Sculpture Fun (Part Three or So)

Originally I had a brilliant idea for today’s post. When I walked by Saks Fifth Avenue recently I saw that they had created this bizarre Wizard of Oz window display. The idea was that I’d take a bunch of pictures, post them lickety split and voila! Instant 10-minute posting. Slap your hands together, you are done. Well I moseyed on by Saks yesterday and lo and behold they’d changed their windows. Doggone people. Don’t they know there are lazy librarian bloggers out there just itching for the chance to fill space? Fortunately I had a back-up plan. Do you remember my previous Sculpture Fun postings?  There was the first one (which, since the appearance of the blogroll, requires you to scroll down to the bottom of the screen to see the images) featuring Lentil, ducklings, Ramona, Eeyore, Alice, Peter Pan, and Ribsy.  A second post on the topic rustled up the likes of Pollyanna, Paddington, Robin Hood, Peter, Pinocchio, and Dinosaur Bob. And long ago I had a fun link to Strange Statues Around the World.

How right she is too:

Oz and Ends reported back in April that someone actually stole the plaques from a lot of these characters.  It doesn’t get much lower than that.

Wendie O mentioned some statues she was familiar with.  If you know the White Marsh branch of the Baltimore County Public Library system then you may be aware of their fairly fabulous Red Queen.

You can read the artist’s view of the Red Queen here.  I was particularly fascinated by the sentence, "Metaphorically, Alice and The Red Queen epitomizes the relationship between student and teacher."  If the student/teacher relationship requires the teacher to bodily pull the student along behind through the air then I’m all for that message.

Fans of Philip Pullman know that the man is head over heels in love with Norman Lindsey’s book The Magic Pudding.  The New York Review of Books reprinted the title with his introduction not too long ago, just in case you’re hankering for a copy.  In lieu of that, enjoy this sculpture based on the book.  I got it from Carol Reid’s posting on Typo of the Day for Librarians.

Carol was also the one to show me the posting on the Tom and Huck statue found in Hannibal, Missouri.

AND Carol even managed to scrounge up (and I have no idea where she even found this) a Miffy statue from Utrecht, the Netherlands.

And they said it couldn’t be done.

Wilson Swain directed me to this next pic and the accompanying links as well.  You could technically point out that Bullwinkle doesn’t constitute children’s literature.  To that I point out to you the Fractured Fairy Tale portion of the show, and say that furthermore half of the fractured fairy tales we find on our shelves today owe much of their existence to that program.  I was at first a little unclear on where you could find this statue.  It is listed as being on Sunset, Boulevard.  Further information from Seven Deadly Arts, however, had this to say: "In 1961, cartoonist Jay Ward unveiled a statue of Rocky and Bullwinkle in front of his Sunset Blvd. studio, directly across the street from the Chateau Marmont. (The studio is gone, as is Ward’s neighboring gift shop, The Dudley Do-Right Emporium, which operated from 1971 to 2005, but the statue remains a Hollywood fixture to this day.)"  In any case, it was restored recently to mixed reviews.  Here is the before and after with thanks to Cartoon Brew.

Thanks Wilson!

"It’s Greyfriars Bobby, a real dog who visited his master’s grave every night decades after the man died.  It was a children’s book by Eleanor Atkinson and later a Disney movie.  I read the book and bawled and saw the movie and bawled and when I was 40, got to go to Edinburgh for the first time.  My husband and I crawled out of Waverly train station and I galloped up this mile-long Everest-steep hill to see the statue before we even checked into our hotel.  My  husband is used to such antics and didn’t even mind my bawling in the street over the statue."

Aw….

I also heard that there was a Dr. Seuss statue hidden away somewhere.  Possibly in Springfield, Mass.  So I plugged in "Dr. Seuss" and "statue" into the old Google search box and before I knew it I was coming up with a veritable plethora of items!

First and foremost, there is indeed a Dr. Seuss National Memorial at The Quadrangle in Springfield, Massachusetts.

I love this statue they made of the man himself.  Doesn’t he look relaxed?  If they were to make a statue out of you, wouldn’t you like to look as easy going an happy as Mr. T.G. does here?

And then here are the others:

(I think the Lorax is puckering up for a smooch)

Field trip, anyone?

Whew!  So much for an easy post.  But if you’ve any I’ve missed, let me know.  I’m always willing to gather more together.

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