George Mendoza and Monika Beisner’s Thumbtown Toad belongs on your bookshelf next to Struwwelpeter, and the brave, childless team at Prentice Hall which published it in 1971 belongs in the Publishing Hall of Fame.
I think I found the book via Daddy Types while searching for Monika Beisner’s illustrated Dante (published in Germany and Italy; feature coming soon). Toad won DT’s Bizarre Book Contest in 2006. The person who submitted the book for the contest wrote:
The Thumbtown Toad is not a toad–although decorative toads pop up throughout the book’s illustrations–she is a wicked woman. She does all kinds of unpleasant things like wear skulls for shoes and cook juicy children in stews, but what’s really off-putting about this book is its understated menace; it’s written in non-rhyming verse of obscure form, building an queasy current of real dread under the obvious “wicked” antics of the Toad–it’s as if there’s some truly unspeakable horror underneath the already nasty things we are told about. The intricate pen-and-ink illustrations by Monika Beisner are similarly sinister in their suspended stillness, in their somewhat antique stylization, and in the rather babyish face of the Toad herself.
The real clincher, though, comes at the end–the Thumbtown Toad has a nightmare that she laughed so hard, she burst into flames. The accompanying drawing is horrifying.
Naturally I begin my post with this image. Click for larger versions.
