Wagging Tails!

Our book today is a little treasure from deep, deep in the shadowy recesses of my personal library: a much-loved 1955 volume called Wagging Tails: An Album of Dogs, written by Marguerite Henry and drawn by Wesley Dennis. It’s an exuberantly friendly, colorful book full of friendly dogs, a book put out by Rand McNally that’s dedicated to two dogs: to Alex, “whose tail wags like a metronome,” and to Dice, “who is clean but not spotless.” I completely fell in love with it when I first read it, and I’ve been in love with it ever since.

Marguerite Henry is at first glance an unlikely-seeming author for a book of dogs. She was famously – and universally beloved – at the height of her powers back in the 1940s and ’50s as the author of horse books, not dog books. Black Gold, Justin Morgan Had a Horse, Misty of Chincoteague, and King of the Wind, which won the Newbery Award … these and a dozen other books were so famous that word of their worth had crossed the interspecies No Man’s Land and reached even the ears of us dog kids. And years later I actually sat down and read Misty and King of the Wind and immediately understood their popularity: the calm grace with which she captures the electricity of the young girl-horse connection made Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty feel like the period piece I only then realized it was.

But Henry was breezily prolific throughout her career, and she loved animals with the clean, earnest devotion of childhood, which she never quite outgrew. She wrote books about birds and horses and a couple of cats … and dogs. And in as many cases as she could, she tried to secure the artwork of her long-time favorite collaborator, Wesley Dennis, a stiffly picky perfectionist with the face of a prize fighter and the artistic sensibility of a second-tier Landseer. Dennis was a tough man to get to know and an easy man to like once you did, and his drafty old house on Cape Cod could be the most welcoming place in the world to those who’d fought their way through to the artist’s friendship.

I have no idea if Marguerite Henry ever visited that house at Falmouth, but she and Dennis forged a great partnership anyway, and by the time the two of them produced Wagging Tails, they’d been working together for a long time – and it shows. The words and the pictures in this book mesh without a hitch.

We get all the breeds that were popular back in the late ’40s. There’s the Dachshund:

On fall nights, after a brisk hour across country, he likes to toast his bones by the fire. As for me, nothing is so nice as to pull of my boots and wriggle my toes under his warm body. Too small? No, indeed. He’s just the right size!

And there’s the Pekingese:

The Pekingese is a paradox. He looks like a morsel of fluff, but left him up and you find him surprisingly heavy. He is built like a lion, massive in front with an enormous shaggy mane. And he is lion-hearted, too. I knew of one who defied even a Great Dane. He would bring out his playthings – his rubber bones and tinklebells – and taking a war-like stance, forefeet wide apart, he would roar in the big fellow’s face.

And there’s the Boxer:

Big and strong as he is, there’s a gentle side to his nature, too. Youngsters can pull his ears and poke his ribs, and he takes it all with gay good humor. As pet and protector, he is full of love and faithfulness for everyone in the household.

I periodically take down my copy of Wagging Tails and read all the way through it in unhurried happiness, reliving the countless times I’ve visited these pages in the past. These are my people – some of them, anyway – these two dozen familiar faces, these chihuahuas and saints and pointers and mutts, and these beagles with their pennant tails pointing straight up as they race along. And every time I re-read the book, I smile the same broad, private smile and remember encountering it for the first time. And I wonder how many vintage ladies of a certain age sometimes pull down their Album of Horses and smile the same smile, grateful for all the memories.