copyright 1960; illustrated by Nicolas Sidjakov; Parnassus Press publishers, Berkeley, California; smaller hardbound; very good condition with unmarked pages; pictorial boards very good; dust jacket quite good with minimal edge wear.
 
Illustration Award -
Nicolas Sidjakov won the annual Caldecott Medal as illustrator of the year's "most distinguished American picture book for children".  Parnassus was a small press in Berkeley, California, established in 1957 by Herman Schein, the husband of writer-illustrator Ruth Robbins. Sidjakov illustrated one of its first books and during the next several years it published at least three picture books he created with Robbins as writer.
 
book description -
Baboushka and the Three Kings retells a Russian folktale about an old woman's endless search for the Christ child. In a retrospective essay about the Caldecott Medal-winning books from 1956 to 1965, Norma R. Fryatt wrote, "Children will find in it something unusual, perhaps too removed from their experience and the Christmas story as they know it, but certainly it is a book to which they should be introduced... Primitive colors, rigid vertical lines, stylized figures, an unusual typeface that satisfied both artist and designer, – this combination of graphic skills was an experiment and one which in the main succeeded."
 
The 28-page book includes a song "Baboushka," verse by Edith M. Thomas and musical score by Mary Clement Sanks.