Caps for Sale

What's inside (9 sections)

1. The man with the tower on his head
2. A painter who made a joke out of paper
3. Why it works out loud
4. The life it made for itself
5. What has not aged well
6. How to read it without ruining it
7. The last page
8. Key takeaways
9. FAQ

I have read this book to a circle of four-year-olds who had already heard it eleven times, and the twelfth reading still produced a small riot. The moment the peddler wakes and pats his head, a boy in the back began to giggle before the page turned. That is the engine of the book: not surprise, but the delicious certainty of a joke about to land.

The book is small. Forty-eight pages, very few words, one man, one tree, a troop of monkeys. It was published in 1940 by W. R. Scott, written and illustrated by Esphyr Slobodkina, a Russian-born American abstract painter. She adapted a folktale and made it her own. It has sold millions of copies and stayed in print for more than eighty years. None of that is why the boy giggled. He giggled because the peddler was about to lose his temper and the monkeys were about to win.

The man with the tower on his head

The plot is a single anecdote, told with the patience of a street performer. A peddler walks up and down the streets of a small town, balancing his entire stock on his head. His own checked cap sits on top. Under it, in order, are grey caps, brown caps, blue caps, and red caps, stacked into a tall column. He calls out, "Caps! Caps for sale! Fifty cents a cap!" Nobody buys. The street is empty enough that his voice has room to bounce.

So he walks out into the country. He goes slowly, very slowly, so as not to upset the caps. He finds a tree, sits down, leans back little by little, and checks with his hand that the stack is still in place. Then he falls asleep. While he sleeps, the monkeys come down. They take the grey caps, the brown caps, the blue caps, the red caps, and carry them up into the branches. They leave the checked cap on his head. That detail matters, because it gives him something to throw.

He wakes, pats his head, and finds the stack gone. He looks right, left, behind, and finally up. The tree is full of monkeys, each wearing one of his caps. He shakes his finger at them. They shake their fingers back and say, "Tsz, tsz, tsz." He shakes both hands. They shake both hands and say, "Tsz, tsz, tsz." He stamps one foot. They stamp one foot. He stamps both feet. They stamp both feet. The escalation is the whole comedy. He is a grown man in a moustache and a checked cap, losing an argument with a tree full of monkeys who have no argument at all, only a mirror.

Then he does the thing that ends it. He takes off his own checked cap, waves it in the air, throws it on the ground in disgust, and starts to walk away. The monkeys take off their caps, wave them, throw them down, and start to walk away. The peddler stops. He looks at the ground. He looks up at the tree. He picks up every cap, stacks them back on his head in the same order, and walks slowly back to town, calling his wares again. No moral, no lesson.

The text is almost bare. Slobodkina uses simple sentences, repeated phrases, and a handful of sound words. "Tsz, tsz, tsz" is the only thing the monkeys say, and it is enough. The page turns do the rest. The peddler's hand goes to his head. The page turns. The monkeys appear. The page turns. The finger shakes. The page turns. A child who cannot read yet can feel the setup and payoff.

A painter who made a joke out of paper

Slobodkina was born in Chelyabinsk in 1908, in the Russian Empire. Her family moved to Harbin, in Manchuria, after the revolution, and she studied art and architecture there. She came to the United States in 1928 and enrolled at the National Academy of Design. In 1936 she became a founding member of the American Abstract Artists, a group that fought for abstraction's place in American art. She painted flat, interlocking shapes and made collages and constructions.

That matters for the book. The illustrations are not soft watercolor dreams. They are cut-paper shapes, flat and declarative, with strong silhouettes and a narrow palette. The peddler is a stack of rectangles and a moustache. The monkeys are brown curves with round ears and long tails. The tree is a flat trunk and a cloud of leaves. The town is a row of pale walls and dark windows. The pictures look like a poster pasted together on a kitchen table. Slobodkina had already illustrated Margaret Wise Brown's "The Little Fireman" in 1938, a book made with cut-paper collage, and she brought that technique to her own story.

The design is plain in a way that now looks confident. There is a lot of white space, the type is large and black, and the shapes are big enough to read from the back of a room. The art sets the stage and then gets out of the way.

