![]() ![]() Woody Allen once confessed that he'd always felt "at two with nature." A recent radio commentator lamented that parents no longer allow their children "to play on the edges of civilization." Instead too many children today are willingly tethered to indoor technology and self-sequestered away from the natural world. This mother asks simple questions, not in an interrogating, punishing way, but more as little gifts that honor and nourish her son's intelligence. Brian's mother, instead of screaming, "Where have you been? How many times have I told you not to wander off into those woods alone? And I just cleaned your room and what's that slimey animal doing in your drawer? Brian!" Not so in this book. At the back, with birds above and rats beneath a garden shed, the store wants you to feel like you're outside.īesides feeding us a design concept, there are other, deeper layers of flavor in this favorite book. #Wild rumpus bookstore crackMidway, things begin to change, there's a tree-trimmer sheetrocked in the ceiling on a ladder, and the ceiling itself at this point starts to crack open to the sky. Our store's front doors open into a fairly conventional interior with carpet, a comfortable reading chair and floorlamp. "and next to me, on the boulder with its head resting on soft moss, the salamander will sleep."Īrchitecture doesn't have the luxury of page-turning, but instead allows us a front-to-back spatial progression. And at the end, the last pages show Brian sound asleep in his bed in the woods. Each illustration shows a step in a process that changes a conventional interior to an exterior: gradually walls and ceilings disappear, wildlife moves in and then takes Brian and the reader back out. His answers both accommodate the new salamander and magically transform the world of his bedroom. And for each question, Brian has an answer. Each page of the story that follows is driven by his off-stage mother's questions. And today it continues to teach us about books and young people, and about adults who love them.Īlone, Brian goes into the woods, discovers a salamander and takes it home to his bedroom. ![]() In 1992, we first used this story as a kind of blueprint for building the store. Over the years, Wild Rumpus has had a sort of conversation with the book The Salamander Roomby Anne Mazer. ![]()
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