Two years ago, during a reading at an independent bookstore, an audience member asked author Anne Fadiman why a favorite children's book by her father--writer, editor and TV/radio personality Clifton Fadiman--was out of print. The bookstore co-owner brought that book, Wally the Wordworm, to the attention of publisher David R. Godine, who published a new edition of it last fall. First appearing in 1964, Wally the Wordworm follows an insatiable bookish worm on a "logomaniacal odyssey of epic proportions" through the dictionary. Clifton Fadiman, whose illustrious career included being editor-in-chief of Simon & Schuster, book critic of the New Yorker, host of the radio show Information Please and the longest-serving judge for the Book-of-the-Month Club, rejected the contemporary practice of "talking down" to children with simple language. Instead, he peppered Wally the Wordworm with words like eft, escalator, ptarmigan and sesquipedalian, hoping to amuse, challenge and expand the minds of young readers. The new edition of Wally the Wordworm (David R. Godine, $17.95, 9781567926576) includes the original art by Arnold Roth and a new afterword by Anne Fadiman. --Tobias Mutter
Rediscover: Wally the Wordworm
Two years ago, during a reading at an independent bookstore, an audience member asked author Anne Fadiman why a favorite children's book by her father--writer, editor and TV/radio personality Clifton Fadiman--was out of print. The bookstore co-owner brought that book, Wally the Wordworm, to the attention of publisher David R. Godine, who published a new edition of it last fall. First appearing in 1964, Wally the Wordworm follows an insatiable bookish worm on a "logomaniacal odyssey of epic proportions" through the dictionary. Clifton Fadiman, whose illustrious career included being editor-in-chief of Simon & Schuster, book critic of the New Yorker, host of the radio show Information Please and the longest-serving judge for the Book-of-the-Month Club, rejected the contemporary practice of "talking down" to children with simple language. Instead, he peppered Wally the Wordworm with words like eft, escalator, ptarmigan and sesquipedalian, hoping to amuse, challenge and expand the minds of young readers. The new edition of Wally the Wordworm (David R. Godine, $17.95, 9781567926576) includes the original art by Arnold Roth and a new afterword by Anne Fadiman. --Tobias Mutter