It is not often in life that a person has the opportunity to redo something, children’s author/illustrator Steven Kellogg told The Newtown Bee, Tuesday, December 9, but the recently issued 35th anniversary edition of his book Pinkerton, Behave! has provided him with just that chance.

The book has been revised and reillustrated by Mr Kellogg to reflect his own and the country’s changing attitudes toward gun violence, he said. “It’s interesting to me to see that I’ve grown more as a children’s book illustrator than I had realized,” said Mr Kellogg.

“I’ve made lots of little tinkerings with the dialogue and illustrations. I was really motivated to remove the detail of the burglar with a gun,” he said, in response to readers’ reactions since the book was first published. “It actually makes the book a lot better. I’m really grateful for the opportunity to visit this book again, without the detail that was so controversial.”

Mr Kellogg shared the following article with The Newtown Bee, explaining his motivations behind what he views as a positive and updated version of one of his more popular books. The article first appeared in Publishers Weekly on December 11.

“Satirical news show host Stephen Colbert’s talent for fomenting perverse merriment blossoms when he is posing as the indignant defender of an issue that, in actuality, he is skewering with gleeful satire. He was in top form recently when he spoofed a new children’s book entitled My Parents Pack And Carry that features a gun-toting mom and dad. Colbert’s brilliantly targeted ridicule inspired his fans to post humorous online suggestions for changing a host of well-known children’s books so they would reflect our society’s obsession with guns.

I am an author and illustrator who has published over a hundred children’s books, and Stephen Colbert’s satirical sketch resonated strongly with me. Recently I was motivated by our ever-increasing focus on guns and gun violence to make significant changes in one of my books, entitled Pinkerton Behave!, that was published 35 years ago.

During my career, most of my books were created in the attic studio of an old farmhouse in Sandy Hook where my wife, Helen, and I lived for 35 years, and raised a large family. After the kids were grown, we down-sized to a smaller home in the Adirondacks, where I continue writing and illustrating children’s books, and traveling around the country to present programs on reading and storytelling in schools and libraries.

While driving home from a school visit in New Jersey on December 14, 2012, I heard the news that a deranged young man from my former neighborhood had gunned down 20 first graders in the Sandy Hook Elementary School, where most of our children had been students, and where I had appeared frequently as a guest author. Proceeding homeward in a state of shock, I was further dismayed to find that Helen, who was stabilized in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, had heard the news and lapsed into a state of anxiety and disorientation, mentally lost between our current New York State residence and our former home in Sandy Hook.

During the following weeks, while trying to help Helen, and coping with my own depression, I resolved to respond to the tragedy in the voice of my professional focus, the illustrated book for children. I found the perfect collaborator in my friend Patricia MacLachlan, the author of the classic Sarah Plain And Tall, and a fellow board member of the National Children’s Book and Literacy Alliance. After months of intense work, Random House published our book, Snowflakes Fall, dedicated to the children of Sandy Hook, with verses and paintings celebrating the precious individuality of all children and the joyous adventure of childhood.

Creating the book proved to be a healing experience, and it also caused me to rethink a controversy that had been growing around one of my early books, Pinkerton, Behave! It was inspired almost 35 years earlier by the real Pinkerton, an impossible, but endearing, Great Dane puppy that thwarted every attempt to teach him the accepted norms of canine socialization, by lapsing into a state of determined confusion.

In the story, Pinkerton’s failings lead to his humiliating expulsion from a prestigious obedience school. But then the little girl in the family decodes the pattern of Pinkerton’s obsessive misbehavior, and she utilizes that discovery to direct him in a series of maneuvers that brings about the arrest of an intruder who is burglarizing the house.

In creating the burglar back in mid-1970s, I had patterned him after the stereotyped caricature of comic book bad guys I remembered from my childhood, and I portrayed him wielding an oversized pistol.

As time passed, the prevalence of domestic gun violence became a growing national concern, and the inclusion of that menacing gun elicited objections and protests from adult readers who were sharing the book with children in their lives. In light of the Sandy Hook tragedy, and the alarming statistics of gun violence (with more than 80 school shootings having occurred in the country since December 14, 2012), I recognized that my thinking had changed and the book must change.

I discussed my feelings with Laurie Hornik, my editor at Penguin. Would it be possible to publish a revised and reillustrated version of Pinkerton, Behave? She shared my concerns and pointed out that the book’s 35th anniversary was approaching, perfect timing for the publication of a new edition that would update and reflect societal concerns about guns and violence.

Positive reviews of the original book had appeared in a number of periodicals, including Newsweek Magazine, which printed one of the illustrations where the gun was most prominently depicted. I began work on the new edition by recomposing all of those images and deleting the gun. As I proceeded, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the intervening decades had broadened the horizons of my imagination, and I enjoyed adding many new verbal and visual details that I felt made the updated version a lot more fun.

But, most importantly, I was motivated by the conviction that caring citizens must try to reprogram their society for the safety and well-being of everyone, and authors and illustrators have an obligation to create the highest quality literature and art in order to enrich the lives of children. Focusing on that goal, I rejected the direction that was satirically proposed by Stephen Colbert, and readers of the revised and reillustrated 35th anniversary edition of Pinkerton, Behave! will find that the bad guy-burglar has been disarmed.

The 35th anniversary edition of Pinkerton, Behave! is available through www.amazon.com or www.barnesandnoble.com, and various book stores. Mr Kellogg hopes to schedule a local reading and book signing in the upcoming months.