Every writer leaves bits and pieces of his own story in his books whether he knows it or not, so I thought I’d look through some of Ludwig Bemelmans’ books to see what he says about himself here and there. The trouble is, I find a paragraph that shows what a good story teller he is and half an hour later I realize that I’ve just gone on reading and haven’t written a word about Ludwig.

I’ll begin again, with My War with the United States, the first book he published for adults, after he had written Hansi and The Golden Basket for children. Those books showed that he could tell a simple story with clarity and sparkle which with his pictures made the whole book sing.

The chapters of My War with the United States were translated from the pages of the German diary he kept during his service in the United States Army. He must have been about eighteen and he had been in this country only two years. Here are unforgettable characterizations and descriptions that show an eager young mind learning to understand the American character, so different from the German, and recording pictures of everything he saw.

The Field Hospital, Unit N, to which I belong, was recruited in New York. The men are mostly college students or graduates, not ordinary privates. Some of them are older, and professional men; for example, the one who has his bed next to mine in the barracks is a Professor of French at one of the large universities … I am very glad of his friendship; he seems to take the whole business we are engaged in as if it did not concern him, as a vacation, never has a serious thought … But he is happy, and most so when we push a wagon with bread from the bakery back to the barracks every evening; then he sings and says that this is the best time he has ever had, that he IS completely happy. Perhaps he has been in some terrible life and now feels happy because he is away from that. He tells me that Schopenhauer states with authority that Happiness is the absence of Unhappiness, which is so obvious and foolish that a backward child could make this observation, but he says I must think about it. I looked this up and it is right; only Schopenhauer says the absence of ‘Schmerz,’ which is pain, and in German the word pain covers more than just pain — it means sorrow, trouble, unhappiness. And so Professor Beardsley is perhaps right…

In our free time we go to motion pictures and entertainments for the soldiers. One is as dull as the other. On Sundays we go to churches, and afterwards people ask us to their houses for dinner. In all these houses is a soft warm feeling, a desire to be good to us, and the food is simple, good, and plentiful. We also take walks together, and Beardsley has pointed out a piece of scenery which he named ‘Beautiful Dreck.’ It was a bitter landscape composed of railroad tracks, signal masts, coal sheds, a factory building and some freight cars, a gas tank, and in the background some manufacturing plant, black with soot. Some of the windows of this building were lit by a vivid gray-blue light and yellow flames shot out of several chimneys. ‘That is,’ he said, ‘beautiful Dreck, and we have lots of it in America.’

Dreck is a German word for filth and dirt but it also means manure, mud, dirty fingers. It is a large, able word, patois, almost bad; it covers all that was before us, and thereby it can be seen that Professor Beardsley knows much. He told me St. Louis had a particularly good portion of ‘Beautiful Dreck,’ but that the best he knew could be seen in the Jersey Meadows, where it covers almost a whole countryside.

I wish we had space to quote the story of the time one of the prisoners he was guarding took Ludwig’s gun to pieces to show him how it worked and Ludwig couldn’t put it together again. It’s all very unorthodox and very soberly told as true comedy should be. And there is deep tragedy here too as must be in an army hospital for the insane. The young man observed and studied about it all and his judgments were wise and kind. There is a beautiful chapter “Tirol in Buffalo,” full of almost unbearable homesickness, that gives the Austrian background the boy loved.

In short, if you would know the young Ludwig you could not ask for a better script than My War with the United States. The diary must have been written in 1917–18. The book was published in 1937. The twenty years between had been crammed with living and working — the banquet manager, storing up more tall tales of hotel life, the artist perfecting his own style of drawing, the traveler shuttling from New York to the West Coast or from New York to Europe and back again. His restless energy can never let him alone — he has so many skills that he is driven from one to another and in between he writes a play or opens a restaurant or takes a Mediterranean cruise — it’s all the same to Ludwig.

Hansi (1934) and The Golden Basket (1936) and My War with the United States (1937) established Ludwig as an import ant writer-artist or artist-writer with a cosmopolitan genius all his own. He has written many brilliant, witty, amusing books from then to now. But Father, Dear Father (1953) is my favorite and to me is the best portrait of Ludwig today — probably because it is largely the story of a trip to Europe with his small daughter, Barbara, and a remarkable miniature poodle, Little Bit. Barbara asks searching questions and her father’s answers give background, philosophy and hopes. Here is a sample:

“‘Some of the people you write about are awful — most are.’

“‘Yes, some are awful, and I have portrayed them as best I can. I have written some very bitter social satire.’

‘“Well, I’m sorry, Poppy, but I never got that. You make them all charming and too, too utterly divine.’

“‘I’m not a prosecutor. I don’t condemn. I put the form, the shape, the being, on canvas and on paper, and I let the reader decide for himself.’

“‘Well, maybe you start out that way, and then, no matter how awful, you fall in love with your characters, and they all turn mushy and nobody is really bad — they’re just odd. In fact, sometimes the bad are much more lovable than the good. And now that I come to think of it, almost always. Anyway, it’s not social satire.’

‘“Well, maybe it’s not social satire but comedy of manners and in a world in which there are less and less manners, especially among the young, it’s a very hard thing to write. As for hating people, I’m sorry, but I find it hard to hate anybody, and impossible to hate anybody for long.’”

Another day they had been talking about Ludwig’s Austrian accent which he has never lost, and Barbara asked:

‘“Do you think in German?’

‘“That’s another thing that puzzles me — no, I don’t.’

‘“In English?’

