The Man Who's Riding Dan Brown's 'Code' Tales

Wait, says the colonel in charge: That's a village you're talking about. So what you mean is two Viet Cong and 73 women and children. Report it that way next time.

"I loved that man. He was honest," Kidder says.

The Style of 'Elements'

Illustrator Maira Kalman was an English major, but "to my chagrin," she says, she had never encountered William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White's venerable good-writing manual, "The Elements of Style."

Then she picked up a copy at a yard sale and decided she simply had to illustrate it.

It might seem a quixotic pairing. Kalman is a hip children's book illustrator, fabric designer and frequent contributor to the New Yorker. "Elements" is a textbook on the distinctly unhip topic of grammar and usage.

Ah, but "it's really a work of literature, not just a grammar book," Kalman says. She was knocked out, in particular, by the quirkily humorous phrases and sentences the authors employed to illustrate their writing rules.

With the blessing of the Strunk and White estates, she sold her idea to the Penguin Press. She circled hundreds of phrases she loved, narrowed the list down and started sketching. The results are quirkily humorous in their own right.

"Well, Susan, this is a fine mess you are in," write Strunk and White to demonstrate the proper punctuation of a name or a title in direct address. Kalman gives us a sad-eyed basset hound staring reproachfully from a pink background.

"His first thought on getting out of bed -- if he had any thought at all -- was to get back in again," the authors write to show the correct use of dashes. Kalman paints a young man in striped pajamas, not ready to face the day.

Does "The Elements of Style" really need illustrations? Of course not. The text-only version has been selling steadily for nearly half a century (the paperback was No. 89 on Amazon yesterday).

But if art draws new readers to Strunk and White's little gem, says Penguin Press's president and publisher, Ann Godoff, well, "that's the Lord's work for an editor."