The story itself has a long tail. The earliest known version is a newspaper item from Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1789, about a sailor with a supply of red woolen caps who falls asleep under a tree and wakes to find monkeys wearing them. The sailor throws his own cap down in a rage, and the monkeys copy him. Slobodkina heard a version from a cousin, looked for a printed source in the New York Public Library and elsewhere for two years, found nothing she could use, and wrote her own. The result feels old and new at once: the joke is a folk joke, and the telling is clean.

W. R. Scott was a small publisher with an eye for unusual picture books. The 1940 edition was 48 pages, and the book has stayed close to that shape ever since. Later editions adjusted the colors and refreshed the printing, but the layout, the text, and the sequence of gestures remain recognizably the same. That consistency is part of why grandparents can read it to grandchildren without a script.

Why it works out loud

The book is built for a room full of people. The peddler's call is a hook. "Caps! Caps for sale! Fifty cents a cap!" A child can shout it with you by the second reading. The monkeys' answer is an invitation. "Tsz, tsz, tsz" is not a word, so there is no wrong way to say it. It can be a whisper, a hiss, a screech. The gestures are broad enough to copy from across a rug. Shake a finger. Shake both hands. Stamp a foot. Stamp both feet. Throw a cap on the ground.

The physical business solves a practical problem. Small children do not sit still for language alone. They sit still for language that gives their bodies a job. The book gives them four jobs, then a fifth, the throw, which is the release. The comedy is in the synchronization. The adult shakes a finger, the children shake their fingers, and for a second the room is a tree full of monkeys.

The repetition also teaches without announcing itself. The caps are stacked in a fixed order: checked, grey, brown, blue, red. A child can count them. A child can name the colors. A child can see that the stack gets shorter and then longer again. The sequence is a map: town, country, tree, sleep, theft, attempts, throw, recovery, town. A child who can retell it has learned something about narrative without being told what a narrative is.

There is also the pleasure of prediction. The first time, the monkeys' mimicry is a surprise. The second time, it is a joke the child is in on. The third time, the child is running ahead of the adult, saying the lines, shaking the finger before the page turns. That shift from surprise to anticipation is one of the pleasures of reading to a young child.

The tantrum is part of the appeal. The peddler gets angry. He shakes his finger, stamps, shouts, and throws his cap. Children know that feeling. Watching a grown man lose his temper over a stack of hats, and then recover because the world mirrors him rather than punishes him, is funny in a way that is also a little freeing. The book lets the silliness do the work.

The ending is a small feat of timing. The peddler throws his cap. The monkeys throw theirs. There is a beat where nothing happens. Then he looks down, and the ground is covered with caps. He does not say thank you. He does not learn a lesson about monkeys. He just picks them up and goes back to work. That flatness is the joke. A lesser book would have him shake his finger one last time or make a friend. This one lets him be a peddler again.

The life it made for itself

"Caps for Sale" was not an overnight sensation. It sold steadily, found its way into libraries and story hours, and then settled into the long life that only a few picture books get. It won the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award in 1958, a quiet prize that signaled librarians had noticed. It has been translated into more than a dozen languages.

The adaptations are modest. Weston Woods Studios included it in a 1986 VHS collection, "Five Stories for the Very Young," animated from the book's illustrations. A 2007 DVD collection, "Picture Book Classics," narrated by Rex Robbins, brought it to another generation. Captain Kangaroo read it on television. Those versions add nothing. They let the pictures move a little and a friendly voice carry the text, which is right for a book that is already a performance.

The sequels are a mixed inheritance. In 1967 Slobodkina published "Pezzo the Peddler and the Circus Elephant," which gave the peddler a name, Pezzo, and sent him into a new adventure. It was reissued in 2002 as "Circus Caps for Sale." After her death in 2002, her longtime assistant Ann Marie Mulhearn Sayer completed "More Caps for Sale" (2015) and "Caps for Sale and the Mindful Monkeys" (2017), using scanned and edited images from Slobodkina's original artwork. The later books are affectionate, but they do not have the ruthless economy of the first one. The first book is a joke. The sequels are stories about a character.

The original has also become a piece of art history. Slobodkina's paintings and constructions are in the Metropolitan Museum, the Smithsonian, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Whitney. The Slobodkina Foundation, which she established in 2000, preserves her work and runs lesson plans for teachers. The book is often used in classrooms to teach colors, counting, sequencing, and dramatic play. That is a lot of weight for a 48-page joke, but the book carries it lightly.

