Long Before Kermit Met Miss Piggy. . .

On a recent day, in the hushed and austere basement archives of the Dept. of Special Collections of UCLA’s University Research Library, we found rare books librarian James Davis. He was reading a ‘90s version of “The Three Little Pigs.”

It wasn’t the little porkers as we knew them. With great glee, Davis was flipping through “The Three Little Wolves and the Big, Bad Pig,” effusing, “Just a lovely idea. The three little wolves brutalized by this marauding porcine figure.” (All learn to coexist.)

Department head David Zeidberg interrupted long enough to suggest that the wolf is “completely misunderstood.” Perhaps, added Ph.D student Andrea Immel, the wolf comes from a dysfunctional family.

They were kidding, of course, but, Zeidberg observed, children’s books about fractured families, alcoholism, poverty and racial prejudice say a great deal about our times. As, of course, do Miss Piggy and Kermit.

Davis, Zeidberg and Immel (as consultant), have been assembling “Fun & Games: 400 Years of Children’s Books,” a million-dollar exhibit to be shown at the California International Antiquarian Book Fair, Friday through Sunday at the Airport Hilton.

Fair-goers will be taken back to that once upon a time before Barney the dinosaur and the Berenstain Bears--when children’s literature was somewhat loftier.

Take “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” written in 1880.

Even with one-syllable words--this was, after all, for children of 7 and up--it wasn’t easy plodding, this retelling of John Bunyan’s 17th-Century Christian allegory:

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“As I went through the wild waste of this world, I came to a place where there was a den, and I lay down in it to sleep. While I slept, I had a dream, and lo! I saw a man whose clothes were in rags, and he stood with his face from his own house, with a book in his hand, and a great load on his back . . . “

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Segue to the present and this book-- not in the UCLA collection--marketed for the 7-plus reader:

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“Look!

We are here--right here on the globe.

This is where we live .

We live in our own hometown .

We know our way around our hometown . . .”

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You get the idea. It’s what Davis calls “this awful oversimplification” in contemporary kid-lit. Once it was Bunyan. “Now it’s Dick and Jane and see Spot jump.”

Davis, as caretaker of the library’s 46-year-old children’s book collection (which includes “Pilgrim”), isn’t suggesting that all of today’s books are McLiterature.

But he’d wish for less junk food and more feasts such as Sendak and Seuss. He was quick to acquire “Bonjour, Mr. Satie” by Tomie dePaola. It’s the delightful tale of Ffortusque Ffollet, Esq., a mouse hobnobbing in Paris with Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence.

“I think it’s wonderful,” he says, even though he’s “not sure a little kid cares about James Joyce or D.H. Lawrence.”

The book fair’s public showing of several hundred items culled from the 23,000-book collection is a first for UCLA, whose children’s book trove is primarily a resource for visiting scholars worldwide.

There are 3-D “peep shows,” pop-up books and 200-year-old miniature libraries in exquisite lacquered boxes, modeled after the traveling libraries that adults took along in the coach. There is “The Infant’s Cabinet of Shells,” a set of beautifully illustrated cards in a hand-painted box.

The oldest item going to the fair is a 16th-Century book of fables, in Latin, with images attributed to a student of Titian.

Oddities include jigsaw puzzles, circa 1800--one that taught about pence and shillings, another the names of the Roman emperors.

In the collection, rarities abound, though Davis is less interested in “high spots” than in building a library of educational value. He thinks it would be “stupid” to pay the going price--$100,000--for a first printing of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.”

And it is he who decides how to spend donations from Friends of the Library and others. The fun is “trying to second-guess the future,” what will endure.

What doesn’t UCLA want? Well, says Zeidberg, “We don’t go looking” for Nancy Drew or The Hardy Boys. Series books are always being updated and reissued, so it’s a bottomless pit. “There’s no challenge.”

They do want books that, 200 years from now, will shed light on our times, for better or worse. They have a first edition of “Little Black Sambo” and a book about internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

Recently, Davis boasts, without a hint of modesty, he invested in a truly cutting-edge book, before it began reaping rave reviews. The book? “Everyone Poops.”

A Ring of Truth to It

Taking his cue from Burma Shave, optician Brad Kessner penned this on the boarded-up window at The Eyes Have It in quake-battered Sherman Oaks:

We Have a Crack

But We’ll Be Back!

They’re back. The board came down Friday and the doors opened Saturday.

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Well, every Tyrannosaurus Rex has his day: Last Saturday’s planned daylong UCLA Extension seminar, “Dinosaurs in Fact and Fancy,” was canceled for lack of interest.

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