The jacket as a selling tool, rather than as merely the protective wrapper (or “dust jacket”) it started out as more than a century ago, is hardly a new phenomenon. But as the major market for children’s books shifted from libraries and schools to retail from the 1970s onward, and as the publishing industry itself went corporate and redrew its organizational chart, cover designs rooted in editorial vision became a good deal rarer. Jackets produced as a group decision, with the marketing and sales force of the house taking the lead, became the new norm.

A devil’s advocate might interject here that children tend to love glittery lettering, shiny Mylar surfaces, and gold tinsel spines; and if amusing cheap tricks like these lead to a love of reading, why complain? Even if there is a disconnect between a book’s content and its cover design, does that really matter? I would say that it matters whenever the result is a book that feels sadly at war with itself (the oversized Peter Rabbit “sequel,” for example); and when a certain kind of cozy, intimate book for which there has long been a proven place falls by the wayside. The cover designs of Don Freeman’s Norman the Doorman (Viking) and Esphyr Slobodkina’s Caps for Sale (Harper) — to name two mid-twentieth-century picture books that attained “classic” status in time to withstand the current trend — would be unlikely to pass muster at any of today’s major publishing houses. True, both of these books date from the time when a new picture book was typically encountered up-close on a library shelf or table, not glimpsed at forty paces in a big box store, amid a crazy quilt of color-splashed alternatives. But whatever the market forces that happen to be at work, if the picture book as a genre is to thrive in the future, publishers will need to make books that have more to offer, from the cover on in, than calculated cleverness.

Consider two of the most beloved picture books of all time. What, besides their publisher (Harper) and editor (the late great Ursula Nordstrom), do Goodnight Moon and Where the Wild Things Are have in common? Stylistically, their illustrations look nothing alike and their story lines could hardly be more different. Still, these two perennial favorites do share one striking feature—and it is a pretty strange one when you stop to think about it: in both instances, the hero of the tale does not appear on the cover.

In a preliminary jacket sketch for Goodnight Moon, Clement Hurd painted a more static version of the cover image of the Great Green Room everyone knows. It’s pretty much the same design, except that in the sketch the bunny child perches on the windowsill, at the center of the picture. In the finished cover, the bunny has gone missing.

Nearly all picture book covers make it their first order of business to introduce readers to the hero of the tale; it seems only good sense to do so. But when it was time to finalize the cover for Goodnight Moon, Nordstrom took a counterintuitive approach that reflected her understanding of the text’s mantra-like magic string of words. It was she who instructed Hurd to take out the bunny.

Nordstrom’s argument went something like this. The bunny was not a hero in the ordinary sense but rather a placeholder for the child at home who, swept up in the spell of Margaret Wise Brown’s hypnotic lyric, would want to imagine himself inside the Great Green Room. The story, she told the illustrator, wasn’t really the bunny’s story. Viewed this way, the jacket image came to serve as a door left open for the reader to enter the room.

But what about Where the Wild Things Are? Did Nordstrom, or Maurice Sendak, omit Max from the cover image for similar reasons? The situation is not quite comparable. Max, after all, is arguably the quintessential picture-book hero. The archival record does not seem to account for what happened. We know that Max does not make an appearance in any of the several Wild Things cover studies preserved at Philadelphia’s Rosenbach Museum & Library, which houses Sendak’s archives. But we don’t know why, and so can only guess what Sendak and Nordstrom were thinking. My guess would be this: the cover image was meant to be another open door, and a signal to readers that they were going to have to venture inside—inside the book and inside themselves — if they wished to have what the cover art promised would be a strange and wonderful experience. This was a cover to daydream over, not art to digest in an instant. And I doubt it would make it past any present-day publishing committee.

Which is not to say that a cover has to be quiet and contemplative to rate as a success. Fred Marcellino came to picture-book making in the early 1990s at the tail end of a brilliant run as America’s preeminent trade fiction jacket artist of the previous two decades. Chances are great that at some point you have been stopped in your tracks by the indelible graphics he created for Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, Anne Tyler’s The Accidental Tourist, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and a host of other international bestsellers. No one knew better than Marcellino how to create a book jacket that made a big splash while also giving an incisive impression of the experience that lay in store for readers.

