Mr. Popper was a house-painter. Winters he read books on polar exploration while Mrs. Popper swept around him. He yearned to be an explorer. He wrote letters to explorers. He wrote one to Admiral Drake in the Antarctic. Admiral Drake sent him an Antarctic penguin which he named Captain Cook. Mr. Popper, Bill and Janie Popper were overjoyed. Mrs. Popper was not quite so pleased, but even she got used to giving up the refrigerator for a nest and having the cellar flooded for a swimming pool in summer and an ice rink in winter.

The penguin drooped. An appeal to a great aquarium brought not a cure but another droopy penguin named Greta. Both penguins stopped drooping and before long there were ten more penguins. Mr. Popper had little money. Ice plants, penguin-sized, are expensive. It worried him. It worried the people who sold the ice plant.

Finally Mr. Popper had an idea. He would train his flock as a vaudeville troupe. It worked wonderfully and delighted everybody except perhaps Pullman porters, traffic squads and all other vaudeville performers.

From the dust jacket