Imaginary Gardens with Real Toads in Them


Some may know Lionni through his design work for Fortune magazine, or for his children's books.  It has become increasingly difficult to know of perhaps his greatest achievement:  Parallel Botany.  Out of print, the book has become like that it describes, the extremely rare and rarely seen.  Copies have become expensive to acquire in nature.  One has to go to a library, the bibliographical greenhouse.

Maybe this book is more well-known than I give it credit.  Egotistically, I feel that if I just learned about it, nobody else has, but in this case I suspect that the fact that the book is out of print has severely limited its readers.  Which is a tragedy.  The book is as strange, fresh and relevant as when it came out in 1977.

The time is ripe for a reprint.

JB

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