Lyle is a crocodile. He lives on East 88th Street with the Primm family, helps with the shopping, and is on good terms with everyone except Mr. Grumps next door, whose cat Lyle frightens. Mr. Grumps has him committed to the zoo.

The zoo does not suit him. Lyle and his old stage partner Hector P. Valenti make a break for it, and what happens next is why children have been asking for this one since 1965. Bernard Waber draws the whole thing deadpan, as though a crocodile in a brownstone is an ordinary domestic arrangement, and that straight face is the joke.

Forty eight pages, paperback, at the generous landscape trim the artwork was drawn for. Reads aloud beautifully because the sentences are already funny out loud.