13 Weird And Wonderful Facts About Your Favorite Books As A Kid

"Where The Wild Horses Are"?

1. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was inspired to write The Little Prince while stuck in the desert post-plane crash.

Reynal & Hitchcock

In the mid-1930s, Saint-Exupéry, who had intended to fly from Paris to Saigon, crashed in the Sahara. His experiences while waiting to be rescued, including hallucinations, became fodder for the beloved book.

2. Green Eggs and Ham was the result of a bet.

Random House

Publisher Bennett Cerf bet Theodor Seuss Geisel (aka Dr. Seuss) that Geisel couldn't write a book using only 50 words. Geisel did, and won $50, which is a pretty solid per-word rate.

3. The Giving Tree almost wasn't published, as editors didn't believe it would resonate with readers of any age.

Harper

"The trouble with this ‘Giving Tree’ of yours," Simon & Schuster editor William Cole told Silverstein, "is that ... it’s not a kid’s book — too sad, and it isn’t for adults — too simple.” Needless to say, Cole was wrong.

4. Where the Wild Things Are was almost about horses.

Harper

"[My editor Ursula Nordstrom] gave me a contract based on 'Where the Wild Horses Are,'" author Maurice Sendak said in a 2004 interview. "And then, it turned out after some very few months to her chagrin and anger, I couldn't draw horses."

As for the "wild things"? Sendak said he based the creatures on his hairy, lovable relatives.

5. Similarly, Goodnight Moon's characters were almost humans. Almost.

Harper

Turns out, illustrator Clement Hurd was just better at drawing rabbits.

6. H.A. Rey and his wife Margret fled Paris on bicycles with the first manuscript of Curious George in 1940, shortly before the city was taken by Nazis.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

The manuscript was nearly seized by an official who suspected the Reys were spies, but upon seeing its content, released it back to the couple.

7. The idea for Charlotte's Web came from E.B. White's fascination with the (many!) spiders in his own home.

Harper

White brought a spider egg sac from his farm in Maine to his apartment in New York. He then allowed the hatched baby spiders free reign of his pad, until his cleaner complained.

8. Eric Carle got the idea for The Very Hungry Caterpillar from...playing with a hole punch.

Putnam‎/‎Philomel‎

"One day I was punching holes with a hole puncher into a stack of paper, and I thought of a bookworm," Carle has said of the book's unexpected origins. As such, he originally named the story A Week With Willi the Worm, before his editor suggested a caterpillar instead.

9. The steps taken by Alice in Alice: Through the Looking Glass make up a playable game of chess (though not necessarily an efficient one).

Macmillan

“At two points the White Queen passes up a chance to checkmate and on another occasion she flees from the Red Knight when she could have captured him," The Annotated Alice author Martin Gardner has said of the moves/plot. "Both oversights, however, are in keeping with her absent-mindedness.”

10. Everything you thought you knew about Madeline's characters is apparently untrue.

Viking

John Bemelmans Marciano, grandson of Madeline creator Ludwig Bemelmans and the author and illustrator of recent titles in the series, says most people have the story all wrong.

"It's not an orphanage; [Miss Clavel is] not a nun; and Madeline is not French," Marciano told NPR in 2013. "I used to get almost indignant over it, but these things take on a life of their own and sometimes misperceptions are the stuff of legends." Sacrebleu — I mean, whoops!

11. In the Australian version of Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, Alexander wants to move to Timbuktu.

Dramatic Publishing Company

Alexander's seeming belief that bad days don't happen in Australia is a running gag in the original book. But what about the printing for Australians, who know better than that? Turns out, Timbuktu was the answer.

12. Bridge to Terabithia author Katherine Paterson didn't realize at first that she'd kind of snatched the kingdom's name from The Chronicles of Narnia.

Harper Collins

"I thought I’d made up 'Terabithia,'" Paterson says on her website. "I realized when the book was nearly done, that there is an island in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C. S. Lewis called 'Terebinthia.' I’m sure I borrowed that unconsciously ... [and] Lewis got Terebinthia from the Biblical terebinth tree, so it wasn’t original with him either."

13. In 1929, J.M. Barrie gifted Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children his Peter Pan rights, which have benefited the organization ever since.

Fox Photos / Getty Images

The London hospital receives royalties from Peter Pan book and product sales, as well as from performances of the play.