He tries to share his poems with the other bats and his excitement about the daytime but they do not understand. Because he is awake he begins to notice the world around him-the other animals, the farm-and he begins to make up lines of verse to describe what he is seeing. First off, all of the bats, except for our hero, move to the barn and when the lone bat invites them back, without success, he has trouble sleeping by himself, and he begins to wake up in the daytime hours when all the bats are usually asleep. Then the story shifts and we begin to hear the tale of one of these little brown bats. The story begins like a personal essay with the narrative voice commenting in first person on several brown bats that hang from the roof of his porch. And even more amazing, as of this writing, the book is still in print. This book, beautifully illustrated, designed and produced, is, in itself, a convincing argument for the need to preserve the tradition of a bound, tangible, physical book. Sendak illustrated a comparatively quiet little book by the poet Randall Jarrell entitled The Bat-Poet. About the same time that he was drawing Max and the Wild Things, Mr. 2013 marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of Maurice Sendak's masterfully illustrated Where the Wild Things Are.
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