Ounce Dice Trice

A friend recently showed me the book Ounce Dice Trice and told me about its author, Alistair Reid.

I had never heard of him, but now I know he was a Scottish poet and translator of the works of Borges and Neruda. He also taught and wrote for the New Yorker. 

Ounce Dice Trice was published in 1958 and is intended for children, but it's one of those books that's clearly meant to be enjoyed by the adult who's reading to the child just as much. 

When my friend got it out to show it to me — it's a Saint Paul Library copy, and it lacks the dust jacket — I saw the lettering on the spine and suspected immediately that it would have illustrations by Ben Shahn inside... and I was correct!

The flap text reads,

This is a book of words. Some are funny, some are serious and beautiful, some are rude and some are odd. Alastair Reid has collected sounds and made words grow from them. He has collected words into lists and combined them into ideas. From single words he has woven garlands of ideas and definitions — all fresh and clever and often funny.

It also has more than 100 Shahn translations of those words into images. A couple of my favorite illustrations within:

 

 


All of the words in the book are just as glorious, of course, but the last part of the text is made up of what Reid calls a garland, where one word leads to the next. 

Here's how it starts:

And it continues for pages and pages.

Later in the garland, I was particularly taken with the tirrivee illustration. I think I generally am drawn to the expressiveness of Shahn's faces:

And then there's Reid's definition of a worg, which is not at all what Dungeons and Dragons made of the word. It's much more mundane and gardening-friendly:

 

The good news, beyond the fact that this lovely book is in my local library system, is that it looks as though there are lots of copies, even first editions, of it available on ABEbooks.com for reasonable prices. I may avail myself of one.