Re: R.I.P. Ben Shecter, 89, in Feb., illustrated "The Mother Market" (1966)

On 5/7/2025 8:27 PM, Lenona wrote:

He died on Feb. 28th. He was also a designer for theatre, opera, ballet
and TV.
 Originally, Nancy Brelis' book was titled "The Mummy Market."
  From the New York Times, in 1966:
 "Three children search for an ideal mother in this fantasy..."
 It's not exactly sci-fi, but the book DID get listed at the ISFDB.
 https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?2408330
 "The Mother Market" was the title used in 1975, almost a decade after it
was published.
 (Which raises the question - since I'm pretty sure the author was
American, when did calling your mother "Mummy" become so much less
common, in the U.S.? I'm kind of surprised the author used the original
title as late as 1966, given the likelihood of reader confusion!)

Good question. Brelis was born in 1929.
I can attest from personal memory that 'mummy' for mother was
basically absent from American English (at least in NYC) in the
early 60s, but I encountered it frequently when I moved to England
in 1968.
'Mommy' seems to have become popular starting in the 1940s.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=mommy%2Cmummy&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3&case_insensitive=true
pt