For thirty years, the whole last half of his life, Leonardo da Vinci was obsessed with unlocking the secrets of nature. His notebooks are the mind-boggling evidence of a fifteenth-century scientist standing at the edge of the modern world, basing his idea
The knock-knock joke: a kid classic. So many funny, punny punchlines. It was just screaming for its own book. To do this classic joke justice, we decided to gather fourteen of the best-known and most talented children?s book artists to illustrate their fa
Max’s brothers have grand collections that everyone makes a big fuss over. Benjamin collects stamps and Karl collects coins, and neither one will share with their little brother. So Max decides to start a collection of his own. He’s going to collect w
"Nothing ever happens here," the shepherd thinks. But the bored boy knows what would be exciting: He cries that a wolf is after his sheep, and the town's people come running. How often can that trick work, though? B.G. Hennessy's retelling of this timele
What was Isaac Newton like? Secretive, vindictive, withdrawn, obsessive, and, oh, yes, brilliant. His imagination was so large that, just "by thinking on it," he invented calculus and figured out the scientific explanation of gravity.Yet Newton was so sma
Albert Einstein. His name has become a synonym for genius. His wild case of bedhead and playful sense of humor made him a media superstar?the first, maybe only, scientist-celebrity. He wasn?t much for lab work; in fact he had a tendency to blow up experim
4 + 3 = 8?Whoops! That's not right.Looks like a job for the eraserheads!The three eraserheads—an owl, a crocodile, and a pig—live atop three pencils in the land of paper, rulers, letters, and numbers. Their job is to help a little boy correct his mist
Barnum Brown's (1873-1963) parents named him after the circus icon P.T. Barnum, hoping that he would do something extraordinary--and he did! As a paleonotologist for the American Museum of Natural History, he discovered the first documented skeleton of
Across the world there are many an artiste - But none so outrageous as Joe, the Fartiste. The Fartiste doesn't sing, he doesn't dance, and he doesn't act. But that doesn't stop him from taking the stage at Paris's famed Moulin Rouge, where he performs