What has not aged well

The honest case against the book is that it is thin: one incident, told once, with a repeated gesture and a repeated sound. Some adults will read it for the twentieth time and feel the walls of the sentence closing in. The monkeys have no personalities. The peddler has no backstory. The town has no people. The book is a stage with three props: a stack of caps, a tree, and a temper.

The peddler's anger is also worth a second look. He shakes his finger, stamps his feet, and shouts at the monkeys. It is funny, but it is also a grown man throwing a tantrum at animals. Some caregivers do not want to model finger-wagging and foot-stamping as a way to solve a problem. The resolution comes from a lucky imitation, not communication or empathy. The monkeys do not learn anything. The peddler does not learn anything. The caps come back because he throws his own cap down, and they copy him. That is a mechanical ending, not a moral one.

The trade is obsolete. A wandering peddler with his stock on his head is a figure from a vanished economy. "Fifty cents a cap" dates the book as surely as a horse and buggy. A modern child may need to be told what a peddler is and why anyone would buy a cap from a man in the street. The setting is vaguely European, but it is not a real place. That vagueness is part of the folktale atmosphere, and it is also a gap where history should be.

The monkeys are a problem if you look closely. They are a collective, a troop of identical imitators. They exist to mirror the peddler and then to give the caps back. The 1789 newspaper version treats them as a curiosity, a species with an imitative faculty that exceeds everything short of human. The book softens that into "monkey business," but the colonial flavor is still there: the clever man, the mimicking animals, the joke at the expense of the creatures who do not understand property. It is an old book, and its animals are devices.

The art has aged in a different way. The flat colors and cut-paper shapes were bold in 1940. To a child raised on glossy digital picture books, they can look plain, even crude. The palette is limited, the faces are simple, and the backgrounds are sparse. That is the point, but it is not to every taste. Some children will lean in. Some will ask why the pictures look like stickers.

The book is also short on women. There is a peddler, a troop of monkeys, and a town of shutters. No mother, no daughter, no shopkeeper. That is not a sin in a 48-page joke, but it is a limitation. A classroom can talk about who is missing from the story, and why. That conversation is more interesting than pretending the book is universal.

It works best with children about three to seven. Older readers may find the repetition thin. The book is not trying to grow with them. It is trying to do one thing well for a child who is still small enough to want the same joke again.

How to read it without ruining it

Slow down. The page turns are the punchlines. If you read the text and turn the page too quickly, you flatten the joke. Let the peddler check his caps. Let the monkeys appear. Let the finger shake. Let the silence after the throw sit for a second.

Then let the children join in. The book is built on call and response. The peddler calls, the children answer. The monkeys shake, the children shake. If you have a checked cap, wear it. If you have a stack of paper caps, let a child balance them. If you have a room full of kids, divide them into peddlers and monkeys.

The pictures are worth a pause of their own. Count the caps. Name the colors. Find the monkeys in the tree. Ask what the peddler will do next. Ask why the monkeys copy him. Ask what else they might copy. The pictures are simple enough for a child to read without help.

Skip the parts that bother you. If the finger-wagging feels wrong, change it to a wave. If the shouting feels too aggressive, make it a whisper. If the word "peddler" is unfamiliar, explain it. The book is sturdy enough to survive a few changes. It is a joke, and jokes are flexible.

For older children, the book can be a doorway into the folktale. Read the 1789 newspaper item, talk about how a story travels from a sailor to a cousin to a picture book, and look at Slobodkina's abstract paintings. The book is simple, but the questions around it are not.

The last page

The last page shows the peddler walking back to town, the stack restored, calling his wares again. The monkeys are still in the tree, empty-handed. Nothing has changed, except that everything has been returned.

I have a copy with a chewed corner and a faded red cap on the cover. My child used to pat the peddler's head and say "hat" before she had a word for stack. Now she reads it to me, and she does the voices, and she still laughs at the throw. The book has not taught her anything I can name. It has given her a joke she can tell with her whole body. That is a small thing, and it is not a small thing at all.

FAQ

When was Caps for Sale first published?

W. R. Scott published it in 1940, with words and pictures by Esphyr Slobodkina. The standard edition is 48 pages.

Why do the monkeys copy the peddler?

The book draws on a folktale about imitation. The monkeys mirror his finger shaking, stamping, and finally his thrown cap, which is how he gets the caps back.

What age group is Caps for Sale for?

It works best with children about three to seven, especially in a group read-aloud. Older readers may find the repetition thin, though the art and folktale history still reward a look.