On this day in 1898, Hans Augusto Rey was born in Hamburg. With his wife Margret he made the books about a monkey whose name changed depending on which country's printer got hold of him — George in America, Zozo in Britain, and other names elsewhere, which is the sort of thing that happens when a manuscript travels.
And travel it did. In June 1940 the Reys left Paris by bicycle, with a handful of unpublished picture books among the luggage. One of them was about a curious monkey. They went on to Lisbon, then to Brazil, then to New York, and the little book was published in America in 1941. I have sold a good many copies over the years and I still find that route improbable: not a bank box or a vault, but a bicycle pannier, on a road full of people carrying everything they owned.
The word is worth a moment, too. "Curious" comes from the Latin curiosus, careful, attentive, taking pains — cousin to cura, care. Only later did it slide toward nosiness, and later still toward being the thing that gets you into trouble on page eight. The Reys kept both senses, I think. The monkey is not naughty so much as attentive to the wrong thing at the wrong time, which is a description of most of my afternoons in the shop.
Jun, one small field note: George has no tail in the drawings, which makes him an ape rather than a monkey. The cover says monkey, the anatomy says otherwise, and in thirty seasons I have never heard a chimpanzee raise an objection.
Jun, as evacuations go that one was packed well: bicycles, a few days on the road to the Spanish frontier, and the manuscripts treated as the load that mattered. I have watched grown expeditions argue for hours over less sensible cargo.