‘“No, I don’t think in either. I think in pictures, because I see everything in pictures, and then translate them into English. I tried to write in German; I can’t. I made an attempt to translate one of my books, and it was very difficult and sounded awful. Then the Swiss publishers Scherz engaged an old lady, the widow of a German general, to translate the book, and when I read it I said to myself, “How odd! It’s another book.” I liked it, but I never could have done it myself.’

‘“What do you mean by pictures?’

‘“Well, when I write, “ A man comes to the door,” I see it as a movie — I see the door, precisely a certain kind of door, and I see the man.’

‘“In color? Do you dream in color?’

‘“That depends on the subject. Happy dreams are usually in color, especially flying dreams.’…

‘“You love painting more than writing?’

‘“Yes, I would rather paint than write, for writing is labor.’

‘“Do you think you could be a great painter?’

‘“Yes, the very best.’

‘“But why aren’t you?’

“‘Because I love living too much. If I were unhappy as Toulouse-Lautrec was, or otherwise burdened, so that I would turn completely inward, then I would be a good painter. As is, I’m not sufficiently devoted.’

‘“Is it the same with writing?’

‘“Well, yes. My greatest inspiration is a low bank balance. I can perform then.’

“‘To make money?’

‘“Yes, to make money.’

‘“But that’s awful!’

‘“Well, it has motivated better people than I.’

‘“For example, whom?’

‘“For example, Shakespeare.’

‘“And if you had all the money in the world would you just be a cafe society playboy and waste it?’

“At such turns in the conversation I impose silence.

‘“Poppy—’

‘“Yes, what now?’

‘“About the people you write about.’

‘“We’ve had that argument before, and I’ll run through my little piece again for you. I was born in a hotel and brought up in three countries — when I was six years old I couldn’t speak a word of German, because it was fashionable in Europe to bring up children who spoke nothing but French. And then I lived in other hotels, which was a very lonesome life for a child, and the only people you met were old ones, below stairs and upstairs. In my youth the upstairs was a collection of Russian grand dukes and French countesses, English lords and American millionaires. Backstairs there were French cooks, Roumanian hairdressers, Chinese manicurists, Italian bootblacks, Swiss managers, English valets. All those people I got to know very well. When I was sent to America to learn the hotel business here, I ran into the same kind of people, and these I know very well and I can write about them, and one ought to write about what one knows. I can write about you, or Mimi, or a few other people, but I can’t write about what you call “ordinary people” because I don’t know them well enough. Besides, there are so many people who do, and who write about them well.’

“‘Could you write about German ordinary people?’

“‘I can write about Tyroleans, and Bavarians, whom I have known in my youth, woodchoppers, teamsters, boatmen, peasants, and the children of all these people.’

“‘But how did you find out about them, and understand them, when you didn’t speak their language?’

“‘Oh, I understood them, as a foreigner does.’

“‘When you were older?’

“‘Oh no, in my childhood; or better, when I started living and occasionally ran away from the hotel.’

“‘And did you like that more than the hotel?’

“‘Of course. The hotel was like an all-day theater performance and one played along, but the other was real and important and something you never forget. I ran away often and played with other children, but I was always brought back.’

“‘Do you speak German with an accent too?’

“‘Yes, of course.’

“‘Do you speak any language correctly?’

“‘Well, I have the least accent in French, or else the French are very polite, for they always say how very well I speak it for a foreigner.’

“‘That’s all rather sad, Poppy.’

“‘Well, it has its advantages. It’s like being a gypsy, belonging everywhere and nowhere. When you are in Paris you want to be in New York and vice versa.’”

Right now he is in this country to accept the Caldecott Medal but tomorrow he flies back to Paris.

This article, originally published in the August 1954 issue of The Horn Book Magazine, is part of our Caldecott at 75 celebration. Click here for more archival Horn Book material on Ludwig Bemelmans and Madeline’s Rescue.

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*Paper read at the meeting of the American Library Association, Minneapolis, Minnesota, June 22, 1954.

My deep gratitude to the members of the American Library Association for the Caldecott Medal.

Now we shall talk about art.

There is one life that is more difficult than that of the policeman’s and that is the life of the artist.

I have repeatedly said two things that no one takes seriously, and they are that first of all I am not a writer but a painter, and secondly that I have no imagination. It is very curious that, with my lack of these important essentials, the character of Madeline came to be. It accounts perhaps for her strength; she insisted on being born. Before she came into the world, I painted. That is, I placed canvas or paper on an easel before me and made pictures. I found in this complete happiness and satisfaction.

The unfortunate thing about painting is that the artist must exhibit, and at exhibitions, along with his work, exhibit himself; that he has to see his work, which is as his children, sold; see it wrapped up and taken away. I felt sorry for many of my pictures and those of other painters. I wish that there were a way of acquiring dogs or paintings other than by walking into a store and paying for them. The art market, then, the faces of the people who come and look at pictures, the methods of arriving at success, which entail self-advertisement and the kissing of hands, were not my dish.

I looked for another way of painting, for privacy; for a fresh audience, vast and critical and remote, to whom I could address myself with complete freedom. I wanted to do what seemed self-evident — to avoid sweet pictures, the eternal still lifes, the pretty portraits that sell well, arty abstractions, pastoral fireplace pictures, calendar art, and surrealist nightmares.

I wanted to paint purely that which gave me pleasure, scenes that interested me; and one day I found that the audience for that kind of painting was a vast reservoir of impressionists who did very good work themselves, who were very clear-eyed and capable of enthusiasm. I addressed myself to children.

