Publications about books for children and young adults
Leonard S. Marcus is the author of Minders of Make-Believe (Houghton), The Annotated Phantom Tollbooth (Knopf), Show Me a Story! (Candlewick) and Listening for Madeleine: A Portrait of Madeleine L’Engle in Many Voices (Farrar).
A recent conversation about the current state of the picture book soon came around to the subject of book jackets. A senior art director in the group noted mournfully that as jacket designs have increasingly become the province of sales and marketing teams, covers have grown less representative of the books they trumpet. The disconnect [...]
Type — the formal language of the printed word — speaks to us in mysterious ways. It’s not always clear just what type is saying, or how our reading experience is enhanced or undermined, however subtly, by slight variations in point size (the overall dimensions of the type), or the thickness and proportions of an [...]
Dan Yaccarino has an aficionado’s old-fashioned regard for picture-book artistry and a techno-geek’s new-fangled fascination with screen-based storytelling. He has illustrated more than thirty children’s books and is the creator of the Nick Jr. television series Oswald and the Emmy Award–winning Willa’s Wild Life, which currently airs on NBC and Qubo. Having recently played an [...]
Loosely based on a two-minute animation Sendak created with Jim Henson for Sesame Street in 1971, Bumble-Ardy revisits his long-standing preoccupations with childhood outsider-hood and saving-grace resilience, but with a new twist of extravagance taken straight from the operatic playbook of Giuseppe Verdi. We talked about all this at the artist’s kitchen table in a conversation recorded on May 12, 2011.
In 1935, as a twenty-year-old enrolled in New York’s National Academy of Design, the Caldecott-winning illustrator Marc Simont began the practice of carrying a sketchbook around with him for the purpose of making rapid-fire, impromptu drawings of people. Simont had recently moved to New York from Paris, the city of his birth, for the second [...]
A second look at Where the Wild Things Are? Forty years after Maurice Sendak’s early mid-career masterpiece first appeared on the fall 1963 Harper list, the suggestion still feels premature. Turning to the book now, the most striking thing about it remains its undatable, fresh-as-paint immediacy. However familiar the Sendak images have long since become, [...]
