Back by popular demand

We've lapsed in our photo taking this month. But the reading public requests new shots, and so we offer this image of Edith's first pigtails. Only possible when her hair is wet.



Incidentally, we feel obliged to inform our readers that when we gave Edith credit for listening to half of Go, Dog, Go at a single sitting (or standing), we were referring to the abridged version. We thank Brian Critz for bringing this to our attention, as we had not known of the longer edition. Indeed, I had been a bit mystified to read that one of our posters called the book Big Dog Little Dog as a child, wondering where the idea of just two dogs, differently sized, could have come from. Turns out, there are oodles more pages to the original book than appear in the board book version, which begins with the dogs leaping out of bed en masse to race to the dog party. And even the pages that are common to both books feature oodles more text in the original--text that clarifies, for example, why there are dogs playing tennis on top of a blimp. As a general rule, we don't plan to give Edith abridged books. But we would like to suggest that the narrative is, in fact, tighter and more cohesive in the shorter Go, Dog, Go, allowing for greater linguistic intensity and dramatic suspense. (As for Edith's attention span, six-page books remain the order of the day.)