The funny thing is that when Marcellino turned to designing the cover of his first picture book, Puss in Boots (Farrar), a project he had dreamed of doing for years, he painted an irresistibly saucy, elegant close-up of the story’s egomaniacal cat — but forgot to leave room for the title or his name. Marcellino’s editor, Michael di Capua, came to the rescue with a bold solution that, he later reported, had been revealed to him in a dream: to leave the front cover entirely type-free. The graphically thrilling result, which set the stage for a trickster tale famous for its own surprising twists and turns, became the most talked-about juvenile cover design in recent memory. A second result was that Puss’s text-free headshot went on to inspire a Mount Rushmore of monumentally large — but overbearing and for the most part humorless — copycat jackets, especially for picture book biographies of JFK, Helen Keller, and other famous folk: the ultimate I’m-a-big-important-book covers. Which only goes to show that, whatever form it takes, the best picture book cover design is made from the inside out, as a strong, clear, highly particular response to a one-of-a-kind story worth discovering.

From the November/December 2012 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

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Not long ago, Claire Counihan, director of art and design at Holiday House and a type devotee from her student days at Pratt Institute, was planning a new series of easy readers to be illustrated by a variety of artists. Among Counihan’s first decisions was to select a sans serif type for the entire series. “Older, more accomplished readers,” she explains, “are better served with serif faces, which help the eye travel more swiftly from word to word by making a series of visual connections. But for new readers, word recognition, not speed, is the point. My editor, Grace Maccarone, and I considered the usual suspects: Gill Sans, Helvetica, Futura. In the end we picked Report School because it has a nice high x height (the height of the lowercase letters) and the letterforms are simple, with the a, d, and g, for example, formed from just a circle attached to either an ascender or a descender.”

On Holiday House’s inaugural I Like to Read series list was Paul Meisel’s See Me Run. Counihan continues: “Paul studied graphic design at Yale before turning to illustration, so type is always a big part of our discussions. Because Paul’s text was just eighty words long, we agreed that the initial point size I had chosen should be increased to better counterbalance the art. I kept the leading — the space between lines — the same, however. Too much leading and your eye plunges from line to line! For display, I picked Wild Ketchup, a typeface as bouncy and wacky as the dogs that run through the book.” See Me Run won a 2012 Theodor Seuss Geisel Award Honor.

Martha Rago’s approach to typography is rooted in classic design principles learned in the 1980s under mentors Nanette Stevenson, Atha Tehon, Riki Levinson, and Cynthia Krupat. Rago, executive art director at HarperCollins Children’s Books, believes that a successful book design “brings order and cohesion to the whole work” while also “matching the book’s emotional content.” As the designer of Night Driving, the first picture book illustrated by Peter McCarty, she noted the spare, poetic, and nostalgic tone of both John Coy’s text and McCarty’s pictures as well as the emotional impact of the story they told — a reminiscence of a boy’s nighttime drive in the company of his father. McCarty’s “shaded, tonal black and white images, rendered in grainy, textual graphic, and featuring round, sculptural forms” were, she says, “both warm and refined.” They referenced period cars, clothing, landmarks, and other details suggestive of the 1940s or early 1950s. With this in mind, Rago chose Gill Sans Light for the text, a sans serif font that had been designed by Eric Gill in 1931. “It is a humanist font, with warmth in its round forms, but also with an elegant, no-nonsense quality, especially in its lighter weights. I used fairly open leading to keep it readable and accessible, with a generous negative space around the blocks of text on each page, to face images framed in a margin of white. The display, Umbra, is also from the 1930s, a cut that relates to the forms of Gill Sans but with sharper verticals, and has a shadow effect that echoes the glow of light and shadow through the book’s imagery.”

While harmoniousness and understatement are clearly among the watchwords in picture-book type selection and design, the element of surprise also has a role to play. Lee Wade, vice president and publisher of Schwartz & Wade Books, recalls with delight her decision to set the copyright notice for Velma Gratch & the Way Cool Butterfly in the shape of a butterfly. She admires the boldness with which the great American graphic designer Paul Rand, in the picture book Sparkle and Spin, broke with the typographic scheme of the book to create a dedication page to remember. “The dedication,” Wade says, “appears in black hand-lettering in the top right-hand corner of the first page of the book. And since it is the only hand-lettering in the whole book, and seems to have been drawn with a black felt-tip pen, it looks like a personalized message to each reader — a design surprise for sure!”

The picture book has a long-standing tradition of hand-lettering, motivated (one assumes) by the basic desire cited by Wade to connect with young readers in the most intimate way possible. Examples from the 1920s and 1930s include William Nicholson’s Clever Bill, Wanda Gág’s Millions of Cats, and Jean de Brunhoff’s The Story of Babar (as originally published). More recently, Vera B. Williams’s “More More More” Said the Baby and Chris Raschka’s Yo! Yes? have continued in this vein. David Saylor, vice president and creative director of trade publishing at Scholastic, observes that a combination of hand-lettering and idiosyncratic type decisions that skew in the direction of hand-lettering are among the factors that define the special visual impact of Margaret Wise Brown and Clement Hurd’s Goodnight Moon.

