Should Have Gone to Page 52

R. A. Montgomery, who conned critics into believing his crippling indecisiveness was a strategy to foster creativity and decision-making skills in children, has died at the age of 78. A graduate of The College of Middle Earth, Montgomery started the Choose Your Own Adventure series in 1977 with Vermont Crossroads Press before moving to the little mom and pop operation at Bantam Books where he wrote more than 50 in the Choose series, which has produced more than 250 million books.

Encyclopedia Down

(Props to Monty)

Or

Encyclopedia Brown and the Metastasis

Donald J. Sobol, who showed that dorky kids can solve their police chief father’s cases decades before Veronica Mars, has died at the age of 87 of gastric lymphoma. Born before Wikipedia made encyclopedias obsolete, Leroy Brown earned his distinct nickname for the vast array of facts at his fingertips, which he would use to solve his father’s cases in time to enjoy a lovely dinner. Brown’s steel trap mind time and again kept local bully Bugs Meany in detention, while his friend and bodyguard Sally Kimball kept the smug dork from getting his ass beat. Unlike those efficient bastards Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes, Sobol made sure to pause in Brown’s summations to give his kiddie readers the chance to compare their own deductions to the master. Over nearly 60 years, Sobol wrote 28 Encyclopedia Brown mysteries, earning a special Edgar Award for contributions to tedious unsolved crimes. The series has never been out of print and has been translated into 12 languages, with book sales in the millions.

Be Still

Or

Off to Castle Yonder

Or

Where the Dead Things Are

Maurice Sendak, who became a fixture of kiddie lit by treating children as the selfish, irrational sociopaths they really are, and because he couldn’t draw horses, has died of complications of a stroke at the age of 83. Already a renowned author and illustrator, Sendak pitched a book called Where the Wild Horses Are, which his editor loved. Sendak couldn’t draw horses, but he could draw things, especially with the obnoxious relatives from the Sunday gatherings of his youth as models, and the book became one of the top sellers of all time. The book probably would have sold even more if it wasn’t banned by small-minded librarians who thought the book would be too frightening for young’uns coddled by the sweetness and innocence of most kids’ books. Other classics included Higglety Pigglety Pop! Or There Must Be More to Life, the nonsensical tale of a terrier who decides there must be more to life than having everything, In the Night Kitchen, about the nocturnal adventures of Mickey, a pants-less child who barely escapes being baked into a cake, and Outside Over There, the tale of a girl rescuing her baby sister from the goblins who kidnapped her. Sendak was a member of the National Board of Advisors of the Children’s Television Workshop during the development stages of Sesame Street, and later collaborated with Jim Henson to produce an animated sequence of his story Bumble Ardy.

Fossilized

or
Hoff in Coffin
(props to Chris for the header)
Syd Hoff, author of "Danny and the Dinosaur," is finally extinct at age 91. Just to show how many epochs he spanned, he was originally hired by William Randolph Hearst. He penned numerous cartoons for the New Yorker from 1931 to 1975, but was widely acclaimed for his books in which a museum dinosaur comes to life and spends the day with a boy in New York City. One of his lesser-known titles was "Danny and the Dinosaur go Wilding in Times Square."
(Monty on special assignment)