You might remember, from your childhood, an impish monkey named Curious George. He and his companion, The Man with the Yellow Hat, were born today. Well, sort of. Actually Hans Augusto Reyersbach, who was H.A. Rey, one of the authors, was born September 16, 1898 in Hamburg.
Reyersbach and his wife Margret (who was Margret Rey, the other author) grew up in the same town and originally met at Margret’s sister’s birthday party. Later, as adults, they met again in Brazil, of all places, in the 1930s. Reyersbach was there on business, selling (I’m not making this up) bathtubs, and Margret was there to escape Nazism. They got married in 1935, and moved to Paris, where they lived until 1940. By then Europe was in the middle of World War II, and the Nazis were threatening Paris. The Reyersbachs, who were Jewish, escaped Paris on their bicycles. One of the few things they were able to carry with them was the manuscript for Curious George.
They had already published at least one book, Cecily G. and the Nine Monkeys. The G. stood for Giraffe, which is what Cecily was. One of the nine monkeys was George, and their next book was going to be about him.
Their escape from France was epic. They made it to Bayonne by bicycle, and received visas from the Portuguese embassy there. They crossed the border to Spain, possibly on foot, and in Spain were able to get train tickets to Lisbon. From there they traveled by ship to Brazil, and continued to New York. Once there, they managed to get Curiourgs George published by Houghton Mifflin by changing their plans for the illustrations. They were originally watercolors, but in prewar New York, the color separations presented a problem, so they switched to cartoon-like images that became one of the trademarks of the Curious George books. They did preserve the color yellow, of course, because there was that guy with that hat.
The Reys collaborated on both the stories and the illustrations of their books, and shared credit on the covers. Curious George was an immediate success, and is still in print today, over 80 years later. They published seven Curious George books in all.
The Reys published quite a few other books besides the Curious George series, and illustrated even more. In addition to children’s books, Rey was interested in astronomy and in 1952 published The Stars: A New Way to See Them. It contained his diagrams of constellations that he (and evidently most other people) found more intuitive than the fanciful illustrations traditionally used. A new edition was published in 2008.
In 1963 the Reys moved to Boston, near Harvard Square, where there is now a shop called The World’s Only Curious George Store. The store was opened in the 1990s by friends who wanted to commemorate the Reys, and was originally called Curious George and Friends. It’s partly a bookstore, of course, but they don’t limit their inventory to books. I believe if you visit there’s a good chance you could buy a yellow hat. Unless some small prankster has hidden them.