You will notice in Madeline that there is very little text and there is a lot of picture. The text allows me the most varied type of illustration: there is the use of flowers, of the night, of all of Paris, and such varied detail as the cemetery of Père la Chaise and the restaurant of the Deux Magots. All this was there waiting to be used, but as yet Madeline herself hovered about as an unborn spirit.

Her beginnings can be traced to stories my mother told me of her life as a little girl in the convent of Altoetting in Bavaria. I visited this convent with her and saw the little beds in straight rows, and the long table with the washbasins at which the girls had brushed their teeth. I myself, as a small boy, had been sent to a boarding school in Rothenburg. We walked through that ancient town in two straight lines. I was the smallest one, but our arrangement was reversed. I walked ahead in the first row, not on the hand of Mademoiselle Clavel at the end of the column.

All this, as I said, for many years hung in the air and was at the back of my mind. Madeline finally began to take shape in France, where I had gone to paint. My daughter Barbara was about Madeline’s age when we went to the Isle d’Yeu for a summer vacation. This was then an island without any pretensions, and has since become famous as the place of detainment of Marshal Pétain. There was the usual Hôtel des Voyageurs and the Café de la Marine. The house we rented was twenty-five dollars for the season. It had its own private beach and the beds were always full of sand. A few miles away lived a man who owned a few lobsterpots and a fishing boat, and I bicycled there regularly to buy the makings of a bouillabaisse or a fish stew.

One day, pedaling along the road home with the sack of seafood over my shoulder, both hands in my pockets, and tracing fancy curves in the roadbed, I came to a bend which was hidden by some pine trees. Around this turn, coming the other way, raced the island’s only automobile — a four horsepower Super Rosengart belonging to the baker of Saint Sauveur, the capital village on the island. This car was a fragrant, flour-covered breadbasket on wheels. I collided with it, and it threw me in a wide curve off the bicycle into a bramble bush. I had taken the car’s doorhandle off with my arm and I was bleeding. I asked the baker to take me to the hospital in Saint Sauveur, but he said that according to French law, a car that has been involved in an accident has to remain exactly where it was when the crash occurred so that the gendarmes can make their proper deductions and see who was on the wrong side of the road. I tried to change his mind, but he said: “Permit me alors, Monsieur; if you use language like that it is no use at all to go on with this conversation.”

Having spoken, he went to pick up his pain de ménage and some croissants that were scattered on the road, and then he spread the branches of the thicket to look for the handle of his Super Rosengart. I took my lobsters and went to the hospital on foot.

After I had waited for a time, an old doctor came, with a cigarette stub sticking to his lower lip. He examined my wound, cleaned it, and then with a blunt needle he wobbled into my arm. “Excusez moi,” he said, “but your skin is very, very tough.” I was put into a small, white, carbolicky bed, and it took a while for my arm to heal. Here were the stout sister that you see bringing the tray to Madeline, and the crank on the bed. In the room across the hall was a little girl who had had an appendix operation, and, standing up in bed, with great pride she showed her scar to me. Over my bed was the crack in the ceiling “That had the habit, of sometimes looking like a rabbit.” It all began to arrange itself. And after I got back to Paris I started to paint the scenery for the book. I looked up telephone numbers to rhyme with appendix. One day I had a meeting with Léon Blum, and if you take a look at the book, you will see that the doctor who runs to Madeline’s bed is the great patriot and humanitarian Léon Blum.

And so Madeline was born, or rather appeared by her own decision.

Now we come to the sequel, which is the bearer of this medal and the reason why I am here tonight…

In this story Madeline shares the pages with a dog. This dog came about in a strange way. My wife’s parents live in Larchmont, and in a house next door to them is a family of outwardly respectable folk — that is, no one in that solid community would suspect that this quiet and respectable suburban house was occupied by a poet. Her name is Phyllis McGinley and she writes for The New Yorker.

She has two little girls, and they said, “Why don’t you write another Madeline?” So I offered them fifty cents apiece if they would give me an Idea, for I was paralyzed with lack of imagination. The children did not even go out of the room. They came with hands held out, and after I paid them they stated the plot:

“There’s a dog, see — Madeline has a dog. And then the dog is taken away but it comes back again, maybe with puppies so all the girls can have dogs.”

That was tight and clever dramatic construction, and now there remained the dog to find. I said, “What kind of a dog?”

“Oh, any kind of a dog.”

I went back to Paris and started to look for any kind of a dog. And of that breed Genevieve is a member.

I had a studio at the time in a house on the Seine at number one Git de Coeur, and I walked down to the quay and promenaded along there. Under one of the bridges there lived an old man with his dog. He loved it very much and he combed its fur with the same comb he did his own hair, and they sat together watching the fishermen and the passing boats. I started to draw that dog, and observed it. It loved to swim.

I now had the dog and I sat along the Seine, and thought about the new book. But as yet there wasn’t a plot I could use, and the little girls who might have done it for me were in America.

Then one day something happened. An object was floating down the Seine, and little boys ran along the quay, and as the object came near it turned out to be an artificial leg. One of the little boys pointed at it and said, “Ah, la jambe de mon Grandpère!”

At that same moment a long line of little girls passed over the bridge des Arts, followed by their teacher. They stopped and looked, holding onto the iron rails with their white-gloved hands. The leg was now very close, and the dog jumped into the Seine and retrieved it, struggling ashore and pulling it from the water by backing up the stones.

There suddenly was a great vision before me. The plot was perfect.

