Readers Love Curious George. I Fell in Love with the Author’s Astronomy Books.
He is without a doubt the most famous little monkey in all of fiction. Curious George, known for letting his inquisitiveness get him into trouble and then using his ingenuity to get him out of it, has been entertaining children and their parents since 1941, when the first book of his adventures, simply titled Curious George, by the husband-and-wife team of Margret and H.A. Rey, was published. It was followed by six more books; the last one, Curious George Goes to the Hospital, appeared in 1966. George has also starred in six animated feature films, and, since 2006, a PBS television series. Some 30 million copies of the George books have been sold, in 19 different languages.
The first Rey book that I encountered, however, had no monkeys whatsoever. As a kid growing up in Nova Scotia, with a keen interest in the stars and the universe, I devoured all the science books that I could find. I was lucky that my parents had books like Marvels and Mysteries of The World Around Us, a massive Reader’s Digest hardback that weighed as much as my head, which covered pretty much the whole universe. But it was aimed at adults and older kids, and anyway the astronomy stuff was squeezed into a few pages at the end. The little book that really got me hooked on the night sky was called Know the, adapted from a longer work, . The author was H.A. Rey.
