THE STINKY CHEESE MAN

From the front jacket copy ("...56 action-packed pages, 75% more than those old 32-page 'Brand-X' books") to the Little Red Hen's back-cover diatribe ("Who is this ISBN guy?"), the parodic humor here runs riot.

The insistent Hen is already squawking her tale at Jack—officious narrator, MC, and sometime participant—before a page labeled "Title Page" in 192 point type; the dedication is upside down, Jack's introduction carries a Surgeon General's warning, and the table of contents turns up late—after a story in which it plays an unprecedented role, then gets a jolt that knocks one tale off the page and, apparently, right out of the book. The brief, colloquially told, thoroughly revised tales are in the same comic spirit: no one wants to eat the Stinky Cheese Man, unlike the Gingerbread Boy; a lovestruck prince puts a bowling ball under his princess's 100 mattresses; "and much, much more!" All of this is fairly amusing, but what's most unusual is the innovative play with typography (a repetitive story gets smaller and smaller like an eye test, and words and letters are distorted in various other ways) and Smith's wondrously bizarre and expressive art ("The illustrations are rendered in oil and vinegar," states the colophon).

Irrepressibly zany fun.