Museum Numbers

These cleverly designed board books use treasures from Boston's Museum of Fine Arts to teach the concepts of size, shape and color. On one spread in Numbers , for example, the legend ``8 Buttons'' faces a painting by Van Gogh; readers can count either the eight buttons drawn beneath the legend or those on the uniform worn by Van Gogh's subject. ``Pink ballerinas'' can be found in the colors (and composition) of Degas's Dancers in Rose . Voss chooses from an imaginative range of media: the shape of the oval is illustrated by an elegant American dressing glass; an Egyptian mummy and two coffins add up to the number three. Nine flying cranes are embroidered on a Japanese robe, and a Navajo blanket affords numerous examples of the cross shape. Graduated pages coded with colors, numbers and shapes form a viewer-friendly thumb index, and the final pages of each volume supply information about the represented works of art. Ages 1-5. (Feb.)