Shel Silverstein was definitely warped enough to be my favorite children's author.. Several hardcover editions still share space on my own old fart bookshelf although I never knew about him until college. Definitely my loss there.

His spare, black and white drawings are messy, often perverse. The inked lines seem carelessly tossed onto the page, belying HarperCollins' executive editor Antonia Markiet's memory of Silverstein as an "untiring perfectionist."

"Every word mattered, every line in a drawing mattered, no matter how small," Markiet explained in an interview she insisted be conducted by way of e-mail.

"Children in particular are very aware of when they are being condescended to. Shel never did that. He did not try to guess what a kid might like because he knew what HE liked and he trusted that connection," Markiet said in her e-mail. "He didn't think anything was beyond his audience, or too hard for them, or too complex for them."