“The design of Goodnight Moon,” Saylor notes, “is not complicated, but you can tell that careful thought went into it. You can see this in the decision to add color to the type on full-color pages; the sizing of the type so as to sit well on the page without competing with the artwork while still holding its own.

“The text font,” he says, is “a solid, very friendly sans serif (Martin Gothic Bold, I believe), not typical of the classic picture books that relied on serif fonts for some sort of authority. And the hand-lettering of the title type adds a nice warmth and almost casual feeling to the book. It all looks effortless — and inevitable.”

Playing Nice Donald Crews has always turned to the same font—Helvetica—for the titles and texts of his now-classic picture books for toddlers and preschoolers. Asked about this, he responds—half in rapture and half in disbelief at being called upon to state the obvious—with a question of his own: “What would we do without Helvetica? Helvetica lets us create simple and beautiful words, phrases, and paragraphs that meld perfectly with the geometric, iconographic imagery in modern design solutions. It conveys the essential information but doesn’t overwhelm the overall page, poster, or book. It plays nice.”

The path to reaching that nirvana of ultimate design integration is, of course, maddeningly different for each and every book. As the art director for Stephen Savage’s first picture book, Polar Bear Night, Saylor sensed the need for a strong sans serif to match the monumental feel of Savage’s linoleum block illustrations. “I wanted the type to feel definite and confident, the same way the bear cub feels as she ventures out to explore the world.” The font Saylor selected, Neutraface Text Bold, was inspired by letter designs of the twentieth-century American architect Richard Neutra, and it served to accentuate the retro flavor of Savage’s art.

Given the inherent playfulness of the picture book as a genre, it was inevitable that type would one day assume a more kinetic and central role than the supporting one usually assigned to it. Iconoclastic artists of the last century, from French poet Guillaume Apollinaire to American painter Jasper Johns, produced modernist magic by shining a maverick light on the letterforms in a quixotic quest for the message embedded in the medium. And while news of their experiments was slow to reach Children’s Book Land (surprise, surprise), when it finally did make an impression — most notably via the typographic high jinks of The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales, designed by Molly Leach — designers took note of a picture book that had clearly opened up new territory for everyone. As Laurent Linn, art director at Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, observes, type in The Stinky Cheese Man not only harmonized with the art but also became “an integral part of the illustrations.”

It was significant, he says, that Leach selected Bodoni, a classic font, for the body type, rather than a showier or more outlandish choice. “Using a single, well-known font established a solid foundation, which in turn helped to ground the overall design within which the illustrations were quite energetic and zany. But the real creative genius lies in how the type was manipulated and placed to create real emotion and energy and humor. You don’t need to read a word to understand what each particular character means to say.” For a pre-reader, Linn adds, the type becomes almost as big a part of the visual experience as the illustrations.

A picture book Linn himself recently designed shows how design ideas, including those learned from The Stinky Cheese Man, can travel and morph to suit the unique challenges posed by a very different kind of project. For I, Too, Am America, Linn wanted a way to signal poet Langston Hughes’s contrasting vision of the prejudiced time in which he lived and the future that he hoped would bring racial equality. In addition to what became an exhaustive search for a single typeface that felt appropriate for both the historical and contemporary scenes evoked by Hughes and depicted by illustrator Bryan Collier, Linn wished to draw a clear graphic distinction between the two time periods through a contrast in the type presentation.

“For the first [historical] part, I set the type in white, framed boxes within the illustrations. I also placed the art itself in a similar, traditional frame. Then, for the second half of the book, I got rid of the frame around the art and had the illustrations go fully to the paper’s edge, so that we no longer see the book’s world through a frame, but are fully in it. I also eliminated the text boxes. In this part, the text flows freely, curved and floating on pieces of paper that swirl through the air, each incorporated into the art. The type goes from being outside of the action to being a part of the action, just as the reader does.”

And as readers of The Stinky Cheese Man have been doing now for years.

