Welcome to the pro-market world of children's book author and illustrator Richard Scarry.
Farmer Alfalfa heads to town with an old truck full of corn. The truck is on the verge of collapse. But after selling his corn to Grocer Cat, Farmer Alfalfa uses the money to buy a new truck.
On another day, Alfalfa sells all kinds of produce and uses the money to make purchases from local merchants, including Stitches the tailor and Blacksmith Fox. Stitches, in turn, uses the money from Alfalfa to buy "an egg beater so that his family can make fudge," while Fox buys more iron to use in his blacksmith business.
Welcome to the very busy—and pro-market—world of children's book author and illustrator Richard Scarry. If you were a child in the latter half of the last century, there's a good chance you read some of Scarry's books. The man was prolific, completing more than 150 works from the 1950s to the 1980s (with many more Scarry books published after his death in 1994).
The Alfalfa stories come from Scarry's What Do People Do All Day?, originally published in 1968. Set in Busytown, the book introduces readers to an array of professions—from carpenters and electricians to mail carriers, sailors, stay-at-home mothers, air traffic controllers, and many more.
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I grew up with this Richard Scarry print blanket. It was of busy town or whatever he called his little animal town. Everybody doing things. I spent a long time staring at the pictures on that blanket.
I don't think I ever read a proper story of his: all the things I read were these listicles before there were listicals (he'd write books about the alphabet or books cataloging all the quotidian stuff of a normal middle class life). I don't think I ever actually liked any of his books, but they were always there. I think late by '70s early '80s he had pretty much cornered the kid market.
I had never heard of him. Seems like a precursor to the Tuttle Twins.
The simple economy