Rey doing the art and Margret the writing. “People always think these little stories are effortless, but it took us an enormous amount of time to do each book, and after each book, we said, ‘No more, too much trouble.’ But it is like having children, I suppose after four or five years, you have more or less forgotten the pain, and then we would do another. Instead of flooding the market with Curious George illustrated books, the Reys paced themselves. In 1963, they left their Greenwich Village apartment for a house near Harvard Square in Cambridge. Within a week of their arrival in New York, the couple found an American home for Curious George with Houghton Mifflin. We took the few books we had made together with us, which proved to be a very sensible thing, because it showed people what we could do.” “I was very surprised he was able to do that I didn’t know he was so efficient. “With the Nazis on our heels, we left Paris on two bicycles that my husband put together from spare parts,” Rey said. The Reys were married in 1935, and lived in France and Brazil before settling in the United States in 1940. After World War I, he designed circus posters to earn extra money while studying philosophy and linguistics in Munich and Hamburg, and learned how to lithograph his drawings directly onto stone, a skill that proved useful years later when he was living in Paris and executing color separations for his own book illustrations. (Hans Augusto) Rey was born in Hamburg, Germany, in 1898, and started drawing at the age of 2. “My husband always managed to get one of our cocker spaniels somewhere in each of our books.” “Oh, she’s such a baby,” Rey said in heavily accented German, and pointed with amusement to a training diaper secured firmly around the young dog’s hind quarters. The first thing we did when we visited a new city was go to the zoo.”Īs she talked about some of the pets she and her husband owned over the years, including turtles in Paris, monkeys in Brazil, alligators, chameleons and newts at a summer home in New Hampshire, Jeannie, the latest in a long line of cocker spaniels to grace the Rey household, arrived, almost on cue, in the living room. “My husband and I had no children of our own, but we always loved animals.

To their pleasant surprise, the Reys subsequently found themselves embarked on a new career as collaborators on a series of enormously popular books featuring a variety of charming characters.

Cecily g and the 9 monkeys