All Types of Type

Goodnight Moon (Harper & Row, 1947) by Margaret Wise Brown; illus. by Clement Hurd
Night Driving (Holt, 1996) by John Coy; illus. by Peter McCarty
Freight Train (Greenwillow, 1978) by 
Donald Crews
Harbor (Greenwillow, 1982) by Donald Crews
The Story of Babar, the Little Elephant (Random, 1933) by Jean de Brunhoff
Millions of Cats (Coward-McCann, 1928) by Wanda Gág
I, Too, Am America (Simon, 2012) by Langston Hughes; illus. by Bryan Collier
Velma Gratch & the Way Cool Butterfly (Schwartz & Wade/Random, 2007) by Alan Madison; illus. by Kevin Hawkes
See Me Run [I Like to Read] (Holiday, 2011) 
by Paul Meisel
Clever Bill (Doubleday, Page & Co., 1926) by William Nicholson
Sparkle and Spin: A Book About Words (Harcourt, 1957) by Ann Rand; illus. by 
Paul Rand
Yo! Yes? (Orchard, 1993) by Chris Raschka
The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales (Viking Penguin, 1992) by Jon Scieszka; illus. by Lane Smith
Polar Bear Night (Scholastic, 2004) by Lauren Thompson; illus. by Stephen Savage
“More More More” Said the Baby: 
3 Love Stories (Greenwillow, 1990) by 
Vera B. Williams

From the September/October 2012 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

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Dan Yaccarino in his studio. Photo courtesy of Dan Yaccarino.

LEONARD S. MARCUS: How involved were you in designing the interactive e-book based on your board book, Five Little Pumpkins?

DAN YACCARINO: I would get the latest version and give the developers suggestions about the sound effects, music, and the “functionality” of the character—what the character can be made to do.

LSM: Who are these developers? What is their background?

DY: They are a combination of people who have come from publishing, film, TV, and games. I’ve worked in books for twenty years and in TV for at least a dozen years. It’s a convergence of all these media, and the result will be something that is greater than the sum of their parts.

LSM: Among your own picture books, are there those you think would make good e-books and others that would not make the transition especially well?

DY: There are definitely some books that should not become e-books! In general, they are the ones that tell a linear story, like Unlovable. When kids get older, they want to sit down and delve into a story. So there might be no good reason to introduce functionality—and you might end up with gratuitous moments when something moves or makes a sound simply because it can be made to do so, rather than because doing so moves your character forward. On the other hand, picture book e-books seem to work very well for books for younger kids—for concept books or early read-alouds like Five Little Pumpkins. An example of another kind of book that would be right for an interactive e-book is Go, Go America: 50 States of Fun. It’s a book of facts about the United States. I see a lot of opportunities to play around and make connections. Also remember: right now, we’re in the beginning stage when lots of pre-existing books are being retrofitted as e-books. In five years, e-books won’t look anything like the ones being made now. But we have to go through these first steps now.

LSM: Is there anything to be said for the tactile experience that traditional books offer, and that electronic devices, even if they are “hand-held,” don’t?

DY: I still love print books. I love the weight of the book in my hand and the paper. I just started my next book, and I try to do at least two books a year. The whole “e-book thing” is coming, but it’s not here yet. But I look at the talk about the superiority of printed books to books on screens as almost a fetish. When Gutenberg came along, people probably said the same thing about scrolls. Or even earlier: “I just miss the weight of that clay tablet in my lap!” Storytelling has been given a new form, and someone in my position is going to be excited about that.

LSM: Why, from this standpoint, even bother with a book?

DY: Because it’s a good vehicle for showcasing a character’s personality. But if the character Curious George were being developed today, I don’t know if I would lead with the book. Maybe I would start with a game.

LSM: Can you be more specific about how you as an illustrator might go about creating dramatic interest in an e-book as compared to a print picture book?

DY: Let’s say that you want your character to be surprised. In the traditional book form, it’s a page turn. You know, he’s walking down the road, and what does he see?…You turn the page and it’s a giant monster or whatever. The page-turn is as high tech as we get with books. In television or film, you might have a quick cut, and frame the scene so that it looks overwhelming to this tiny character. In interactive e-books…I don’t know yet what the equivalent technique would be. That’s the exciting thing. Maybe you tap the character and it grows. Or you tap it and the frame moves. We’re still inventing that language. In a picture book, you can do gatefolds. You can do pop-ups. You can do pull-tabs. We’ve pushed all that to the limit. With e-books, we’re just at the point where filmmakers were more than 100 years ago. It’s exciting to be part of that new beginning.

LSM: Pop-ups are an old way to make images actually move on the page. Do you think that pop-up books in particular will pale—and date—especially rapidly in contrast to the new media, in which animation is a given?

DY: I can’t imagine Robert Sabuda’s work ever looking quaint. It’s so beautiful and intelligent. But there will be fewer “average” pop-up books. Books in general will continue to exist, but they will become more special. They’re going to become beautiful objects, less utilitarian than they are now.

