The late, legendary children’s book author Maurice Sendak frequently worked on multiple projects at a time. This was the case in 1997, when he and Arthur Yorinks co-created a book called “Presto and Zesto in Limboland.” After finishing their writing, Sendak put the drawings and text in a drawer in his Ridgefield home and thought about other things.
Sendak died in 2012 in Danbury. In 2015, the co-executor of his estate, Lynn Caponera, was going through Sendak’s papers at his home and found the art and text of “Presto and Zesto in Limboland.” She immediately sent it to Sendak’s longtime editor and publisher, Michael di Capua.
“It was miraculous,” di Capua said in a phone interview.
“Presto and Zesto in Limboland” will be published in fall 2018 by Michael di Capua Books/HarperCollins. It will be Yorinks’ and Sendak’s third book together, after “The Miami Giant” from 1995 and “Mommy?” from 2006.
The book is built around a set of illustrations that originally had nothing to do with the book. Yorinks said in an interview that Sendak created 10 illustrations to be used, projected onto a screen, during a 1990 performance by London Symphony Orchestra of “Rikadia,” a series of 18 choral songs by Czech composer Leo Janácek.
“The songs were nonsense rhymes. It was a one-shot deal, performed just one night,” Yorinks said “The pictures are stunning, wonderful and hilarious. They are all things Sendak.”
In 1997, Sendak took the drawings out again to be used as projections with a performance by violinist Midori, a benefit for New York City music education. After that, Yorinks and Sendak started talking about turning the drawings into a book.
“We started to riff on possible stories. We were cracking each other up and making things up,” Yorinks said. “It actually began to congeal into a real narrative, a real story that held up as a book.”
Di Capua said he was amazed the narrative held together as well as it did, considering the nature of Janácek’s stories.
“The Czech nursery rhymes were … surreal. The rhymes have no connection to each other. Each one stands alone. At first when we talked about making it into a book, we talked about having the Czech rhymes translated. But they were clearly untranslatable,” he said. “One of the miraculous aspects of the text that Arthur and Maurice devised was that they took these totally disconnected pictures and made a continual story with a beginning, middle and end. … It’s just ingenious.”
Caponera, who also is president of the nonprofit Maurice Sendak Foundation, worked for the author for about 40 years until he died. Caponera said she had seen the illustrations in Sendak’s files frequently.
“I moved them from one folder to another about 100 times,” Caponera said. “I never heard it called ‘Presto and Zesto.’ They were called ‘Sugar Beet.'” That name came from one of Janácek’s stories, “When the Sugar Beets Got Married.”
“I found the manuscript separate from the artwork. I had to read it to understand what it was,” she said. “There are other things he worked on and discarded, but this was clearly a finished thing.”
The book gets its title from nicknames Yorinks and Sendak gave each other. Yorinks said Sendak called him Presto because it only took a few minutes for Yorinks to get to Sendak’s home from his own home. “I couldn’t let him get away with him giving me a nickname unless I gave him one,” Yorinks said. “I called him Zesto.”
Museum, Archive
In other Sendak news, Caponera said plans to create a museum dedicated to Sendak in Ridgefield have been dropped, but separate plans for an archive at Sendak’s Chestnut Hill Road home are going forward.
In December 2014, Ridgefield town officials voted to allow the town to work with the Maurice Sendak Foundation to create the museum. An unused town-owned, 6,000-square-foot building designed by renowned architect Philip Johnson was proposed as the location of the museum.
The Johnson building, which was vacated by its previous tenants in 2006, was in disrepair. The Sendak foundation would have had to finance the renovations before moving in.
“The building was going to be a problem,” Caponera said. “They needed such a huge amount of construction on the building. We all felt it’s not going to work. … The plan shifted to doing just the archive.”
Ridgefield First Selectman Rudy Marconi said “we were looking forward to it becoming the museum, but I’m sure the investment would have been substantial for them.”
Marconi said the building has been leased, for $1 a year, to a modern-furniture business whose owners live in a Philip Johnson home in New Canaan. He said the lessees will finance renovations to the building using Johnson’s original plans, which were archived at Columbia University. “It will be great. They will be bringing it back to life,” he said.
Also, a theater company will occupy and refurbish part of the building, also at $1 a year lease, Marconi said.
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