Free The Complete Adventures of Curious George by H. A. Rey, Margret Rey Page A

department and Hogarth's superior, Lovell Thompson, had concluded that the watercolors for Curious George looked "as if the author still planned to point them up ... and clean them up [in places]." Thompson ruled that a new set of "pre-separated" illustrations based on the watercolors should instead be prepared.
    Whatever Rey's own first thoughts on the subject may have been, he quickly adapted to circumstance, as well as to the more graphic, less painterly aesthetic implicit in the method of reproduction made available to him. In preparing the separations for Curious George, Rey served a whirlwind apprenticeship, over the course of which he transformed a technique foreign to him into a uniquely expressive idiom for his art.
    Curious George appeared to strong reviews on the same Houghton Mifflin list as Holling C. Holling's Paddle-to-the-Sea (which far outsold it up until the early 1950s) and in the same season as Robert McCloskey's Make Way for Ducklings (Viking), which won the year's Caldecott Medal. The attack on Pearl Harbor followed later that same fall, and with the United States' entry into World War II came paper rationing and other wartime restrictions that severely limited the potential sale of most children's books.
    Curious George's fortunes rose with the birthrate during the postwar baby boom years. One of the book's first reviewers had predicted that small children would "wear the book out with affection." With time and the publication of six sequels, Rey's spry mischief-maker came to occupy a permanent place in our collective imagination, a near relation to Dr. Seuss's Cat in the Hat, Don Freeman's Corduroy, and Maurice Sendak's Max. Sixty years after he first endeared himself to the mild-mannered man with the yellow hat, George remains a bright standard-bearer for the universal curiosity of children: their large-as-life need to touch and tangle with the world and to learn by doing—even if to do so means occasionally landing in thickets of trouble.
    Over the years, the Reys, who had no children of their own, remained unaffected by their steadily growing fame and fortune. They continued to work hard and live modestly, first in New York's Greenwich Village and later in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and to lend their support to causes in which they believed, such as the civil rights movement. From time to time, typically at intervals of five or so years, they returned to their favorite character to tell a new story about him.
    More often than not, the Reys had something up their sleeve. Curious George Gets a Medal (1957), in which George goes for a ride in a rocket, was published, presciently, weeks before the Soviets' surprise launch of the Sputnik II satellite, which carried the first animal into space (a small dog named Laika). Hans Rey, long fascinated by the prospects for space travel, had wished to share his enthusiasm for rocketry with the young. Then, a year after Dr. Seuss's Cat in the Hat popularized the practice for storybooks, Margret Rey wrote Curious George Flies a Kite (1958) with a "controlled," or simplified, vocabulary aimed at helping children learn to read. Curious George Goes to the Hospital (1966) was conceived in part as an aid in preparing children for first-time hospital stays.
    The Reys, however, took care not to allow their nobler intentions to overwhelm their beloved little monkey's blithely madcap appeal. From the first book to the last, George remains the most entertaining of characters—the ultimate innocent and incorrigible clown. For Hans and Margret Rey there was lesson enough for readers in the threadbare margin by which George survives his more spectacular pratfalls. Had not the couple learned a similar lesson, in a far darker key, themselves, cycling at the last possible moment through enemy lines in Occupied Europe toward an uncertain future nearly half a world away?
    For Curious George's creators, to land on one's feet was always the first order of business: the rest was