LSM: Granted that e-Book Land is fascinating new territory, is anything lost by relying so heavily on technology for storytelling for children?

DY: The main thing is that we have more options now. My daughter, who is thirteen, just saw the film Hugo and is now reading the book it is based on, Brian Selznick’s The Invention of Hugo Cabret. On Sundays in our house we have a rule: no screens. That applies to me too, unfortunately! We have a big family dinner and spend a lot of the day at home. It’s a release from technology. As a parent you need to put limits on the devices.

Think of a three-year-old and Five Little Pumpkins. There is going to be interactivity with the e-book: trying out the functions, listening to the music and narration, and scrolling. The text is an old rhyme, and if the child is sitting on the parent’s lap and is saying the rhyme too, there is the interactivity of reciting the words with the person who’s reading the book. So, there are different kinds of interactivity and I don’t think that one is better than the other. If kids stare blankly at a screen, that’s not the device’s fault. I don’t see parents sharing interactive e-books with their children. It tends to be more of a solitary activity. But that could happen. And as I say, as a parent you can always turn off the narrator and just read the story.

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At nine, Bumble-Ardy is older by far than either Mickey or Max, and he bursts on the scene of this brightly lit faux melodrama with a Dickensian backstory of parental neglect and an outsized craving for birthday cake and kisses. Who could begrudge the slobbering little wise guy his boorish (boarish?) behavior? Why, the whole world, of course.

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.

LEONARD S. MARCUS: It looks as though you had fun making your new book, Bumble-Ardy. Even the title suggests that.

MAURICE SENDAK: Actually, I didn’t. It was a very difficult time. I was working on it when my partner and friend was dying of cancer. We set up a room in the house to be like a hospital room. Eugene died, and then I had bypass surgery. I was doing the book to stay sane while all this was going on.

LSM: It’s a book about someone—a pig-child—who insists on having a birthday party even if he has to give it to himself.

MS: Well, one of the beauties of being an artist is that you can create a whole new world, with circumstances that are better in your invented world than they are in the real world.

I had been reading a fabulous book (The Man Verdi, by Frank Walker) about Verdi, whom I adore. Verdi was in his late seventies and had written what he said would be his last opera, Aida, when from out of nowhere a young poet called Arrigo Boito came into his life. Boito had composed a wonderful opera about Mephistopheles and was going to write another opera about Nero, and he gave himself up to Verdi in collaboration. A whole new world of Italian music was springing up, and Verdi was seen as old. Boito got Verdi all excited about the possibility of doing another opera, another kind of opera. In fact, Verdi composed his two best operas, Otello and Falstaff, in his eighties. And so I thought that if I were going into old age I would want to do what Verdi did, which is to write extraordinary things, and to really find myself. I’ll be eighty-three shortly, and I want to be renewed. We all want to be renewed, don’t we? Bumble-Ardy was a step toward renewal.

LSM: How do you see the hero of the story?

MS: Bumble-Ardy is a very wicked little child as far as I’m concerned. He’s not to be trusted. He’s never given permission to have a party, but he has one anyway, even though sweet Adeline doesn’t want anybody to come to the house, to drink her special drinks. Adeline is a simple, ordinary woman—wonderful and healthy and strong—and she loves him in spite of everything. Does he love her? “You bet!” he says, as if that were an appropriate answer. But can any child love who has been so mishandled by his original parents? Thank God that Bumble-Ardy’s parents are dead so we don’t have to wonder what they did to him. We only know that they were famous, and famous people have unhappy children for the most part. They don’t have the time to take care of them. So he’s a troubled pig-boy, a kid you’ve got to watch.

LSM: Maybe Adeline expects too much. I thought he gave the perfect answer when she becomes upset with him and, desperate to calm her down, he says, “I promise! I swear! I won’t ever turn ten!”

MS: Yes, I like that! For me that’s the best line in the book. He thinks that’s really a promise. He’s definitely an unhappy child.

LSM: It seems that you were looking back at some of your earlier books in this one. “Some swill pig” sounds a lot like “some swell pup.” And one of the party guests—although you have made him a pig—bears a striking resemblance to the Oliver Hardy bakers of In the Night Kitchen.

MS: That same pig appeared in another project I worked on just a few years ago, a staging of Peter and the Wolf, which I translated into Yiddish and sang on a stage in New York City. Thank God very few people knew I was doing it! But the kids in the audience loved it—even though it was all in Yiddish. Instead of a wolf it was a pig: “ein Schwein.” That is the pig that you say looks like Oliver Hardy. I liked him so much in my Peter and the Wolf that I wanted him for this book, too.

