My Favourite Things

Rodgers and Hammerstein's beloved song from The Soundof Music has captured hearts for generations. Now acclaimed illustrator Renée Graef's heartwarming illustrations give it new meaning. Complete with its score, My Favorite Things is perfect for reading and sharing.

Let your child's imagination run wild in this wonderfully busy, search-and-find board book - follow fun characters, spot and count things, and have an entertaining, I-spy adventure! From an exciting town to a sunny beach, a beautiful park to a colorful toyshop, little ones visit their best-loved places, search through the busy scenes, then point to and name all sorts of delightful things, building their vocabulary. They follow entertaining characters like the little girl and her mum buying things for a birthday party, the young boy out and about with his grandparents, and playful Patch, the mischievous pup. They count scampering squirrels, fluttery butterflies, flying birds, and more. Plus there are favorite toys and fabulous treats to find, and a cool cat is hiding somewhere in each scene! A perfect interactive book to share with pre-reading toddlers or older children just beginning to read, every scene has "Can you spot?" questions, things to find that are certain colors or patterns, and open-ended prompts to encourage observation, exploration, and conversation. And at the end of the book, little ones can play a fun "Look back and find..." game. With so many favorite things to talk about, and characters to follow from page to page, children can use their imaginations to tell their own story. Perhaps they will continue the story even after they have finished the book!

Starring an enthusiastic pooch whose joy, optimism and love know no bounds, this lively picture book is based on Emma Chichester Clark’s own dog, and joyfully celebrates unconditional love. Plum has lots of favorite things—catching sticks, her bear, her bed—but really, LOVE is her absolute favorite thing. She loves her family and all the things they do together. Sometimes, however, Plum’s exuberance causes trouble, and she just can’t help being naughty. But fortunately, love is such a great thing that even when she makes mistakes, Plum’s family still adores her.

From Maira Kalman, the author of the bestsellers The Principles of Uncertainty and The Elements of Style, comes this beautiful pictorial and narrative exploration of the significance of objects in our lives, drawn from her personal artifacts, recollections, and selections from the collection of the Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. With more than fifty original paintings and featuring bestselling author and illustrator Maira Kalman’s signature handwritten prose, My Favorite Things is a poignant and witty meditation on the importance of both quotidian and unusual objects in our culture and private worlds. Created in the same colorful, engaging, and insightful style as her previous works, which have won her fans around the world, My Favorite Things features more than fifty objects from both the Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum and Kalman’s personal collections: the pocket watch Abraham Lincoln was carrying when he was shot, original editions of Winnie-the-Pooh and Alice in Wonderland, a handkerchief in memoriam of Queen Victoria, an Ingo Maurer lamp, Rietveld’s Z chair, a pair of Toscanini’s pants, and photographs Kalman has taken of people walking towards and away from her. A pictorial index provides photographs of the actual objects and a short description of them, enhancing the reading experience. As it speaks to the universal experience and importance of beloved objects in our lives—big and small, famous and private—this unique work is a fresh way of examining and understanding our society, history, culture, and ourselves.

Alberta likes what she likes.Big dogs:noSmall dogs:yesGrapefruits:noGummy candies:yesHer favorite color is orange. And her favorite vegetable is potato chip.She likes baths. And boats.But none of these is her favorite thing of all.What could it be, then, her favorite thing?

Set against the tumultuous political backdrop of late ’60s Chicago, My Favorite Thing Is Monsters is the fictional graphic diary of 10-year-old Karen Reyes, filled with B-movie horror and pulp monster magazines iconography. Karen Reyes tries to solve the murder of her enigmatic upstairs neighbor, Anka Silverberg, a holocaust survivor, while the interconnected stories of those around her unfold. When Karen’s investigation takes us back to Anka’s life in Nazi Germany, the reader discovers how the personal, the political, the past, and the present converge.

From every “beautiful mornin’” to “some enchanted evening,” the songs of Oscar Hammerstein II are part of our daily lives, his words part of our national fabric. Born into a theatrical dynasty headed by his grandfather and namesake, Oscar Hammerstein II breathed new life into the moribund art form of operetta by writing lyrics and libretti for such classics as Rose-Marie (music by Rudolf Friml), The Desert Song (Sigmund Romberg), The New Moon (Romberg) and Song of the Flame (George Gershwin). Hammerstein and Jerome Kern wrote eight musicals together, including Sweet Adeline, Music in the Air, and their masterpiece, Show Boat. The vibrant Carmen Jones was Hammerstein’s all-black adaptation of the tragic opera by Georges Bizet. In 1943, Hammerstein, pioneer in the field of operetta, joined forces with Richard Rodgers, who had for the previous twenty-five years taken great strides in the field of musical comedy with his longtime writing partner, Lorenz Hart. The first Rodgers and Hammerstein work, Oklahoma!, merged the two styles into a completely new genre—the musical play—and simultaneously launched the most successful partnership in American musical theater. Over the next seventeen years, Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote eight more Broadway musicals: Carousel, Allegro, South Pacific, The King and I, Me and Juliet, Pipe Dream, Flower Drum Song, and The Sound of Music. They also wrote a movie musical (State Fair) and one for television (Cinderella). Collectively their works have earned dozens of awards, including Pulitzers, Tonys, Oscars, Grammys, and Emmys. Throughout his career, Hammerstein created works of lyrical beauty and universal feeling, and he continually strove—sometimes against fashion—to seek out the good and beautiful in the world. “I know the world is filled with troubles and many injustices,” he once said. “But reality is as beautiful as it is ugly . . . I just couldn’t write anything without hope in it.” All of his lyrics are here—850, more than a quarter published for the first time—in this sixth book in the indispensable Complete Lyrics series that has also brought us the lyrics of Cole Porter, Lorenz Hart, Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin, and Frank Loesser. From the young scribe’s earliest attempts to the old master’s final lyric—“Edelweiss”—we can see, read, and, yes, sing the words of a theatrical and lyrical genius.

A lively and lyrical picture book jaunt from actor and author John Lithgow! Oh, children! Remember! Whatever you may do, Never play music right next to the zoo. They’ll burst from their cages, each beast and each bird, Desperate to play all the music they’ve heard. A concert gets out of hand when the animals at the neighboring zoo storm the stage and play the instruments themselves in this hilarious picture book based on one of John Lithgow’s best-loved tunes.