Palindromania!

The ultimate celebration for the palindromic year 2002!

What exactly is "palindromania"? It's the inability to see the word STRAW without thinking WARTS. It's the powerful impulse to reverse the name OPRAH to make it HARPO. It's the uncontrollable urge to buy A TOYOTA. It's an obsession with words and phrases that read exactly the same forwards and backwards. And now, in his most entertaining and extensive volume, Jon Agee, the prime purveyor of palindromes, has taken this unique word phenomenon to a whole new level. Featuring themed sections, comic-strip-style stories, and even lengthy monologues, Agee's collection of over 160 familiar and unfamiliar palindromes paired with all-new masterly cartoons is a treasure for word-lovers young and old.

Palindromania! is a 2003 Bank Street - Best Children's Book of the Year.

Jon Agee, the author-illustrator-playwright-librettist-palindromist, grew up along the Hudson River in Nyack, New York. As a kid, he created picture books, detective comics, and flipbooks made out of train ticket stubs. In high school, he spent an inordinate amount of time in the art room. In college, at the Cooper Union in New York City, he studied painting, dabbled in animation, and made an "art" film. Soon after graduating, in 1981, he began getting his first books published.

He is probably best known for his fourth book, The Incredible Painting of Felix Clousseau, in which a mysterious painter's pictures come to life, wreaking havoc in turn-of-the-century Paris. His other books, featuring canine professors, forgotten astronauts, and guffawing grumps, are at times quirky, nonsensical, satiric, and always humorous. Their sophisticated wit appeals to kids and adults alike.

Somewhere along the line, Jon became obsessed with creating words and phrases that read the same backwards and forwards. The result was his first book of palindromes, Go Hang a Salami! I'm a Lasagna Hog! Its companion volume, So Many Dynamos!, temporarily relieved Jon of his peculiar compulsion.

Jon has also written the book and lyrics to two musicals, B.O.T.C.H. and Flies in the Soup, which were performed at the TADA! theater in New York. He would happily continue to pursue this enterprise if he didn't need to eat.

In his spare time, Jon does a lot of doodling; or he might write a tongue twister, or an anagram, or a poem. Sometimes he draws a cartoon that gets published in The New Yorker magazine, which pleases him very much.