By Wanda Gág
A lonely old couple wants one cat, so the old man brings home millions and billions and trillions of them, and only one kitten is left by the end.
A very old man and a very old woman are lonely, so he sets off over the hills to find her a cat. What he finds is a hillside absolutely covered in them: hundreds of cats, thousands of cats, millions and billions and trillions of cats. Every one he picks up is the prettiest, so he can't leave any behind, and he walks home with all of them trailing after him. They drink a whole pond dry. They eat every blade of grass on the hill. The old woman points out they can't possibly keep them all, so the cats are asked to decide among themselves which is the prettiest, and every single one says it's them. They quarrel. Then it goes quiet. Only one scraggly kitten is left, the one who never thought it was pretty at all, and it's the one the couple keeps.
The chant is the whole engine, and it's an unbelievably good one. "Hundreds of cats, thousands of cats, millions and billions and trillions of cats" comes back through the book, and your child will be saying it with you by the second time, then saying it in the car, then saying it in the bath. For a cat-obsessed child, the pages where the old man walks home with an ocean of cats streaming behind him are pure wish fulfillment, and Gág's black-and-white drawings pack so many of them onto a spread that a child can hunt through it for ages. It's from 1928, the oldest American picture book still in print, and it does not sound like anything published this year, which is part of what makes it stick. But the ending is strange, and it's the reason to read the heads-up below before you bring it home to a child who loves cats.