By Miroslav Sasek
A Czech painter walks you round Paris in 1959 and draws everything he likes, from the gendarmes to the cats to the man selling roast chestnuts.
Sasek takes your child round Paris the way a friend who lives there would, on foot, stopping wherever he feels like it. Some pages are what you would expect, the Tower, Notre Dame, the Louvre. Most are not. A concierge in her doorway. The flower market. A poodle being clipped in the street. The policemen on their bicycles. A café waiter carrying too much. The captions are short and dry and often funny, and the drawings are the point, all flat color and confident line. There is no plot and no ending. It is a city, looked at hard by somebody who loved it, one page at a time.
It teaches a place instead of a fact, which almost nothing else on a geography shelf does. A child who has met Paris here does not learn that it is the capital of France; they learn what it smells like and who is standing on the corner, and the capital-of-France part sticks afterwards because it has somewhere to stick to. Sasek is also the strongest argument on this shelf for one person's eye over a committee's, since his Paris is made entirely of what he personally stopped to look at. Sixty-four pages, no reading demand to speak of, and a nine-year-old and a five-year-old get different books out of the same spread.