LSM: The colors in Bumble-Ardy are among the warmest and brightest of all your books.

MS: It was not a conscious choice but, yes, there is a palette in this book that is different from that of my other books. It’s Verdi-esque. Verdi was such an enormous help to me as I worked on the book. I had lost my sister recently, too, which meant that my whole family was gone. I was the baby of the family. There were five Sendaks and there were five Wild Things, and now there’s only one Sendak, and he’s about to bite the dust, too! Life, as I said before, was very difficult at that time and so it was natural that there would be a change in the look of things. Also, I was very impressed with my own strength in doing this under the circumstances in which I was living.

LSM: There is a house without walls in We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy, and Bumble-Ardy lives in one, too. Do you see the two books as somehow linked?

MS: I never thought of Bumble-Ardy in that way. But I still have that same deep feeling for children who are in dire trouble. I see  Bumble-Ardy as a lonely, unhappy kid who is doing the very best he can to be in the world, to have a party. I was ungainly. I was heavy. I probably looked like a little pig. I don’t know. You can start making up any kind of story if you want to, as you well know.

LSM: The party scenes in Bumble-Ardy look like something out of a Coney Island sideshow.

MS: That big face on the midway at Coney Island. I loved that! We lived only two subway stations away from Coney Island, and we used to go to the boardwalk and beach there very, very frequently—my mother, father, sister, brother, and I. For my father the one calamity was that my brother and sister and I never learned to swim. My father, who was very macho, was a strong swimmer and was terribly disappointed to have children who didn’t swim. Once when my mother was sitting in a beach chair—I can still see the big umbrella—she called to my father, “Throw them in! Throw them in! They’ll swim!” So he did. Then he looked down, and there were the three Sendak children lying perfectly still underwater, not fighting for life! So he had to schlep us up and dump us on the sand. He was deeply resentful and disappointed that he had three dopey kids who just lay there. They weren’t fighting to live. Somehow that got into this book, too.

LSM: Did you like to play dress-up?

MS: No, that wasn’t one of my things. All I liked to do when I was a kid was draw. My childhood was like my adult life: drawing pictures with my brother, putting the comics up on the glass window, and tracing the characters onto tracing paper or drawing paper and then coloring them. That and making things was all we ever did. My brother and I built the entire New York World’s Fair of 1939 in miniature out of wax. The floor of our room was covered with little waxen buildings. Nobody else could come in.

LSM: Maybe that was your real goal.

MS: Oh, it was fantastic. My brother, who was older, was the gifted one, much more talented than I. Most of the work was his. I was his assistant.

My sister at that point had her own room. She also had innumerable boyfriends. I had a yo-yo collection that was beyond belief, and the reason I had it was mostly that I would stand in the doorway of the living room watching
her and her boyfriend. Finally she caught on how to get this kid out of
the way. Give him a yo-yo!

Then one day my sister abandoned me at the 1939 World’s Fair, and that incident is the essence of In the Night Kitchen. The book is a reenactment of standing in front of the place where bread was baked by little men in white caps—Oliver Hardy–type men—as they waved to you, and the smell of bread and cake pouring out of the building. I was standing there with hundreds of other people waving back at the little midgets dressed like bakers when I turned around and my sister was gone! The next thing I know I’m screaming and crying and policemen are taking me to a big place with tons of kids who had all been abandoned like me. At least I was old enough to give them a name and an address.

LSM: How could she have done that?

MS: She was with a date. She had had to take me but she didn’t think twice about leaving me. I was allowed to call my mother from the police station, and my mother was crying, and my sister was already home, and I said, “She did it to me, she did it to me!” Then I got into the police car and I was being driven home and I said, “Please put on the siren when you get to the corner of West 6^th Street.” And the police were so eager to calm me down that they did turn the siren on, and when they stopped in front of the building everybody was looking out the window, calling, “Moishe, Moishe, poor little Moishe!” And then I went upstairs and the first thing I did was point to my sister and say, “She did it on purpose!” Later I heard my father clobbering her. It was a great day! If they had asked me I would have become a policeman then and there. Then everyone could have been spared my meshuggeneh books.

LSM: Might there be a little bit of Ursula Nordstrom in Adeline, who steps in almost as a mother to give Bumble-Ardy the things he needs: not everything he needs, but nonetheless an awful lot of what matters?

