Audiobook · read by volunteers
Rocket Book
Peter Newell (1862–1924)
Read by Denny Sayers (d. 2015) · 1 chapter · 11 min
About the book
A boy in a basement strikes a match and lights a rocket. It is only a small thing, but a rocket is a rocket, and this one rises through the floors of a tall apartment building, interrupting twenty households on the way and turning each flat upside down. Peter Newell's verse, written to go with his famous comic illustrations, narrates each flat in turn with sly, sing-song glee. The book was designed with a hole punched through every page to show the rocket's path, and the poem is as playful as the idea. Listeners need only follow the sound of the blast and the cheerful commentary as it climbs. It is brief, comic and a little anarchic, and takes about twelve minutes. Read by a single LibriVox volunteer, it is an easy treat for children and for anyone who enjoys a well-timed disaster.
Introduction
Peter Newell, who lived from 1862 to 1924, was an American illustrator and author, best known for a handful of children's books that experimented with the physical shape of a book. The Rocket Book dates from 1912 and is one of the most inventive of them. Its premise is that a rocket, set alight by a boy in the basement, bursts upward through every storey of a building, and the book's pages are cut to match, with a hole showing where it passed through each apartment.
The text is a series of short rhymed verses placed opposite the pictures, which comment on what the illustration shows. In this way the poem and the drawings answer each other, and the effect is that of a comic strip told in couplets. Newell had a lively sense of the absurd, and his verses balance a mock-serious tone with real affection for the households he disrupts.
The book is often mentioned, together with his earlier The Slant Book, as one of the pioneers of the novelty format in children's publishing, the kind of book that plays a trick with its own design. A recording obviously cannot reproduce the holes, but it can capture the rhythm and the humour. The reading takes about twelve minutes and consists of a single chapter. The original illustrations are available in digital libraries, and looking at them while listening makes a charming double experience, but the verse is entertaining on its own. It is a small gem of invention, and a good reminder that the picture book was already a place for playing with form more than a century ago.
Public domain
Peter Newell died in 1924: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text