There are many problems ahead. Who are Madeline’s parents? Who are the other girls, what are their names, what new disaster shall Mademoiselle Clavel rush to? The next Madeline on which I have been working for two years concerns a boy called Pepito, the son of the Spanish Ambassador who lives next door to the little girls and is a very bad hat.

I’m looking for him now. That is, I’ve been to Spain three times and searched for him and for his house. As yet, nothing has come up, but with patience it always does, for somewhere he is, lives and breathes. The portrait of life is the most important work of the artist and it is good only when you’ve seen it, when you’ve touched it, when you know it. Then you can breathe life onto canvas and paper.

This article, originally published in the August 1954 issue of The Horn Book Magazine, is part of our Caldecott at 75 celebration. Click here for more archival Horn Book material on Ludwig Bemelmans and Madeline’s Rescue.

The post Caldecott Award Acceptance* appeared first on The Horn Book.

An illustrator comments in each issue of The Horn Book upon a new picture book he particularly likes.

Who Dreams of Cheese?
comment by Elizabeth Orton Jones

Who can draw dreams? Who can draw thoughts? Who can tell with a few words and a paint brush how it feels to be a bird — so aptly and simply that suddenly we are a bird? We never really knew before how it was to fly — to peck quickly at a grape with a sharp bill — to be afraid of a squirrel. But now, somehow, we do. And with this knowing comes a new ableness to feel, through our whole being, the meaning of that nest, deep in the weeds, with eggs in it. We feel and we dream a bird’s dream. And having felt and dreamed, we are now part bird. And this moment of experience will never leave us. This bit of understanding is ours, to keep. Who can give such a gift?

We turn to the next page, in the picture book of my choice. Who dreams of a picture book wherein we can be completely reconciled to that disconcerting necessity of going from color to black and white and back again? How reconciled? By our acceptance of the simple fact that there are all kinds of dreams: big and little, funny and sad, dark and light, color and gray —. Instead of black, however, brown is used here — the warm brown of a warm brown blanket…Just as we became a bird, now we are a mouse. And now we know who dreams of cheese.

We were asked this question very loudly, in huge letters, on the front of the jacket — CHEESE being an almost screeching yellow which didn’t seem to go, quite, with the mood of the whole. It was like a gaudy trumpet-call used to introduce a most tender piece of music. Perhaps tenderness needs such a call to attention…“Who dreams of CHEESE?”…“Come into my book,” said Leonard Weisgard, humbly, in small letters, down at the bottom, “and you will see.”…It was an invitation we could not refuse.

We opened the book and its mood came out to meet us. Like a dream it enfolded us and carried us easily — oh! so easily — on.

Direct brush strokes, a feeling of freshness and transparency everywhere, an ingenious background treatment, words that sound like the pictures and pictures that look like the words—all merge and lose themselves in what seems the essence of dreams. We become a rabbit — a fox — a pony — a squirrel — a fish under water — a boy — a girl. We peck we scamper, we nibble, we laugh, in this series of transforming experiences. It’s all such fun we scarcely realize that with each one we grow, until we are big enough to know the grown-up dreams of a father, a mother. And finally, we seem to be everything at once — everything we have been, in the book, and everything we are going to be, outside, in life. It is a big feeling. And underneath — deep underneath — is a bigger feeling still.

“What I see here is nothing but a shell,” the Little Prince told us, several years ago. “What is important is invisible.”

There is a gratifying trend — I might almost say compulsion — which has entered into the making of picture books today: to use the tangible as a transparency, a lens, through which to look and find the intangible, the invisible, the really real.

We close the book. On the back of the jacket is a slender moon, and soft streaks of paint which look like the layers of sleep, and some translucent ferns, and two white daisies growing on invisible stems.

Shall we turn the book over and begin again? The children will want to, I know.

This article, originally published in the November 1950 issue of The Horn Book Magazine, is part of our Caldecott at 75 celebration. Click here for more archival Horn Book material on Elizabeth Orton Jones and Prayer for a Child.

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Thomas Handforth at the Seeman School, 1943. (Photo from the October 1950 issue of The Horn Book Magazine)

by Louise Seaman Bechtel

In the late twenties and early thirties, a happy brew was stirring in the children’s book field; much of its spice and a good deal of the steam of the cooking came from the number of artists from all over the world who contributed to its bookmaking. The artists as well as the books came here from foreign lands; and our own artists traveled freely, too, to far places. One of the most intelligent of the American wanderers was Thomas Handforth, a young man beset with rather unusual ideas about proving the bases of his style through living in the lands where various styles originated. His wanderings brought us children’s books from Morocco, Mexico, China, India. But the bulk of his work was in a great number of etchings, lithographs and paintings which are here described and illustrated. This is a well-deserved tribute, but it is much more than that: through faithful description of the progressive thinking of its subject, it points toward future thinking about the meeting of art cultures of different civilizations.

My first meeting with this young artist was in Morocco through my old friend Elizabeth Coatsworth. She had been there, and on her return had written Toutou in Bondage, a merry story of a stolen dog who finally chose the master who gave him work and fun instead of the mistress who gave him dull comfort. She had suggested an artist known to her through his agent in Hingham, an artist who was most luckily in Morocco. Now my husband and I were on our way to that exciting country. Before we left, some of the pictures arrived, and the book was published in that fall of 1929, the first book of Thomas Handforth.

