A Color of His Own Read online

  To Vera Barbara

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF Copyright © 1975 by Leo Lionni. Copyright renewed 2003 by Nora Lionni and Louis Mannie Lionni.

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc.,

  New York. KNOPF, BORZOI BOOKS, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Visit us on the Web! randomhouse.com/kids and www.randomhouse.com/kids/lionni/

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at randomhouse.com/teachers

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Lionni, Leo. A color of his own. British ed. published in 1975 under title: A colour of his own.

  summary: A little chameleon is distressed that he doesn’t have his own color like other animals. [1. Chameleons—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.L6634Co3 [E] 75-028456 eISBN: 978-0-307-97426-6

  v3.1

  Title Page

  Copyright

  First Page

  About the Author

  Parrots are green

  goldfish are red

  elephants are gray

  pigs are pink.

  All animals have a color of their own

  except for chameleons.

  They change color wherever they go.

  On lemons they are yellow.

  In the heather they are purple.

  And on the tiger they are striped like tigers.

  One day a chameleon who was sitting on a tiger’s tail said to himself,

  “If I remain on a leaf I shall be green forever, and so I too will have a color of my own.”

  With this thought he cheerfully climbed onto the greenest leaf.

  But in autumn the leaf turned yellow —and so did the chameleon.

  Later the leaf turned red

  and the chameleon too turned red.

  And then the winter winds blew the leaf from the branch and with it the chameleon.

  The chameleon was black in the long winter night.

  But when spring came he walked out into the green grass.

  And there he met another chameleon.

  He told his sad story.

  “Won’t we ever have a color of our own?” he asked.

  “I’m afraid not,” said the other chameleon who was older and wiser.

  “But,” he added, “why don’t we stay together?

  We will still change color wherever we go, but you and I will always be alike.”

  And so they remained side by side.

  They were green together

  and purple

  and yellow

  and red with white polka dots.

  And they lived happily ever after.

  Leo Lionni, wrote and illustrated more than forty highly acclaimed children’s books. An internationally known designer, illustrator, graphic artist, and children’s book author, he was born in 1910 in Holland and came to the United States in 1939. He received the 1984 American Institute of Graphic Arts Gold Medal, was a four-time Caldecott Honor winner—for Inch by Inch, Frederick, Swimmy, and Alexander and the Wind-Up Mouse—and was honored posthumously in 2007 with the Society of Illustrators Lifetime Achievement Award. Leo Lionni died in October 1999 at his home in Tuscany, Italy, at the age of eighty-nine.

 

 

  Leo Lionni, A Color of His Own

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