The Gifts of Chris Raschka

n our living room hangs a painting from Mysterious Thelonious, inscribed inventively to the editor. A woman at a local poster shop suggested we frame it in four different colors: violet, Chinese red, celery green, lemony yellow. The piece dances Klee-like on the wall — fine art as much as “illustration,” and the essence of Chris Raschka. Like Monk’s Misterioso, which inspired the book, the piece is joyous, joyful, joy-inducing.

Mysterious, to be sure.

And, as always with Chris’s work, musical.

Also in my collection: a tetrahedron he made from cast-off paintings for The Blushful Hippopotamus, a cube constructed from outtakes of John Coltrane’s Giant Steps, a kitten from Like Likes Like, a beautiful small watercolor of birches sent as a get-well message, a birthday greeting performed by the boys from Yo! Yes?, Chris’s second book.

From his public beginnings, in the early nineties, it was clear to many that Chris would take children’s literature to new places — in both words and pictures. It’s about the books he’s written as well as illustrated that I can speak. Look, for instance, at Can’t Sleep, at those magical floating windows, at the way the words soothe and play simultaneously, or at his most recent work, Five for a Little One, for younger children than his earlier books, classically spare (whether he used Yukon golds or red russets for the potato-stamped illustrations has yet to be revealed), its language suffused with fatherly feeling. These books are of a piece, as if they’d been hummed into existence.

Now, I doubt that many people will have been treated to Chris’s notebooks on Wagner, sketched during intermissions and subway rides uptown after the Metropolitan Opera’s most recent performances of Der Ring des Nibelungen (for which he stood nineteen hours!). We never discussed publishing them, and most likely he never thought to ask. He’s unassuming that way. . . . To understand something personally is his pleasure; to make art of the understanding is his work. The selling of either is never his goal.

Seeing these notebooks — as well as early dummies of many books (Charlie Parker Played Be Bop came unheralded in the mail for the price of a single first-class stamp; the dummy measured just two-and-a-half inches square) — seeing ideas spin free one from the other, seeing color palettes change and techniques evolve, has been an ongoing gift to me. The man behind them, gifted and gifting, is simply a genius. His book view is like no other’s. His recognition this year delights me, not least because genius isn’t easy. And is its own reward. Winning the Caldecott won’t change him a jot.

When Chris and Lydie Raschka’s son, Ingo, was ten, Chris devised a scavenger hunt for a birthday party (seven girls, three boys), the clues of which led them around and about Manhattan’s Upper West Side, to the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument, beneath Joan of Arc on her bronze horse, past the sign reading, “Babe lived here,” and finally back to home base:

Now you’ve seen the neighborhood,
All the best of all the good.
Seeing sights can be a hobby.
Now find treasure in our lobby.

For many years I have worked in beyond-Manhattan buildings with no lobbies — from bedroom offices, actually — and have found treasure from Chris most often in my mailbox: out-of-the-blue book dummies like dress rehearsals, each nearly ready for opening night. Oh, we fiddle, play and re-play, but the light-fingered and whimsical impromptu that is Waffle, the choral richness of New York Is English, Chattanooga Is Creek, was there for my hearing from the start. Lucky me, to unwrap such gifts.

I treasure them. Bravo to you, my friend, and thanks.

Even after retirement, editor Richard Jackson has more than twenty books in the chute, scheduled into 2009. At least one is a new Chris Raschka.