Caps for Sale by Esphyr Slobodkina

Hey, Story Seekers! Today's expedition begins with a man walking around with a stack of caps balanced on his head.

Already, I have questions.

Caps for Sale: A Tale of a Peddler, Some Monkeys and Their Monkey Business, told and illustrated by Esphyr Slobodkina, has been making kids laugh since 1940. The setup is wonderfully simple. A peddler sells caps. He takes a nap under a tree. He wakes up.

No caps.

Well, almost no caps.

Readit has taken one look at the monkeys in this story and decided they are obviously innocent.

They are not.

Book Breakdown

Our peddler has an unusual sales technique.

Instead of carrying his caps in a bag or pushing them around on a cart like somebody concerned about gravity, he stacks them on top of his head.

A whole pile.

He walks along calling out that his caps are for sale, fifty cents a cap, but business isn't exactly booming. Eventually he heads into the countryside, finds a tree, carefully checks his stack of caps, and goes to sleep.

When he wakes up, the caps are gone.

Then he looks up.

Monkeys.

A tree full of monkeys wearing his merchandise.

Now we've got a story.

The peddler demands his caps back. The monkeys imitate him. He shakes his finger. They shake theirs. He stamps his foot. They stamp theirs.

You can probably see where this is headed.

The peddler cannot.

And that's half the fun.

Slobodkina builds the whole scene around repetition and imitation. Each time the peddler gets more frustrated, the monkeys simply copy him right back. Kids catch the pattern quickly, which means they get to enjoy knowing something the increasingly aggravated grown-up hasn't figured out yet.

That's a good place for a kid to be.

Slobodkina's artwork has a flat, graphic quality that looks very different from a lot of today's heavily rendered picture books. Shapes are simple. Colors are controlled. The pictures don't try to overwhelm the story with detail.

They don't need to.

Once those monkeys appear in the tree wearing all those caps, the visual joke is sitting right there.

And look at the peddler's body as his frustration grows. The pointing, stamping, and gestures aren't little extras. They're the machinery of the joke, because the monkeys copy what they see.

The book also gives younger children plenty to grab onto besides the story itself: colors, patterns, repetition, counting opportunities, prediction, and especially imitation.

For teachers and librarians: Lexile AD480L · ATOS 3.1 · Guided Reading Level K · DRA 18 · 674 words · 48 pages · AR 0.5 points. First published 1940 by W. R. Scott, it has sold more than two million copies and took a Lewis Carroll Shelf Award in 1958. The story comes from folklore, and a version of it turns up in a North Carolina newspaper in 1789 with a sailor in the peddler's place.

Jungle Jimmy's Journal

This book is old-school read-aloud engineering.

Simple setup.

Clear problem.

Repetition.

Escalation.

Payoff.

And monkeys.

Never underestimate monkeys.

After years of performing for kids, one thing I've learned is that participation doesn't need to be complicated. Give children something they can predict, repeat, or physically do and you've changed the whole experience.

Caps for Sale practically hands you the routine.

When the peddler shakes his finger, let the kids be monkeys.

When he stamps his foot, guess what's coming next.

By the time everybody understands the pattern, the children aren't sitting there waiting for you to tell them the story anymore. They're inside the joke.

That's probably the biggest reason this book still works.

The plot itself is tiny. Man loses hats. Man wants hats back.

That's it.

But Slobodkina understands repetition well enough to make that tiny problem playable.

There's another bit I enjoy. The peddler keeps trying to command the monkeys into doing what he wants, and it gets him nowhere. His eventual solution doesn't really come from some brilliant plan. Frustration gets the better of him, he acts, and the monkeys do what they've been doing all along.

They copy him.

The answer was sitting in front of him.

Or technically above him.

I wouldn't turn that into a giant lesson for kids. That would squash the fun right out of it. But afterward? Sure. Ask them when they figured it out. Ask what they would have tried.

Mostly, though, I'd let them be monkeys.

