THE WEDDING PROCESSION OF THE RAG DOLL AND THE BROOM HANDLE AND WHO WAS IN IT

**Imagination enlarged: like Carroll and Tenniel, like Baum and Denslow--Sandberg and Pincus. One of the most visually evocative of the Rootabaga Stories is fixed forever in a series of crafty, compelling images. (Crafty: subtle, sly; also, skillful, sure). See the Rag Doll, cross-legged on a swing, smiling at the Broom Handle as he ""fixes her eyes""; see the wedding procession forming a flat frieze across page after page, the Tin Pan Bangers pacing and pounding and riding backward on a bespectacled, booted turtle. It's old-fashioned and new-fangled: the artist has absorbed the flat planes and firm outlines of old engravings, the grotesqueries of German cartoons, the snap and crackle of Pop. We're wasting words--buy it, try it, multiply it.