Steve Martin Writes a Children's Book
Posted on October 25, 2007
Steve Martin has written a children's book called The Alphabet From A to Y, With Bonus Letter Z. Many celebrities have written children's books after they have children, but Martin doesn't have any kids.
"I'm not sure why I did this. I don't know why an alphabet book popped into my head," Martin says of "The Alphabet From A to Y, With Bonus Letter Z," a collaboration with New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast. "My idea was to write these rhyming couplets with the craziest images I could possibly think up, and then have Roz illustrate them."The buzz on the book is good and Random House has already done a print run of 150,000. We'd moan and groan about yet another celebrity thinking he or she can write children's literature, but Martin really can write. We think the book will do very well and intend to check it out.*****
"From A to Y" is a nonsense ride across time and rhyme, with highlights including "H" ("Henrietta the hare wore a habit in heaven/Her hairdo hid hunchbacks: one hundred and seven") and "N" ("Needle-nosed Nigel won nine kinds of knockwurst/By winning a contest to see who could knock wurst"). Martin is a bookish man, but he wasn't thinking of any authors when writing "From A to Y." Not Thurber, White or Edward Lear. Not Dr. Seuss, whom he didn't read until his 20s. Maybe Ogden Nash. "I did grow up on Ogden Nash," he says in a recent telephone interview, "but I'm not sure if that fits here." Martin began working on "From A to Y" a couple of years ago. Like a good boy eating his vegetables first, he took on the hard letters, like "X" (if "Ambidextrous Alex was actually axed" counts as "X"), before digging in to such treats as "A" and "E."
Asked to name his favourite letter (an improvement over being asked his favourite colour), Martin pauses. "Gee." "Gee," as in "giraffe"? No, "Gee," as in "Gee, whiz." "I always liked 'Q.' ... It has that funny little do-dad at the bottom," he says, before remembering, a theme developing here, that his play "Picasso at the Lapin Agile" includes a soliloquy by Albert Einstein on the alphabet, as it relates to pie. "Einstein compared the letter "O" to a pie, and said that the letter "Q" was like an "O" with a comma and that comma-shaped pie looks like a croissant," Martin explains.