our friends will like. We hope you discover something new!

This from Ostheimer:

On 14th July 2010 Margarete Ostheimer will celebrate her 80th birthday! Together, let us create a special birthday present!

Over many decades, the company‘s history and fortunes have been shaped by our founder; Margarete Ostheimer. She has been instrumental in meeting the demand to develop wholesome toys which are in harmony with healthy child development.

Due to her dedication and hard work, Ostheimer figures have reached so many children’s playrooms over the course of time and have made so many children and adults happy.

We would be delighted to receive stories and anecdotes from your own experience of Ostheimer’s products. We will make a beautiful gift from the collected stories and present it to Margarete on 14th July 2010.

With any contributions we receive, we will assume to have permission to publish on our website. If you do not wish this, please let us know at the time of submission.

Please submit your story before 13th July 2010 to:
Wolfgang.schuehle@ostheimer.de

Or by post to:

Margarete Ostheimer GmbH
Attn: Wolfgang Schuehle
Boschstr. 23
73119 Zell u. A.
Germany

With friendly greetings,

Wolfgang Schühle and Stephan Zech (Managing Directors)

Watch our friend Christian Werner at work in his Erzgebirge workshop. What is he making?

The final result may be seen here!

A customer was kind enough to share some of the felting projects she made with our roving for her grandson’s birthday: You may see them on the wonderful Childhood Magic blog her daughter writes. Thank you for sharing! We’re always inspired by our customers’ creativity.