Maurice Sendak’s 1962 One Was Johnny: A Counting Book is another of the tiny picture books from the period. Like Let’s Be Enemies and This Thumbprint, this book is the size to fit in a coat pocket, and maybe a back pocket of your pants.
Also like those other two books, this is an example of just what can be done in a picture book: it is focused and precise, and combines counting, rhyme, and math.
The book starts with 1 and counts to 10. It starts with “1 was Johnny who lived by himself.” Johnny is shown sitting at a table reading, blissfully content with a smile on his face. Each number gets a two-page spread in which a new animal or person intrudes on Johnny’s solitary bliss; the line for each pair of numbers rhymes, so pages 3 and 4 give us “2 was a rat who jumped on his shelf.” Cat follows rat, then dog, turtle, monkey, blackbird, tiger, and then a robber, building to 10, at which time Johnny’s small, pleasant space is extremely crowded, presenting Johnny with “a puzzle. What should Johnny do?”
The middle spread gives us words only, as Johnny announces (in a solution that echoes Max in Where the Wild Things Are) that he is going to count backwards, and then, “if this house isn’t empty, I’ll eat all of you!!!!”
The countdown commences, with the intruders leaving in reverse order in which they’d intruded (with one minor variation: the cat leaves WITH the rat). Here too, the line of narration on each page forms a rhyming couplet.
The countdown reaches one again, and readers once again get “1 was Johnny who lived by himself” only to follow with a two-page celebratory “AND LIKED IT LIKE THAT!”
So many of Sendak’s themes are here: children alone, childhood chaos, eating as threat, bringing things full circle (and then commenting on the positive resolution), and so many of his virtues: wonderful illustration, tension between detail and excess, and precise language.
Lovely lovely lovely.
This book is part of Sendak’s Nutshell Library, a set of four small books that are available independently, but are also available as a bound four-book set. You can see a video on this set here. Besides being by Sendak and small, these books also share subtitles and design elements, like acorns on the back.
And if that’s not enough, there’s a 1975 Carole King song version.