We met Tom in Rabat, where he had settled down for a while, and made many Arab friends. One young Arab noble had begged him at a party to exchange clothes, so that he could “feel” how it was to wear American trousers. He had gone off for a week with Tom’s best suit, leaving this fair-haired, blue-eyed American to go about in flowing Arab robes and headbands. Of course, one in such a costume made a fine guide to Rabat. Only he could have led us to that gay graveyard overlooking the ocean, where parties gather at sunset time. Later we bought Tom’s fine etching which preserves that scene, “Graveyard Chess,” a delicate summary of a whole civilization. We wandered, too, in the noisy market place, past the souks, into the fine French colonial museum, and lingered near the doors of the forbidden mosques. We had mint tea with sugared gazelle-horn cakes, looking out toward the famous pirate island.

But Tom’s favorite city, and Miss Coatsworth’s, and ours too in turn, was Marrakesh. Wilder, more truly Arab than the seaports, a crossroads for distant desert tribes, its primitive beauty has a dramatic setting against the long line of snow-capped Atlas Mountains. As much of all this as possible, especially of Marrakesh, Tom put into the pictures for Toutou. His work for this book is in a style well known in his etchings of this period. He used a delicate, nervous, exotic pattern, but also plenty of emphasis of story details for the action that brings the story to the eye of a child. The book struck a fresh note, both French and Arab in its undertones, sophisticated, gay, decorative, subtle, alive yet also a bit decadent. As a good, thinking artist, Tom could not have lived with that style for too long.

This unusual book was a bit too “special.” Morocco could not win many hearts, even when there was a little dog for hero. Marrakesh was waiting for Mr. Churchill to add to its fame by painting there. The book was one to be proud of, but it has been out of print for some years. Today, it looks as fresh and distinguished as it did in 1929. Perhaps it will be the French in Morocco who will give it another lease of life, for it catches all the charm of the old Arab ways as only one who lived there could see them. There is predominating humor, besides loving appreciation. The decorative approach never hides the fundamental good drawing.

Next, from Mexico came his drawings for Susan Smith’s Tranquilina’s Paradise (Minton, Balch) in 1930; then Mei Li in 1938 and Faraway Meadow (both Doubleday) from India in 1939. The last two had his own stories. In 1944, he illustrated The Dragon and the Eagle by Delia Goetz, happily lending his more humorous memories of his beloved China to a booklet of the Foreign Policy Association. Memories of China again brought charm and authenticity to Margery Evernden’s Secret of the Porcelain Fish (Random, 1947). This lovely book and Mei Li alone are still in print.

For, as his Caldecott Medal book, Mei Li, so well proved, it was China that gave him his deepest inspiration. Best known of all his books, most appealing to children, still deservedly alive and popular, Mei Li shows him at his full strength as an artist. On every bold, big page it proves him akin to those great Chinese artists of old. Here he is saying something about that dream of uniting the arts of East and West. Such an inspiration could not have come from the static art of the Arab. Nor would he have found it in China had he not lived there and loved it as a home. How easily he could have gone on, doing other picture-story books in this same adapted Chinese style, bringing us other aspects of China. In fact, from the piles of drawings, prints, photographs, he left, much more is available for books. But war drove him home to America, and he was diverted to painting for a while and to that extraordinary work with mentally retarded boys of which you will read here. One night he brought to dinner at our apartment in New York a huge case of the paintings these boys had done with him. It was a startling, moving experience to see these paintings, and to hear him tell which sorts of mental states produced them. It was a bitter disappointment to him that, after all the time he spent explaining them to art people and to medical men, they had no public showing during his lifetime. That showing was arranged by his friends after his death. But the work has not yet had the impact on both the art and medical worlds that he had hoped for.

Let me end on a gayer note. All of Tom’s friends must have shared with me those extraordinary Christmas cards of his. With finical care and obvious gay delight, he would put together odd bits of Oriental papers, gilt laces, pictures, cutting, pasting, redesigning, until each of us had an individual treasure to bring his greetings. I look from one of these shining on my desk, to the wall where has hung for so many years one of his brush drawings of a Chinese mother and child, a portrait strong, simple, dignified, a noble tribute to a Chinese friend.

I wish he could have fulfilled further both these aspects of his bright promise. But he left more in accomplished work — etchings, lithographs, paintings — than many a one who lived much longer. These works will live, as will at least one of his books. So will that special intelligence that made him an artist-wanderer-thinker, and endeared him to Arabs, Mexicans, Chinese, Indians, and to us many lucky Americans who called him friend and miss his presence.

This article by Louise Seaman Bechtel originally appeared in the October 19, 1950 extra issue of The Horn Book Magazine and is part of our Caldecott at 75 celebration. Click here for more archival Horn Book material on Thomas Handforth and Mei Li.

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The time has come to attempt a critical appraisal of the twenty books which have won the Caldecott Award for their illustrators. I almost wish the task had fallen to another person, for these volumes, grouped together for inspection, have somewhat disconcerted me. I had anticipated a different kind of impact—one in keeping with the happiness I’ve always felt in realizing that the Caldecott Award exists to pay honor to our gifted artists.

Lovely books are in the group, but these parts seem greater than the whole. As a body of published work, the Caldecott Award books seem to lack a common bond. This may be due partly to the fact that some of them are not really picture books.

Most of us assume that a Caldecott Award book should be a picture book. “Awarded the Caldecott Medal for being the Most Distinguished Picture Book of the Year.” These words are quickly printed on the jacket of a prize-winning book as it goes forth afresh to meet its public. Has the public sometimes wondered: What is a picture book? What is a distinguished picture book?

