By Stanley F. Schmidt
The first of the Fred books: a five-year-old math professor has an ordinary week, and the arithmetic falls out of it.
Fred Gauss is five years old and he teaches mathematics at KITTENS University in Kansas. He sleeps under his desk. He owns very little. Nobody in the book ever explains any of this, and it is not going to be explained later either. Over eighteen short chapters Fred has a week: he gets cold and works out what to wear at fifteen below, he looks at a clock, he wonders why February is spelled that way, he counts by fives, he notices which trees drop their leaves, he goes to church on Sunday, and he thinks about Archimedes. The arithmetic is folded into whatever Fred is doing, so numbers that add to seven arrive because Fred needs them, and the algebra sentence 3x plus 4x equals 7x turns up in the middle of a chapter as though it were nothing. Each chapter runs about six pages and ends with a page called Your Turn to Play, three or four questions, with the answers printed on the very next page.
Fred is here because it is the clearest example on this shelf of one person's enthusiasm carrying a subject. Schmidt wrote and drew every page himself, over decades, and you can hear him. He is a math professor who cannot stop digressing, so a chapter about telling the time ends up somewhere near leap years and Latin, and for a particular child that wandering is the entire appeal. That child does not experience the book as math. They experience it as a funny story they happen to be doing sums inside of, which is a completely different offer than a workbook and can turn a child who has already decided the subject is misery. The answers being on the next page matters more than it sounds: your child checks their own work in ten seconds, alone, and nobody has to mark anything.