Pick a Peck of Puzzles

by Arnold Roth

From a Virginia Estate and a Protected Bookcase! Copyright 1970, Scholastic Book Services, #TJ 1641, Abridged Edition, 63 pages, Fully Illustrated, Very Clean and Tight. Mech5

Library Binding

Published June 1, 1966

Reviews

[Liquidlasagna · Rating 5 out of 5]

I discovered this book in grade Three I think, possibly grade two....

And it was the first unsual mathematics patterns book i saw....

Think of it as Mad Magazine and a Math Puzzle books that can entertain young people

I think it got me slightly interested in number theory and primes

Roth i think could be best explained as someone who is a mixture of the moods of Al Jaffee with Maurice Sendak, but his style is not like either one...

i discovered him all over 1970s TV Guide cartoons a lot

Punch and Judy and funny sports comedy cartoons were his speciality, and it was one of the few books on sports i liked, merely for his drawing style and his humor.

......

Novelist John Updike wrote, "All cartoonists are geniuses, but Arnold Roth is especially so."

Roth has done covers for The New Yorker and his artwork has appeared in TV Guide, Sports Illustrated and Esquire. His cartoons and illustrations were contributions to the satirical magazines edited by his friend Harvey Kurtzman: Trump (1957), Humbug (1957–58) and Help! (1960–65). Roth's cartoons began appearing in Playboy in the late 1950s. Playboy published ten multi-page installments of his An Illustrated History of Sex series in the late 1970s. Roth was a regular contributor of cartoon features to Punch from the late 1960s until the end of the 1980s. Roth had multi-page features in almost every one of the first 25 issues of National Lampoon (1970–72)

His claim to fame

Pick A Peck Of Puzzles 1966
Arnold Roth's Crazy Book of Science 1971
A Comick Book of Sports 1974
A Comick Book Of Pets 1976

and five Dave Brubeck Jazz album covers (1950 to 1958)
and five covers for John Updike's books

He's alive and well at 91 years of age

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

While I realize that some of the reason for this five star rating is nostalgia (I checked this book out of my elementary school library as often as I was allowed) Pick a Peck of Puzzles is a very interesting book. I was lucky enough to come across a copy in my High School library and give a second look to a book that I had so enjoyed. The illustrations are very bizarre almost to the point of being grotesque featuring many Punch and Judy style characters. The puzzles, while all being fairly simple, offer a fun variety of visual puzzles, math puzzles, word games, riddles, and short "who-dun-its?" Thankfully, the librarians at my High School Library were kind enough to give me the odd children's puzzle book that had somehow found its way into their stacks. If you were to come across this odd and charming little book at a thrift shop or a library book sale, it is certainly worth a minute of your time and likely also worth the fifty cents needed to take it home.