MS: Could be. She gives him the basics: love and consideration. And she forgives him at the end. I have to say that that was not in my mind. But I’m grateful that it was in your mind because it makes a kind of sense. Even to the big body, the clumsy affection. It was clumsy, but it was real affection. How could I have lived without Ursula? It’s amazing that that happened. God, I had great people in my life. Bumble-Ardy looks like a happy book. That’s the funniest thing about it. But this was survival. I was working very hard to survive.

—Leonard S. Marcus

The post It’s My Party: An Interview with Maurice Sendak appeared first on The Horn Book.

Marc Simont at his drawing board in November, 2003.

Armed with his small “Scribble-In” brand sketchbooks purchased at a five-and-ten-cent store near the Academy, Simont drew in subways, bars, and other public places around town where, as he says, it was possible to work unnoticed, like a “bug in a fold in the curtain.” Sketching in this way became a lifelong habit. It was also while at the Academy, during the years 1935–1938, that Simont formed a close friendship with fellow student Robert McCloskey. In 1938, both men’s fledgling art careers were given a lift when an instructor hired the pair to assist in the painting of a series of murals for the Lever Brothers offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts. At about the same time, an acquaintance asked Simont to make a number of drawings to accompany a children’s book manuscript he was sending around to publishers. By this round-about means, Simont’s work first came to the attention of the juveniles editor at Dodd, Mead, and a major phase of his extraordinary career was launched.

None of the thousands of drawings contained in the two hundred sketchbooks Simont has compiled over nearly seven decades has ever before been published. What follows is a small (and altogether wonderful) sampling culled from the artist’s first, bug-in-the-curtain student days.

At first I was very bold when sketching people in public, looking straight at them without embarrassment. All that changed the day the man I was sketching across from me on the subway came over and ripped the page right off my Scribble-In book. The experience left me shaken, and I realized that if I was to continue sketching in public I would need to be less conspicuous.

During the summers of ’36 and ’37 I was an assistant to Jerry Farnsworth in his painting class in Provincetown. Mrs. Noyes (above), one of the students, would arrive in the morning in her town car. She would wait in her immaculate white dress while her chauffeur set up her easel and squeezed out the paints onto her palette.

This lady was just passing through.

Both these young women were students at the academy.

In the afternoon at Schrafft’s Restaurant on Fifth Avenue, tired shoppers would rest their feet and enjoy refreshments.

Playing checkers in Washington Square Park after dark was a popular pastime.

For two cents you could read about the Spanish Civil War.

A deck hand on The Normandie when it docked in New York after its maiden voyage.

When depressed, I made self-portraits in the hope they would exorcise the depression.

Bob McCloskey was mechanically inclined. (fixing his camera, above)

Capturing the essence of movement, be it in dance, baseball, or running to catch a bus, was always a challenge. These folks are doing a dance craze of the time — the shag.

All drawings by Marc Simont, circa 1935–1939. © 2004 by Marc Simont.

The post Marc Simont’s Sketchbooks, The Art Academy Years: 1935–1938 appeared first on The Horn Book.

One reason that Where the Wild Things Are feels so fresh today is that in fashioning the illustrations Sendak largely avoided timebound visual references. The aim seems to have been for a book whose impact would be classical, not contemporary. The massive, hooded automobiles and fedora-crowned men of Robert McCloskey’s Make Way for Ducklings, for example, connect that book to a particular bygone era, however beguiling it remains as a piece of storytelling. Stylistically, McCloskey’s book just as plainly belongs within the anecdotal realist tradition of artists like Thomas Hart Benton and Norman Rockwell. Similarly, the flat, bright collage illustrations of Ezra Jack Keats’s Snowy Day look airily “modern” in the postwar, international-style manner of, say, Leo Lionni’s iconic The Family of Man cover design. For that matter, Sendak’s own punched-up, slantwise drawings for Very Far Away (1957) have a distinctively fifties flavor. They are a blast from the same past that gave us the frothy mischief of Hilary Knight’s illustrations for Eloise.

But in Wild Things, Sendak’s style is all his own. The self-assured draftsmanship, aquiver with force fields of elegant crosshatching, is matched by the solid presence of Max himself. Whereas the drifty-dreamy hero of Kenny’s Window (1956) is never going to be a contender, Max already is one, and he carries himself with the authoritative swagger of a defending bantamweight champ. A “private boat” tumbles by for Max precisely because he is going places. By 1963, with five Caldecott Honors under his belt, Sendak was going places, too—including, on weekends, to the Westport, Connecticut, home of his Harper comrades-in-arms Ruth Krauss and Crockett Johnson, the latter of whom proposed rumpus as the word for what by then had emerged as the book’s wordless centerpiece. Connecticut proved to be an inspirational mother lode: the idea for Max’s wolf suit came, in part, from the leopard pajamas worn by the son of another Westport author friend, Doris Orgel. The jungle setting owed something to a nursery mural that an early Sendak mentor, Leonard Weisgard, had painted in the Weisgard family’s home in Roxbury.

