| From
the November/December 2003 issue of The Horn Book Magazine
Editorial
Happy Once, Happy Twice
 ome
people are really hard to shop for. So when Martha Parravano, inspired
by the rich discussion at this year’s May Hill Arbuthnot Honor
Lecture, suggested we do a special issue in honor of the lecturer’s
seventy-fifth birthday — and the fortieth of his most famous
child (see Leonard Marcus’s birthday card for him,
page 703) — I quickly agreed.
You can read Maurice Sendak’s Arbuthnot lecture,
“Descent into Limbo,” in the Summer/Fall 2003 issue
of ALA’s Children & Libraries (and at this writing
you can also watch it on the web at mitworld.mit.edu/play/65/),
but that was just the centerpiece of a splendid day. The morning
was devoted to “A Sendak Symposium,” led off by Gregory
Maguire, whose electric, highly visual inquiry into the Sendak oeuvre
is here translated (mostly) into print. The day was hosted by MIT,
sponsored by ALA’s Association for Library Service to Children,
and devised by two grand institutions — the Cambridge (MA)
Public Library and Children’s Literature New England. We hope
this issue will be just as memorable, and something the birthday
boy can take home from the party.
Each special issue of the Horn Book requires
extra work from everyone on the staff. I’d like to recognize
them here, and I’d particularly like to thank our designer,
Lolly Robinson, who solved design dilemmas small and large, brilliantly.
We are also indebted to Sendak’s assistants Jennifer Lavonier
and Lynn Caponera, helpful all along the way.
I was in college when I first read Higglety
Pigglety Pop!: Or, There Must Be More to Life, and it remains
my favorite of Sendak’s work. But it wasn’t until some
years later that I read an essay on it and learned that it was a
story about death. Of course, I said, mentally smacking my forehead
and waving a bit wistfully to my retreating innocence. But that’s
the thing about Sendak and the thing about great art: whether you
know a little or a lot, it still works. As Sendak says in my interview
with him (beginning on page 687), it makes you chew. In
preparing this issue we examined dozens of the artist’s books,
handling them over and over as research, editing, and production
progressed. Not to take Sendak’s metaphor too far, but there
was an awful lot to chew on — a feast of images, dreams, recurring
questions, and meditations, each one inflected differently but all
born of the same restless yet disciplined imagination.
As for that self-portrait chosen by Sendak for
our cover: doesn’t he look like himself? Interestingly, the
creature on the cover is as enigmatic as the creature in the dream
Sendak describes in the interview: does he want to eat you up, or
does he want to play? Forget about the claws and tail (and tongue,
if you can) and concentrate on the eyes: that’s our man. We
hope we’ve done him equal justice.
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