For, to the public’s confusion, picture books and illustrated books alike have won the Award, and there is a basic difference between the two. In an illustrated book the pictures are, as the term “illustrated” implies, a mere extension—an illumination—of the text. In a picture book, as the term also implies, the pictures play a livelier role, and are an integral part of the action of the book.

Definitions in the book-making arts serve merely as a take-off. One must really learn by looking, and to get the feel of the picture book style one may well turn to the works of Randolph Caldecott, the great English illustrator for whom our own Award has been named.

I have at hand a copy of Randolph Caldecott’s Picture Book No. 7, The Queen of Hearts. Once again I am aware that the delight this book invariably gives me stems not only from the vivacity and draughtsmanship of the drawings, but also from their arrangement. They are so placed that they give visual action to every page, sometimes as full-color illustrations, or again as smaller, monotone sketches around which the white of the paper affords relief to the eye.

Scattered through the thirty-two pages of The Queen of Hearts are the twelve lines of the nursery rhyme, the words appearing where they best sustain the pictures. It is this deft balance between text and pictures which helps to motivate the picture book and puts it in a class quite apart from the illustrated book. Techniques for making picture books are, of course, infinite in number.

Among the fine picture books on the Caldecott Award list is Robert McCloskey’s Make Way for Ducklings, long a favorite with American children. In Make Way for Ducklings we find the modern technique of “bleeding” illustrations off the pages in order to obtain a maximum of pictorial effect. There is no white space in this book. McCloskey sweeps his pencil across the double-spreads which make up his story, so that there is great dramatic action. And there is detail, too, buildings, cars, people, and the ducks themselves. Children, whose eyes are microscopic, never tire of such detail.

Whereas Make Way for Ducklings is printed most satisfactorily in monotone, several other Caldecott Award books employ color to heighten their emotional impact. This is true of Virginia Lee Burton’s The Little House, Leonard Weisgard’s The Little Island, Roger Duvoisin’s White Snow Bright Snow, and Nicolas Mordvinoff’s Finders Keepers.

Each of these four books makes a definite contribution to the technique of picture book making, although this contribution may sometimes seem to be of an experimental nature. Burton has done in color what Wanda Gág did long ago in black and white in Millions of Cats (1928). Weisgard and Duvoisin use pictures that stand like paintings to establish a mood for the child as he listens to the lyrical texts of Margaret Wise Brown and Alvin Tresselt. Mordvinoff, on the contrary, achieves a tight-knit, dramatic effect, since his author, William Lipkind, has reduced the text to a bare minimum. How difficult it is to achieve such verbal economy! How taxing it is for all concerned to create any kind of decent picture book! The layman will never know the backbreaking work that goes into them. Rest assured, the simpler they seem, the harder they’ve been to make.

Unfortunately, not all of those books in color represent the artists at their best. This is less the fault of the jurors than of the prize-giving system which demands that selection be made from the crop of a given year. Certain remedies might help the best books get their chance when their time comes. One would be (as I have already suggested) to eliminate the illustrated book (in contradistinction to the picture book) from the contestants. A second would be to judge a book on its individual merit, rather than on the past performance of its artist.

Past performance appears to be the factor which has most constantly weakened the Caldecott Award list. Of course, the desire to pay tribute to a well-loved illustrator because of his earlier contributions is an endearing trait. But in such a case, the honor falls to the man rather than to his work.

Surely such a charming and spirited artist as the late Robert Lawson would not choose to be remembered for that rare, dull lapse of his, They Were Strong and Good, which won the Caldecott in 1941. One feels the jurors were honoring Lawson’s share in the famous Story of Ferdinand (1936).

Bemelmans’s Madeline’s Rescue may be another case in point. Certainly this book, with its sophisticated overtones, cannot compare with the original Madeline (1939), which offers such a delightful, unadulterated excursion into a child’s world.

Into one’s mind creep memories of certain picture books, absent from the Caldecott Award list, which have stood the test of time and become classics. Among the earlier absentees are: Dr. Seuss’s And To Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street (1937), James Daugherty’s Andy and the Lion (1938) and in the same year Wanda Gág’s picture-storybook Snow White, Warren Chappell’s Peter and the Wolf (1940), Jean Charlot’s A Child’s Good Night Book (1943), and Marie Hall Ets’s In the Forest (1944). Obviously, for chronological reasons, some of these could not have won the Award. Am I wrong in believing others might have?

Let us turn now to certain picture books in which there was general rejoicing when the Caldecott came their way. I have put them in a group by themselves, since they seem to me to be picture-storybooks, rather than simple picture books. Once I had occasion to define the picture-storybook as a genre in which the textual story is fully developed but the pictures are so important one can hardly imagine the story without them. It falls legitimately into the picture book category.

The most recent example of the picture-storybook is Marcia Brown’s Cinderella with its delicately colored illustrations so provocative of courtly life in times gone by. The line of the drawings is well matched by the type, and there is emotional harmony between the pictures and the text which accompanies them on each page. The book as a whole has typographic unity.

Louis Slobodkin’s illustrations for Thurber’s Many Moons are not so happily arranged. Turn the pages of this volume rapidly and you will find your eye jerked hither and yon. Ingrid and Edgar Parin d’Aulaire are among the artists not easily caught off their typographic guard. In all their work they show deep concern for balancing the type page with those lovely colored images they execute in a kind of modern folk style. Abraham Lincoln is a definite contribution to the art of picture book making.