Some books want a thoughtful discussion.

Some books want fifteen preschoolers shaking their fingers at you.

Know your material.

Readit's Review

The monkeys win.

I know the peddler gets his caps back, but I still think the monkeys win.

He keeps getting mad at them, and they just copy everything he does.

If somebody yelled at me and I was sitting in a tree wearing their hat, I don't think I could keep a straight face.

Also, why does he put ALL the caps on his head?

What if he sneezes?

What if it's windy?

What if a bird lands on the top one?

Nobody is talking about this.

I would have put the caps in a wagon.

But then I guess we wouldn't have a book.

I liked figuring out what the monkeys were going to do before the peddler did. I would definitely want to be one of the monkeys if we acted this story out.

Not the peddler.

Too much yelling.

What Others Think

For a book this old, Caps for Sale still has an awfully lively audience. Goodreads shows 4.17 out of 5 from more than 95,000 ratings, with about 1,800 written reviews. What comes up again and again isn't only that grown-ups remember it fondly. It's that kids still respond to the monkeys, the imitation, and the chance to act along.

The reviewer Brina has read it something like "100 times," and wrote about the most recent one: "This time I read it to my daughter's class. I had them play the role of the monkeys and they had much fun acting out their parts."

That's exactly where I'd put my money with this book.

Another Goodreads reviewer, Calista, is worth quoting at both ends. On the pictures: "The art feels pretty bland to me, not distinctive and yet the story is compelling." On the kids: "Wow! The kids really loved this one. They went crazy over it. I think it's the monkeys." And afterward, apparently, "They laughed and go around saying tsk tsk tsk now."

That split is the whole story of this book. An adult meeting Caps for Sale for the first time may find the art and the plot far simpler than the picture books they're used to. Kids don't care. There are monkeys stealing hats and mocking a furious grown-up.

They understand the assignment.

Not everybody comes away charmed, and I think the objection is worth hearing. Madisyn Carlin remembers this as the first book she ever loathed, and the reason is that "the monkeys were monstrous! They stole the poor peddler's hats, ruined them, taunted him, and refused to give them back."

Fair. If your kid is the one who feels for the person being ganged up on, this book is going to sting rather than delight, and it's better to know that before you're forty preschoolers deep into monkey noises.

For everybody else, there's Mackey, who says, "I read this story a thousand or more times to each of my own children, all of our neighborhood kids, anyone who would sit still!"

Eighty-six years later, the monkeys are still causing trouble.

Good.

Belly Laugh Scale

4 out of 5: Big-Time Belly Laughs

The humor here isn't packed with jokes. It's repetition, imitation, frustration, and the magnificent annoyance of being mocked by monkeys wearing your property.

Read it silently and it's amusing.

Perform it and you've got something else.

Let the kids copy the monkeys. Give the peddler some growing frustration. Leave room for them to predict what's coming.

That's where the laughs live.

I'm stopping at 4 because this isn't nonstop comedy. But as a participatory read-aloud?

Those monkeys know what they're doing.

Final Explorer Verdict

I'd recommend Caps for Sale for preschool through early elementary kids, especially ages 4 to 8, and I'd put it high on the list for classroom storytime.

It's particularly good for children who like joining in rather than sitting quietly while an adult does all the work. Repetition, movement, colors, patterns, prediction, and monkey noises give them plenty of ways into the story.

And for an adult who enjoys performing a book instead of merely reading it?

Oh, you've got material.

If the part your kid loves is knowing something the grown-up in the book hasn't worked out yet, that's the engine I built Look! There Are No Dinos Inside Of This Book around. Dangerous Dave insists there are no dinosaurs. The dinosaurs are directly behind him. The kids get to be the ones who can see.

Just remember one thing.

If you're reading this to a room full of children and you ask them to pretend to be monkeys, whatever happens next is between you and the monkeys.

Keep exploring, Story Seekers!

Jungle Jimmy & Readit