If you give a mouse a cookie

The book is known for its playful, circular pattern. A boy gives a cookie to a mouse. The mouse asks for a glass of milk. He then requests a straw (to drink the milk), a mirror (to avoid a milk mustache), nail scissors (to trim his hair), and a broom (to sweep up). Next he wants to take a nap, to have a story read to him, to draw a picture, and to hang the drawing on the refrigerator. Looking at the refrigerator makes him thirsty, so the mouse asks for a glass of milk. The circle is complete when he wants a cookie to go with it.
Author Laura Numeroff has often said in interviews that the idea for the story came to her during a long car trip she took with a friend from San Francisco to Oregon. She narrated it as they drove and later wrote it down. The manuscript was passed over by nine publishers before being taken on by Laura Gerringer, a publisher under the Harper and Row (now HarperCollins) imprint, who immediately thought of Felicia Bond to illustrate it.The text was interpreted by illustrator Felicia Bond to show the increasing energy of the mouse, with the little boy being run ragged by the end of the story. The art was praised by School Library Journal for its "meticulous attention to detail",[1] and was executed with vibrant colors of blended pencil in a complex process of layering red, blue, yellow and black on separate sheets, which were then assembled during printing.
Bond describes rushing to get the sketches done before leaving town with her boyfriend and that the energy of the mouse evolved from that excitement. She has mentioned on numerous occasions that the little boy in the book was her boyfriend, Stephen Roxburgh, as a child.If You Give a Mouse a Cookie[3] quickly became established as a popular favorite and is today considered a contemporary classic, with over four million copies sold. A series of seventeen titles[4] followed, with sales exceeding sixteen million. They have been translated into more than thirteen languages. The If You Give...