Just So Stories

The pitch

Why does the camel have a hump, how did the leopard get spotty, and what happened to the elephant’s nose on the banks of the great grey-green greasy Limpopo River? Twelve tall tales that answer questions no one can answer, told by a father who is absolutely certain of every word, to a child he keeps calling Best Beloved. The sentences are built out loud — long, rolling, stuffed with invented words — and they are almost impossible to read silently.

What to know

This is the most read-aloud-shaped book on our shelf: each tale runs ten to twenty minutes, they are in no particular order, and a four-year-old can follow one while the grade 2–5 band is for reading them alone. The reading measure looks alarming next to that — Accelerated Reader puts the unabridged text at a 6.4 book level — and the NC on its Lexile is the official way of saying the same thing: hard sentences, small audience, on purpose.

Our edition is the 1912 Doubleday, Page printing, and it carries three things at once. Kipling’s own drawings, because he illustrated this book himself. Under each one, his own long caption, which is where a good deal of the comedy lives and which almost no free ebook of this book has, because they have no pictures to hang it on — that is roughly five thousand words of Kipling that go missing elsewhere. And on top of those, Joseph Gleeson’s twelve colour plates, one facing each story. The thirty-three alphabet figures in “How the Alphabet Was Made” are here too; without them that story cannot be read at all. What is not here is “The Tabu Tale,” a thirteenth story Kipling added for one American printing in 1903 and which most editions, including this one, have never carried.

Life when written

Kipling invented the first three of these at bedtime in Vermont, in the house he built outside Brattleboro in the 1890s, for his eldest daughter Josephine. She required them told exactly the same way every time — just so — and would object to any word that moved, which is where the book’s name comes from. The family left Vermont in 1896 for Sussex, and in the winter of 1899, on a crossing to New York, Kipling and both daughters caught influenza; his turned to pneumonia and nearly killed him, and Josephine’s did kill her. She was six. He finished the book without her and published it in 1902, and left in every “O Best Beloved” on every page.