One of the loveliest of the picture-storybooks is Mei Li, written and illustrated by the late Thomas Handforth. It appeared early in the history of the Caldecott Award, and reminds us that the art of picture book making has not kept pace, on the whole, with the vast expansion in the children’s book industry.

Handforth was a traditionalist in his approach to drawing. From his sound knowledge of anatomy, costume and architecture he selected just the right amount for children. And he handled his pictures so that they are not mere illustrations—an extension of the text—but an integral part of the action of the book. Watch their lively flow from left-hand page to right. See how they walk pleasantly hand in hand with the text. And what good ink the printer used. These black and white drawings fairly sparkle with color. In short, Mei Li may be placed alongside the best for adults and hold its own. This is a final test for any child’s book.

We come now to the first of the Caldecott Award books, Dorothy Lathrop’s Animals of the Bible. Because of its unobtrusive typography, this volume at first glance might appear to be an illustrated book rather than a picture book. But the more one studies it, the more one realizes that the lovely pictures are its raison d’être, and that there is perfect balance, both spiritual and typographic, between pictures and text. Since the text is the King James version of the Bible, this is no trivial accomplishment.

Only one other Caldecott Award book deals with a religious theme. This is Rachel Field’s Prayer for a Child, illustrated by Elizabeth Orton Jones. I should call it an illustrated book, rather than a picture book, for the pictures contribute little to its action. The reverent, mystical mood the prayer might awaken in a young person is not sustained by drawings of such a realistic nature. They appeal more to adults who enjoy looking with sentimental eyes at childhood scenes.

Three other Caldecott Award books seem to me to fall short of picture book standards. The pages of The Rooster Crows are in no way animated by the pedestrian drawings of the Petershams, who on previous occasions have gladdened us with works of true distinction. The Egg Tree by Katherine Milhous and Song of the Swallows by Leo Politi have a fault in common: the pictures, though pleasing, are used too profusely in conjunction with the text. The pages look too” busy.”

As for The Big Snow by Berta and Elmer Hader, other illustrations among the Award books may have been rendered with greater brilliance. But the Haders’s pictures have a sincerity that lends a special kind of conviction, and they have been well thought out in relation to the text. The result is a picture book worthy of recognition.

The picture books by Lynd Ward and Feodor Rojankovsky have a heavy air which, when one considers the fine talents of these two men, seems rather unnecessary. Ward’s drawings in The Biggest Bear are distinguished in draughtsmanship, but somber in their effect, and they fall always on the right-hand page with never a doublespread or an extra spot to break the monotony. Compare The Biggest Bear with an earlier book of similar format, Andy and the Lion. In Andy the pages are vivacious; even the white spaces glow.

Rojankovsky’s drawings for Frog Went A-Courtin’ lack his usual verve. Even at that, the book would be more spirited if there were greater variety in the disposition of the pictures. Compare Frog Went A-Courtin’ with Randolph Caldecott’s Frog He Would A-wooing Go, in which (as in The Queen of Hearts) the illustrations are so grouped that they contribute a special action to the book as a whole. Or if you prefer a modern example of fine picture book making, turn to I Play at the Beach, which was illustrated by Rojankovsky and published in the same year as Frog Went A-Courtin’. Here is a radiant little volume of fine drawings, handsome color printing and subtle typhography.

This year’s Award book, A Tree Is Nice, illustrated by Marc Simont, places me in a dilemma. The reason is a literary one. Although I’m not sure how important literary merit is in judging an Award book, I have a feeling it should count. At least it counts with me to the extent that even the title, A Tree Is Nice, disconcerts me. It belongs to a new school of writing for children, a school I don’t quite understand—and therefore cannot judge fairly.

As for the graphic aspects of A Tree Is Nice, I admire Simont’s color spreads and also his monotone drawings. There is plenty of diversity in the make-up of the pages. But to my way of thinking, there is so much diversity that the book does not hang together as a unit. Not only is the make-up extremely varied, but the drawings themselves seem occasionally to change in style. This may be intentional on the artist’s part. I myself prefer the wonderful harmony he achieved in his earlier work for The Happy Day—a harmony to be found not only in each drawing, but in each drawing in relation to its page, and each page in relation to the book as a whole.

Throughout this chapter I’ve been groping in the area of book design. Some of you may argue that the Caldecott is awarded solely on the merits of the illustrations. But illustrations are only one of the several elements of a book. Can illustrations really be good (in the sense that they function adequately) unless good book design is at their service?

The American Institute of Graphic Arts, with its various exhibits of children’s books selected on typographic and artistic merits, has set many of us to thinking along new lines. In a 1951 catalogue (Children’s Book Show 1945–1950. American Institute of Graphic Arts. New York, 1951) for one of these exhibits, James Johnson Sweeney, formerly Director of the Museum of Modern Art, has thrown light upon a matter which is obscure to many of us:

A child’s book is essentially a work of visual art—something that speaks directly to the eye and through the eye. It is a source of education to be sure, but never merely a vessel for the conveyance of information. Its real role is that played by a Gothic stained glass window in the Middle Ages, or a mosaic in the apse of a Romanesque church. It should be aimed primarily to stimulate the imagination through the eye—to educate in the true sense, by drawing something out of the observer—to mature the observer through stimulation, to exercise the imagination and develop the power for creating images. It is a work of visual art and should be approached, in the making, as one, and weighed on its completion by the same standards.

