With spring just around the corner, what images pop into the mind? Naturally, you're thinking cherry blossoms and daffodils, spring lambs and fluffy chickens, dolls and kites, eggs and chocolate. But some of you will also be thinking rabbits, and you are in luck, because next month brings the publication of a new book that is not only all about a very unusual rabbit but is guaranteed to put a smile on your face and a spring in your very step.

"Runny Babbit" is the title; "A Billy Sook" is the subtitle; and Shel Silverstein is the author. Those last two bits of information will alert you to the kind of book this is: It's a children's book that is not just for children, any more than Silverstein's best-selling fable of 1964, "The Giving Tree," was, although this one is funny where that one was heart-rending.

And it is the work of a man who was profoundly, playfully, in love with the English language; he liked to illuminate its rules by messing with them a little, especially in his many books of light verse. (The Chicago native died in 1999, but "Runny Babbit," a collection that he worked on for over 20 years, according to his publisher, is a brand-new title.)