The spinning and knitting the devil agrees to do for her win Duffy the Squire's name and a carefree life until it comes time for her to guess the devil's name. Now back in print, this book is a Caldecott Medal winner and ALA Notable Children's Book. Full-color illustrations. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

Duffy and the Devil was a popular play in Cornwall in the nineteenth century, performed at the Christmas season by groups of young people who went from house to house. The Zemachs have interpreted the folk tale which the play dramatized, recognizable as a version of the widespread Rumpelstiltskin story. Its main themes are familiar, but the character and details of this picture book are entirely Cornish, as robust and distinctive as the higgledy-piggledy, cliff-hanging villages that dot England's southwestern coast from Penzance to Land's End. The language spoken by the Christmas players was a rich mixture of local English dialect and Old Cornish (similar to Welsh and Gaelic), and something of this flavor is preserved in Harve Zemach's retelling. Margot Zemach's pen-and-wash illustrations combine a refined sense of comedy with telling observation of character, felicitous drawing with decorative richness, to a degree that surpasses her own past accomplishments. Duffy and the Devil is a 1973 New York Times Book Review Notable Children's Book of the Year and Outstanding Book of the Year, a 1974 National Book Award Finalist for Children's Books, and the winner of the 1974 Caldecott Medal.

The spinning and knitting the devil agrees to do for her win Duffy the Squire's name and a carefree life until it comes time for her to guess the devil's name.

A Cornish version of Rumpelstiltskin. The spinning and knitting the devil agrees to do for her win Duffy the Squire's name and a carefree life until it comes time for her to guess the devil's name.

Have you ever wondered why things are so bad in Los Angeles? Why is everything so irritating? Why are the lines so long? Why is everyone so selfish and immature? If you spend your time asking questions like these then you should meet the person responsible. Barlaam Smith is the devil assigned to Southern California. He has been so successful that he has worked himself out of a job. The people in his area are now so bad that he doesn't have to do a thing and his statistics are still incredible. In fact, many Angelinos could do his job better than he could on his best (or worst) day. Through his work in media and other modern means the city does his work automatically. So, he's bored and has begun to question himself. He's been pretending to be a human for ages, so the longer he stays on Earth the more human he becomes while all around him we humans become less so. What can he do?