Sesame Street Magazine (July 1979)
Wild Animals I Have Known is an 1898 short story collection by Ernest Thompson Seton. While Seton was a wildlife artist and naturalist, his stories were fiction but within realistic seeming contexts. Unlike Uncle Wiggily or Beatrix Potter characters, these were non-anthropomorphic creatures in nature given names and personalities.
While a handful of prior books had used variations of “I Have Known” in titles as early as 1866 (Men I Have Known), Seton's book became a bestseller, remaining in print to the present. By 1903, it had sparked scholarly debate over its assignment of human emotions to animal characters. From that point onward, “I Have Known” titles by other authors would follow with greater frequency, initially mostly those with an animal or historical bent: Fishes I Have Known (1905), Famous Indian Chiefs I Have Known (1908), Men and Horses I Have Known (1924), Man-killers I Have Known (1933), and more. The 2011 self-published book Wild People I Have Known deliberately echoed Seton's collection in its title.
References[]
The Muppet world has its own share of "I Have Known" books.
Big Bird's Shape Book (1977)
Ernie and Bert's Counting Book (1977)
The Sesame Street Dictionary (1980)
The Muppets (comic strip) July 15, 1984
Sesame Street Episode 2910