PLUNKETY PLUNK

This is about a blacksmith who loves wrought iron more than anything else in the world. His song is ""Tum tum, plunkety plunk, smash, crash, hand-wrought iron is the only iron for me"". Maybe so, but it is a clinker for story appeal and illustrations. The story is too crowded with fantastic nonsense to read, follow or tell with ease. There is a garden full of exotic animals -- an armadillo, lion and a dinosaur who is actually a dragon (later employed as the smith's source of fast fire). The smith rejects the machine age and the dinosaur dragon's hot breath is his solution to an encroaching neighbor's furnace. The block print pictures are crowded on the page with a Rube Goldberg attention to wacky detail. They fail to convince the looker-on of the beauties of hand wrought-iron. They occasionally intrude on a line of print, which must then be sought out. Doubtless the author/illustrator is a master of this technique, but a better organized story and a more disciplined use of illustrations would prove a better show case for his talents.