Thirteen Clocks

Once upon a time, in a gloomy castle on a lonely hill, where there were thirteen clocks that wouldn't go, there lived a cold aggressive Duke and his niece, the Princess Saralinda. She was warm in every wind and weather, but he was always cold. His hands were as cold as his smile, and almost cold as his heart. He wore gloves when he was asleep, and he wore gloves when he was awake, which made it difficult for him to pick up pins or coins or the kernels of nuts, or to tear the wings from nightingales. So begins James Thurber's wonderful revamped fairy tale, The 13 Clocks, in which a wicked Duke who imagines he has killed time, and the Duke's beautiful niece, for whom time seems to have run out, both meet their match, thanks to an enterprising prince in disguise. Readers young and old will take pleasure in this tale of love forestalled and finally fulfilled, while delighting in the caliber of its upstanding hero ("He yearned to find in a far land the princess of his dreams, singing as he went, and possibly slaying a dragon here and there") and unapologetic villain ("We all have flaws," the Duke said. "Mine is being wicked"), along with the entirely original and utterly enigmatic Golux ("I make mistakes, but I am on the side of the good"). Thurber's subversive and deeply satisfying fairy tale, a witty precursor to Shrek and The Princess Bride, is beautifully illustrated by Marc Simont.

James Thurber (1894—1961), one of the outstanding American humorists and cartoonists of the twentieth century, was born in Columbus, Ohio, and launched his professional writing career as a reporter for the Columbus Dispatch in 1920. He began writing for The New Yorker in 1927 after his friend E. B. White got him a job at the magazine. Though hampered by failing eyesight, Thurber wrote nearly forty books, including collections of essays, short stories, fables, and children’s stories. He won a Tony Award for his popular Broadway play, A Thurber Carnival.

Marc Simont was born in Paris and moved to America when he was nineteen. He has illustrated nearly a hundred books, working with authors as diverse as Margaret Wise Brown and Ruth Krauss. He won a Caldecott Honor in 1950 for illustrating Krauss’s The Happy Day, and in 1957 he was awarded the Caldecott Medal for his pictures in A Tree Is Nice by Janice May Udry. He is the illustrator for the New York Review Children’s Collection’s The Backward Day. He lives with his family in West Cornwall, Connecticut.