Wally the Wordworm — Clifton Fadiman

Help instill a love of words and language and an early appreciation for their vast possibilities with this read aloud for children. A worm that lives on words, Wally finds himself starved for inspiration, until one day, he crawls into a magical book: the dictionary. From that moment, he embarks upon a logomaniacal odyssey of epic proportions, twisting himself into the likes of ""syzygy"" and ""sesquipedalian,"" ""pyx"" and ""zymurgy.""
From its first publication in 1964, children and adults alike have been delighted by Wally''s wriggling through rhymes and words of increasing ambition and complexity, his acrobatics whimsically illustrated by New Yorker cartoonist Arnold Roth. This edition includes an afterword by Clifton Fadiman''s daughter, the author Anne Fadiman.