This poem concludes with one of the most solid elements of the Frog and Toad stories, the discovery of a simple comfort - in this case, a soft fur coat to soothe the toad’s sense of malaise. “ might be the clue to the later Toad’s never feeling quite right in his skin: That would suggest that in Lobel’s children’s book universe, Toad might have come out with the cheery temperament, and Frog the gloomy one. True to biology, the poem “Made for Toads” observes that dry-dwelling toads prefer sunny days, while frogs prefer rainy days. That is what Adrianne Lobel calls “a profound adult problem - people can be good at one thing but want to do another” as well an example of her father’s refusal to “condescend to children.” The frog plays his violin “with skill and grace” but wears “a frown upon his face”: Readers can see the beginnings of Toad’s melancholy in the poem “Bright Green Frog” (clearly, Lobel had not yet established the essential difference between sunny Frog and anxious Toad). Part of the gentle humor in the “Frog and Toad” stories is that while the friends are highly civilized, they are also children, so in this party scene: In the title poem of “The Frogs and Toads All Sang,” there is a party at which Lobel always dressed his animals properly Frog and Toad are never seen without their jackets unless they are hibernating, in which case it’s gentlemanly pajamas. Yet many of the elements in the later books are already there.

The most striking absence is that Lobel had not yet developed the friendship between Frog and Toad these poem-stories are about frogs and toads as a group. The ten poems in the new book don’t yet have the particular characters of Frog and Toad that readers came to know later, but the sensibility is emerging. The text was written some 10 years before the Frog and Toad books the illustrations are his own drawings colored by his daughter, Adrianne Lobel. Readers have a chance to see another facet of Frog and Toad in “The Frogs and Toads All Sang” (HarperCollins: $16.99, ages 4-7), a newly discovered work by Lobel, who died in 1987. Arnold Lobel’s four books about these great pals, published from 1970 to ‘79, are a mainstay of HarperCollins’ “I Can Read” series and have set several generations of children on the path to reading.

Frog, reliable, sunny and optimistic, and Toad, curmudgeonly and in constant need of shoring up, have one of the great friendships in children’s literature.

Book about toad and frog