WALTER THE BAKER

Beginning invitingly with "warm smells" of bread, rolls, cakes, tarts and cookies (and a cat perched on a red-brick oven) Walter the baker's story ends lamely when he invents the pretzel in answer to the duke's demand for a roll containing "the rising sun, the noontime sun and the setting sun" (the pretzel, Walter explains, has three holes through which the sun can shine). The splashy tissue-paper collages of coarsely comic peasant figures and a cozy half-timbered town are as pointlessly hybrid as the tale.