Need A House? Call Ms. Mouse!

Do you have a shelf of books about carpentry and architecture and building codes?  We do!  Here’s a taste of a treasure in that collection I recently re-found.

I was reorganizing our many books recently and I found an old favorite book I’d read to my kids a million times.

It’s a picture book, but quite entertaining for all ages, called Need a House?  Call Ms. Mouse! by George Mendoza, illustrated by Doris Susan Smith.

I remember buying it, at a bookstore that was devoted to architecture and building, sort of the Restoration Hardware of bookstores, on the trendy 4th Street section of Berkeley.  (Restoration Hardware is still there, but I doubt the bookstore is – our nation still buys cute reproductions of old faucets, made in China, but doesn’t read much anymore.)

It must have been in the early 80’s, not long after the book was published, because we lived in that neighborhood til 1985, and had a little kid, so buying pictures books was fun and made us feel slightly virtuous, educating our son. 

I remember our delight and surprise to find a kids book among the heavy tomes on Frank Lloyd Wright and the Uniform Building Code.   Our two favorite things – building and kids!  Not to mention the slightly feminist twist – a female architect!  (And a mouse, at that.)

I looked it up on Google Images and you can see most of the book there.  That’s lucky for you, because it’s out of print and goes for $165 on Amazon! I’m glad I kept it through so many moves since then.

The basic theme is that Henrietta Mouse designs houses for her animal friends and they are all appropriate to the particular needs and character of each animal.  Here are some images from it:

Ms. Mouse at her drawing table:

 

Her own house:

 

Construction of the house for Lizard.  (Look, it’s a French version, now she is Heloise!)

 

A pear interior for Worm:

 

A cool modern house for Spider, with a separate music room!

 

Owl’s nighttime observatory, another cool cross-section.

 

Desperate grandmothers are begging on line for this out of print book.  I could sell my copy for $200!  Nope, I’m keeping it for me, and maybe future grandchildren. 

And looking at it again for the first time in a decade, I think Ms. Mouse might haveinfluenced us too, as we expanded our own hillside home, because we read it so many times to our kids. 

Thanks, Ms. Mouse.

Copyright © 2015 Deborah Streeter