Birthday Books: Padre Porko, the Gentlemanly Pig

Padre Porko the Gentlemanly Pig, by Robert Davis. Illustrated by Fritz Eichenberg.

I love this little book already, though I’ve scarcely read into it yet. It belongs to a rare category of experience that I call my ‘Alternate Childhood’; that is, it is a book of the kind that I would almost surely have enjoyed if I had run across it as a child but which I had the ill-luck to miss.

This edition dates from 1948 (Sixth Printing) and the last check-out date stamped inside says Nov. 18, 1978, and hails from Ontario, California. It has been rebound in a plain, sturdy library binding that is so familiar to me from my elementary school years. To open it up and smell the pages wafts me back on a wave of nostalgia.

“Padre Porko” purports to be the retelling of folktales from the south of Spain. Whether this is true (a quick search on Google finds no corroborating evidence) or Davis just uses it as a framing device, I cannot tell. Padre Porko seems to straddle the human and the animal world himself, a sort of tutelary figure that can only be found by people in trouble, but much more accessible to animals. His main goal is to keep everything peaceful and happy, and that includes reining in violent beasts. Although a magical figure himself, he does not use magic, but rather cunning, reason, and good-heartedness.

The fact that it is illustrated by Fritz Eichenberg, one of my favorite artists (Mistress Masham’s Repose, The Heroes of the Kalevala), cements my nostalgic fondness for this little volume.

Can you be nostalgic about something you only discovered about a year ago? As it turns out, yes, yes you can.