The Calico Jungle

A mother gives her little boy a handmade quilt, but it's more than just a quilt. It's a whole world where fantastical animals run, hide, swim, and frolic in a calico jungle. The boy enters this wild landscape and travels through it. He spies calico birds pecking at fruits, sees calico elephants giving each other shower baths, discovers spotted horses, striped lions, and calico fish shining like jewels. As he nears the far side of the quilt, the animals he encounters are curled up asleep. The boy grows sleepy, too. His eyes close and he dreams that he is walking through the calico jungle, under the flowering trees, where all the strange and wonderful animals lived. This marvelous book by renowned artist and illustrator Dahlov Ipcar will spark every child's imagination, inspire them to question what is real, and invite them to explore a world full of color and possibility.

Dahlov Ipcar was born in Vermont, raised in Greenwich Village, and summered in Maine after her parents (the famed sculptor William Zorach and artist Marguerite Zorach) bought a farm on Georgetown Island in 1923.Thirteen years later, eighteen-year-old Dahlov, an aspiring artist, married Adoph Ipcar. The young couple left New York City in 1937 to live on the Maine farm where they first met. By the early 1940s, she had nearly given up thoughts of writing and illustrating books, but was contacted by a New York publisher to illustrate The Little Fisherman, the latest title by Margaret Wise Brown. This charming title helped launch a four-decade run that saw her write and illustrate more than thirty children's books of her own. Today, her artwork is known worldwide, with pieces in the collections of numerous renowned museums. Meanwhile, she still lives and paints in the 1860s farmhouse that she shared with Adolph for nearly seventy years.