The Surprise Book

Dotty spends an entire year secretly collecting a story for every month, pasting them into a scrapbook so it can go under the Christmas tree for Marjorie.

Everything in this book is what Marjorie read. A little girl telephones Santa Claus and is asked, instead of giving her list, to find children he ought to know about. A valentine goes to somebody nobody thought of. A boy nicknamed Buttinski makes peace in March by interfering. There is a paper May basket left on a door by a giver who runs, a blackberry adventure in August, a shipwrecked Betty Crusoe in September, and at the end a soldierly Christmas, because this was 1918.

Patten Beard’s stories turn on kindness done quietly and at some cost, and Alice Beard’s plates carry them. It is a book made to be read aloud, a chapter at a bedtime, or one surprise a month across a year, which is very close to what its author seems to have had in mind.

This Carrier Press Annotated and Illustrated Edition includes:

• All fifteen stories with Alice Beard’s original illustrations
• An original Introduction on Beard and the vanished world these stories come from
• Notes on the Text explaining arctics, May baskets, penny banks and the safe and sane Fourth
• A Reader’s Guide for families and classrooms, built to be read one month at a time