Of bees and wild things

Maurice Sendak died on 8 May, and since then it seems you can't go far on the internet without running into something about him or Where the Wild Things Are. I've never been that much of a Sendak person (Wild Things wasn't part of my childhood library), but all this talk of him has reminded me of a book that was, albeit briefly, part of my childhood and has stuck in my mind ever since.

I believe I read it (or more accurately, had it read to me) while we were in Sweden visiting family. I was five and it was the coldest winter in decades. We had a short stay in a ski cabin in the woods, where the snow piled up to the windowsills and we stayed indoors as much as possible (except for a few disasterous – for me – ventures outside to attempt skiing). My mom had brought along a few books I believe she picked out at the Västerås library, one of which was this one:

The Bee-Man of Orn has been at the back of my mind ever since then. I could never remember the title, but I knew I would recognise the cover if I saw it. And at some point a few years back I made the connection between the illustrations of the “monster book” I wasn't interested in and those of the book I couldn't get out of my head.

Google Maurice Sendak and you'll mostly find images of Wild Things. Try to find an obscure book about a man who possibly had something to do with bees and Google's not much help. On Sendak's Wikipedia page I found what I was looking for by trawling through the rather long list of books he authored or illustrated, right at the bottom of his page. The Bee Man of Orn doesn't have it's own Wikipedia page, but there is a page for the story's author, Frank R. Stockton. A little more research reveals that the story is quite a strange one, but apparently Stockton was known for writing unusual stories. And that's probably why it's haunted me all these years. The combination of the absurd story and Sendak's vivid illustrations made for quite a memorable book. And now that I've rediscovered it, I feel I can finally put it to rest.

But trying to track down this particular childhood memory lead me to another discovery...

Perhaps I'm not such a huge fan of Maurice Sendak because I'm not American. It seems that every American child has Where the Wild Things Are on her bookshelf (along with a copy of Goodnight Moon and The Giving Tree, both of which I first heard about as an adult). But in my search for “my” Sendak book, I discovered a lot of beautiful and fanciful images from other of his works, and now I'm intrigued.

I may have, *ahem*, gone overboard with all the images here, but look at the diversity of styles and the imagination! Hover over the images for names of the works they are from.

He was a big fan of Mozart and of opera, apparently:

He collaborated on a children's book version of Brundibar, a Czech-Jewish children's opera with a fascinating and tragic history, and co-created the sets for recent performances.

There's so much more to Sendak than Max and his monsters. And while I still don't feel the need to actually read Where the Wild Things Are (as opposed to just paging through looking at the pictures as I've done before), I do now want to get hold of some of his less famous books. I've ventured a bit further than The Bee-Man, and now I have a whole new list of books to find.

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Incidentally, in my search I came across a more recent take on the The Bee-Man of Orn, illustrated by P.J.Lynch, which looks just as good, so I might have to find that too.