"What Do People Do All Day?" Revisited

Richard Scarry's classic 1968 children's book What Do People Do All Day? introduced millions of kids to the world of work and the idea of an economy. This week, culture blogger Giovanni Tiso looks back at Scarry's book and its setting, Busytown, and finds a weirdly current account of the modern urban economy. "We still do the things that occupy Scarry’s anthropomorphic menagerie," he writes: "we fix the sewers and serve the meals and cut down the trees and drive the trucks and cultivate the land and so forth." Scarry's omissions (he left out manufacturing jobs, for example) dovetail nicely with the disappearance of those jobs from American cities.

At the same time, the book's common-sense economy puts into relief the way that work has become weirder and, as Tiso puts it, harder to draw: it's difficult to communicate in a cartoon the fact that "Alfalfa has become a derivatives trader."

Busytown has, in fact, had an interesting history: Tiso explains how its drawings have been revised over the years. A father rabbit has joined his wife in the kitchen; the sections about coal mining have been left out of the abridged version. Tiso links to this extraordinary Flickr set, which shows the original Scarry drawings alongside their more contemporary revisions. The main differences have to do with gender: here, ribbons have been added to some of the animals to create gender balance. Some changes are harder to show. How do you represent off-shore manufacturing, or business that happens over the internet? A sixties vision of the city can only stay current for so long.