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Reviewed by:
  • Cricket
  • J. C. Furnas (bio)
Cricket Volume 1, Number 1, 01, 1973(Pilot issue: regular publication commences September 1973). To be published monthly except June, July and August. Annual subscription, $10.00; single copy, $1.50. Open Court Publishing Company, 1058 Eighth Street, La Salle, Illinois 61301.

A man recommending this magazine to me said it was the first high-standard magazine for children since St. Nicholas dwindled away in the 1930's. Having [End Page 229] been reared on St. Nicholas in its great pre-1920 phase, I had some misgivings when beginning to make Cricket's acquaintance. I lost them halfway through. The thing is downright enjoyable.

As it happens, research for my own work has recently taken me through a run of St. Nicholas in representative good years. For my money, Cricket assays considerably better—level of quality better sustained, art work handling a wider variety of idioms, editorial imagination expertly eclectic and cordially amusing without too much cuteness, as in the little drawings-with-dialogue at the bottoms of pages in which crickets and assorted fellow insects discuss what goes on in the matter printed above.

Comparison must allow for the age levels of Cricket's intended audience not going beyond twelve, I should judge, whereas St. Nicholas aimed at youngsters well into their teens. Ordinarily that difference would have been to Cricket's disadvantage, dooming its content to easy-steps-for-little-feet mawkishness. Actually zest and thump and stimulating reachings toward growth-experience come through on a most gratifying number of pages.

Difference in editorial policy is diametric. St. Nicholas relied on previously unpublished material. One reason for Cricket's high quality and a good omen for its future is that most of its content consists of extracts from very good books for children published over the past few decades. Such cream-skimming can be very rewarding, and works out as well here for children as it did in good reading for adults in the old Golden Book magazine of pre-World War II days. A child nibbling at this first Cricket will find friends in T. S. Eliot, Isaac Bashevis Singer . . . and feel them as friends with the same spontaneities as the less augustly renowned but mostly admirable writers of the rest of the content.

Another good omen is the harkback to St. Nicholas in "The Cricket League" department asking readers to do stories or poems on . . . well, this month on "anything spooky or scary: ghosts, skeletons, witches, bats . . . hoots, boos, sighs, grins . . . " or drawings in that same mood in any color so long as it's black. The St. Nicholas League of my day was print-proving ground for Edna St. Vincent Millay, Stephen Vincent Benét, Rachel Carson, and so on. Could be this time, too.

J. C. Furnas

J. C. Furnas, prolific writer of volumes and articles on social history, is best known to those in children's literature for his Voyage to Windward: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson.

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