Richard Scarry's 'Busytown' Gets the Google Doodle Treatment

The search giant created a special logo to celebrate the 92nd birthday of one of the most successful children's book authors of all time

This morning, Google switched its homepage logo over to one of a fantastical cityscape featuring mice riding motorcycles and other anthropomorphic animals peaking out from windows and managing the rescue of a second-floor cat from a burning house.

The design is meant to celebrate the 92nd birthday of famed children's book illustrator and author, Richard Scarry. Scarry passed away in Switzerland at the age of 74, but his work continues to live on in the hearts of children as their bookshelves often include at least a few volumes of the more than 300 that Scarry helped to create. As a child, I often watched The Busy World of Richard Scarry, an animated series that aired on Nickelodeon until 2000, long after I outgrew it.

"Scarry's first book, Two Little Miners (1949), was published in the Little Golden Books series; decades later, he would make a key move to Random House," the Washington Post notes. "His breakthrough book commercially was 1963's Best Word Book Ever, which labeled roughly 1,400 pictures." A 1989 list assembled by Publishers Weekly of the 50 bestselling hardcover books of all time included Scarry as the creator of eight, according to Brian Gillie.

Image: Google.