Lawrence.com

Hartfield, England — On a miserably wet and windy summer day, fans spilled from Pooh Corner � a small shop filled with bear beakers, brooches, boxes and books � cramming the narrow streets with their cars.

Nearby, a procession of families splashed a mile through the muddy forest to toss twigs off Poohsticks bridge and watch them race downstream in imitation of Pooh and his human pal, Christopher Robin.

	www.nypl.org www.pooh-corner.com www.poohcorner.net www.pooh-country.co.uk

Pooh Bear is 75 and his fans still enjoy a good "expotition" to Ashdown Forest, site of Milne's "Hundred Aker Wood," where the bear of very little brain feasted on "hunny" and hunted the mythical Woozle with his friends, bouncable Tigger the tiger, timid Piglet, busy Rabbit, Eeyore the mournful donkey and that wise bird, Owl.

But some locals are crying, "Bother."

"So many people come here because of Pooh, and residents feel swamped. The spirit of anti-Poohism is rampant in this area," said Simon Kerr, a resident of Hartfield, an idyllic village 30 miles south of London where Milne raised his son, Christopher Robin.

After a survey showed most local people preferred to play down the Pooh connection, Wealden District Council has removed references to the bear from its Web site and literature. There are no signs pointing out local Pooh sites, including the bridge, the goal of many an "expotition" � Pooh-speak for "expedition."

"The bridge alone gets 67,000 visitors a year and the trees nearby have been stripped of twigs," said Nicola Sutherland, the council's tourism officer. "Obviously, we can't stop people coming, but we are playing the anniversary down."

Time to celebrate

So on the big day, Sunday, the hunny-splashed parties were held elsewhere.

"Oh yes, we're celebrating," said Peter Stansfield, head of consumer marketing at Egmont Books, the British publishers who produce the two Pooh volumes "Winnie the Pooh" and "The House at Pooh Corner" under the Methuen imprint.

At the Edinburgh Festival in August, Egmont threw a birthday party for Pooh with entertainers and balloons that will be repeated at bookstores later.

The day itself featured a reading from A.A. Milne at the Cheltenham Festival of Literature in southern England, with cake and a cheerful chorus of "Happy Birthday."

Special Egmont anniversary publications include "Now We Are 75," a selection of Pooh stories and verse.

Disney Corp., which owns Pooh film and merchandising rights, ran a competition to find Pooh's two most ardent British fans: one child, one adult. The winners attended a birthday party Sunday in west London and heard actor Nigel Havers read from the classic tales. They were also treated to a meal at Planet Hollywood and a trip to Disneyland Paris.

An independent birthday ceremony will be held today at the studio at Guildford, south of London, of Ernest Shepherd, who illustrated the original Pooh books. Arthur Chandler, the curator of the Shepard Archives at Dulwich University, is writing a monograph entitled "The Ancestry of Pooh" for the event.

Libraries and bookstores in other countries are also paying tribute to Milne's whimsical, rotund bear, who has a tendency to get stuck in "hunny" (honey) pots.

In the United States, Pooh is being feted from coast to coast.

The New York Public Library, which houses Christopher Milne's childhood collection of stuffed toys that inspired the Pooh characters, has been holding readings and special events for a month leading up to the birthday.

Los Angeles-based British actor Peter Dennis � who has made many Pooh recordings and tours with a Pooh revue called "Bother!" � read from Milne's works Sunday at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles.

Enduring popularity

Egmont estimates that sales of the two Pooh books and Milne's poetry volumes, "When We Were Very Young" and "Now We Are Six," sold more than 20 million copies by 1996 and the company still sells more than 1.2 million copies of Pooh books every year.

But that does not include U.S. or foreign-language sales; the stories have been translated into more than 25 languages. Germans know the bear as Winnie der Pu, while Russians call him Vinnie Pookh and Norwegians know him as Ole Brumm.

Tales of how Pooh pinned back Eeyore's tail or rescued Tigger when he bounced into a tree and couldn't get down have made the pudgy beast one of the most popular of Disney's many animal characters. Although the company doesn't release sales figures or say how much the bear is worth, it recently paid $350 million to extend its ownership of Pooh rights.

"Pooh endures because he has a strong nostalgia value � his world is safe and ordered and secure," said Brian Sibley, author and broadcaster who has written, "Three Cheers for Pooh," about the bear's creation. "Pooh's world is timeless."

Sibley said children "love the stories because they get to discover the outcome just before Pooh � like the one where we realize he's following his own footsteps in the snow, instead of a Woozle," Sibley said.

"I think Pooh's secret is the kindness and generosity of spirit of the characters toward each other," Lamb said. "That's something that has universal appeal."

She said the New York Public Library gets "many people ... who are in their 60s and 70s and were read the stories in the era before television was everywhere. Pooh is very special to them."

Winnie the mascot

Milne created Pooh after his 5-year-old son was introduced to a female American black bear cub called Winnie at London Zoo. The zoo still has pictures of a young Christopher feeding the bear condensed milk.

According to historians of the Fort Garry Horse regiment in Winnipeg, Canada, the bear had been rescued from a trapper by a member of the regiment in August 1914.

The bear became the mascot of the 2nd Canadian Infantry Brigade, and in December of that year, when the brigade passed through London on its way to fight in France, the bear was left in the safety of London Zoo. Winnie, as she became known, lived there happily until her death in 1934.

Born in Scotland in 1882, Alan Alexander Milne grew up in London and studied at Trinity College, Cambridge. After a brief spell as an assistant editor at the humorous magazine "Punch," he joined the Royal Warwickshire Regiment at the outbreak of World War I and served in France. In 1913, he married Daphne de Selincourt. They later moved with their son to Cotchfield Farm near Hartfield.

It was here that he watched his wife and son making up tales with Christopher's collection of stuffed animals, which included a bear the child later christened Winnie the Pooh, after the zoo version.

The Pooh books and the poetry volumes, published from 1924 to 1928, were quick hits: Publishers estimate international sales topped 7 million copies by 1956.

Through them all stomps Pooh, a whimsical creature much given to small hummed snatches of doggerel called "hums" �"Isn't it funny how a bear likes honey?" � and who firmly believes in the forest is populated by Woozles and "Heffalumps" and "Jagulars."

"What do Jagulars do?" Piglet asks Pooh one day. "They hide in the branches of trees, and drop on you as you go underneath," replies Pooh. "Christopher Robin told me."

"Perhaps we better hadn't go underneath, Pooh. In case he dropped and hurt himself," worries Piglet. But Pooh is unfazed: "They don't hurt themselves," he replies. "They're such very good droppers."

Christopher Milne, a writer and bookseller who died in 1996, was uncomfortable with celebrity and once wrote that his father had "filched from me my good name and had left me with nothing but the empty fame of being his son." But in a later book, he made it clear he had come to cherish his history.

Milne rarely read his works to his son. In a letter to his friend, Dennis, the actor, Christopher Milne confided, "My father did not write the books for children. He didn't write for any specific market; he knew nothing about marketing. He knew about me, he knew about himself, he knew about the Garrick Club (in London) � he was ignorant about anything else.

"Except, perhaps, about life."