None of which has ever had much bearing, of course, on readers’ actual experience of the book. What little we see of Max’s home— a plain wooden banister and staircase in one scene, a plain wooden doorway and child’s bed in another—are no more old-fashioned-looking today than they were in 1963, the heyday of Jetson fun futurism. Sendak’s Wild Things pencil studies, drawn on tracing paper and now at Philadelphia’s Rosenbach Museum and Library, show a systematic paring away of scene-setting bric-a-brac. While the very fact that Max has a room of his own suggests a middleclass background or better for the boy, his socioeconomic status recedes from consideration as beside the point. What matters about Max is the look on his face—the gamut of expressions from grimace to grin that his faux-feral wolf suit slyly manages both to undercut and intensify.

With the benefit of hindsight, we can also see in Max’s flamboyant costume one of several hints of Sendak’s subsequent involvement in the theater. The palm trees of Wild Things Island have the tenuous look of stage flats. Max and his minions mug and strut like actors playing to the last row as they flaunt their terrible teeth, claws, and eyeballs. In terms of the book Sendak was after, the staged look of the art, with its flattened, all but featureless backgrounds, thrusts Max and company into the foreground, which is to say toward us. Wild Things is a happening—how sixties!—but one that keeps happening because the confrontation it sets into motion is as much with the reader as it is between the Wild Things and Max.

Other elements of the art and design also keep the focus on the level of felt experience. As Claire Counihan (art director at Holiday House) has pointed out, Cheltenham Bold, the turn-of-the-century typeface chosen for Wild Things, serves as a “counterpoint of calm” to the illustrations’ “rampant exuberance.” The font makes way for the fireworks. According to Counihan, Cheltenham Bold has much the same appeal for today’s designers as it did for their sixties colleagues. From the reader’s point of view, it quietly underscores the impression of the book as a perennial. Sendak’s finished artwork, also at the Rosenbach, surprises viewers by the softness and lyricism of the watercolor painting, a range of delicate tonal effects that counterbalance the strong, hard feelings the story lays bare. In 1963, much of this subtlety was lost in reproduction, as the camera separation process then in general use was not ideally suited to capturing nuanced gradations of color. By 1988, when Harper published its twenty-fifth anniversary edition of the book, the technology had leapfrogged forward with the advent of color laser scanning, and readers were indeed granted a second look that came substantially closer to Sendak’s original intention.

But is Wild Things, then, simply and utterly a timeless creation, trailing no trace evidence of its origins in one of recent history’s most tumultuous decades? No, not really. The early 1960s was the cultural moment not just of the Wild Things’ invention but also of New Yorker cartoonist Edward Koren’s shaggy-haired kindred characters. It was a time when all sorts of people were shouting “No!” to all sorts of things. As for Wild Things itself, as Claire Counihan has noted, the display type used on the cover for the title and author’s name was selected for its “hot, very sixties” quality, as a signal to the world that here was “something new.” Unlike Cheltenham Bold, the popularity of this type waned with changes in fashion; as it happens, it has been revived lately by designers with a taste for sixties retro.

Looking past this typographic survival from the Age of Aquarius, Where the Wild Things Are, more than any other picture book of the last half century, also reengages the genre in the spirit of its late-nineteenth-century inventor, Randolph Caldecott. Max and the Wild Things galloping across the page are Caldecott’s ebullient John Gilpin and Three Jovial Huntsmen revivified. Max in his wolf suit is a version of Baby Bunting dressed in a “rabbit skin.” As Sendak writes in his essay on the illustrator, Caldecott captures Baby Bunting, looking perplexed as she observes some rabbits on a hillside, in the moment of realization that the “lovely, cuddly, warm costume she’s wrapped up in” once belonged to similar flesh-and-blood creatures now dead. Sendak’s Max of course is not a baby, and he is not so much perplexed as outraged. But the serious feeling for life’s unfairnesses—and ironies—is the same, as is the assumption that the picture book is a worthy art form in which to dramatize them. Happily, salvation for Max lies in a simple act of undivided attention, the “magic trick” of staring his demons down “without blinking once.” After forty years, Wild Things still leaves readers with the tantalizing sense that to lose oneself in the right book might do the trick almost as well.

From the November/December 2003 issue of The Horn Book Magazine: Special Issue: Sendak at 75.

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