It is Mr. Sweeney’s contention that illustrations which do not function harmoniously with the whole book become mere decorations:

Where there is not a fusion of all the elements of a book – text, illustrations, format, typography – one element, or several, risks giving the appearance of a decoration, an applied embellishment in relation to the others. It may be the text, in the case of a young child’s book, it may be the illustrations, in an older one’s, it may be the type employed, or even the typographical decorations themselves.

I believe Mr. Sweeney would enjoy William Pène Du Bois’s Lion, one of 1957’s five Caldecott Honor Books, or runners-up. I do know that many who love the graphic arts wish a special Caldecott Medal might have been struck off to honor a book which makes fine typography such an integral part of the action. The lines of the drawings and those of the type seem made to match one another. The type page is handsome and enlivened with capitals and red letters. The paper is excellent, the margins are generous and the colors pure. I venture to say that a child who loves this book will never again be content with shoddy design.

Children, even though inarticulate, are capable of appreciating the niceties of good book making. For this reason one wishes that in the years to come the Caldecott Award list might be more representative of picture books judged as “works of visual art.”

In closing I take the liberty of quoting an incident related by Frances Clarke Sayers when she was Superintendent of Work with Children in the New York Public Library. Mrs. Sayers had had occasion to serve with Mr. Sweeney on the 1951 jury for the American Institute of Graphic Arts. In the catalogue of the exhibit she wrote:

The librarian-juror, all the while she chose books with her fellow jurors, was haunted by the memory of a thirteen-year-old boy in a branch library. He was picking out his Saturday’s quota of reading. “If there’s anything I hate,” he said, flipping through the books he was examining, and apropos of nothing that had gone before, “if there’s anything I hate, it’s a cheap-looking book.”

It may well be that when he was little the boy’s taste was formed by some of the fine books mentioned in this article. In any event, the incident serves as a reminder that picture books enter a child’s life during his earliest impressionable years, and the best is none too good for him.

This article is part of our Picture Book Month 2012 coverage.

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In the sunny frame of our kitchen door last summer stood our eight-year-old daughter, Twig. Her excitement was so great that there were no words — just wide misty eyes and a trembling chin, for cupped in her hands was a tiny bird.

The bright-eyed nestling was still covered with puffs of natal down, and it was snuggled in her hands much as it had snuggled in its nest. I turned away from the begging face and said:

“You can’t keep it, Twig. It is too young, and it is a rare bird. It is a rose-breasted grosbeak. Return it to the spot where you found it. Only the mother bird knows how to care for one so young.”

Tears rolled from an ocean of grief, but we had been through this before. Birds, mice and raccoons too young to raise had only brought sadder moments when they did not survive. I knew what was to be learned from raising such a bird, but I also knew the pitfalls. We returned the nestling. I went home. Twig waited under the bush.

However, I had not counted on the unpredictable nature of the rose-breasted grosbeak. Hours passed. The little face appeared in the doorway again. The bird was in her hand calling for food.

“The mother won’t feed it,” Twig said. This awakened in me a vague knowledge that grosbeaks sometimes desert their young when the nest has been disturbed. I went into the yard. Crying from the branches of several trees were other hungry little grosbeaks. So we ended up with two of them, and launched into a summer of watching and reading and looking that was worth all the trouble that is inherent in taking in foundling birds.

Twig learned quickly. Baby birds are hungry most of the time. We had to feed them every twenty minutes or so. We also had to feed them a special formula, and change it often so that it would be fresh. This started us off to the library and the local Audubon Society for information. We found a pamphlet published by the Society describing how to feed stranded nestlings of various species. Once we had the feeding solved, Twig became interested in birds in general. We spent several evenings going through our own books with her, technical but convertible when read with an adult. Some of them were Roger Tory Peterson’s Field Guide to the Birds, Leonard W. Wing‘s Natural History of Birds, and Harry Hann’s The Biology of Birds. The last we read while looking at the two birds, stretching their little wings, to see the feather tracks, feeling their lightness discovering why they could fly.

When she had had as much of this as she could absorb we went to the library for stories about birds. We found several she loved: Rufous Redtail by Helen Garrett, White Birds Island by Georgi Skrebitsky, White Patch, A City Sparrow by Olive L. Earle, and Run Sandpiper Run by Lloyd Goff. These we read aloud while the grosbeaks perched on Twig’s finger and slept. As the stories went along, she would touch the little birds from time to time and whisper: “I’ll bet you’ll do that some day.”

When the feathered pair were old enough to fly, we put them outdoors and fed them in the bushes near the kitchen door to which they returned when hungry. After feeding them, Twig would follow them from tree to tree to see where they sat to sleep. One day she asked why we had grosbeaks in Chappaqua, New York, but her grandmother had none in Pennsylvania.

This question had to be answered by altitude and trees, and specifically by the fact that grosbeaks love linden trees. I pointed out the linden tree in our yard, and on our next trip to the library Twig came home with American Trees by Russel T. Limbach and Knowing Your Trees by G. H. Collingwood. She learned the linden, and then she learned the maples, next the elm, and the scotch pine, and so around the yard. I helped her press leaves from all these trees between old newspapers and before we knew it, the grosbeaks had led to the trees, the trees to the flowers that grew under them, and the flowers to the insects that decorated them. While moving from tree to flower, she would often come  into the house to report a hole in the ground. We turned to The Mammal Guide by Ralph S. Palmer and Field Guide to Animal Tracks by Olaus J. Murie.Palmer’s book is excellent for adults working with children, for it not only identifies the animal but gives its life history, which is enchanting to children. Murie’s is wonderful because it makes detectives out of everyone, and the animals that can’t often be seen become real when their teeth marks are found on nuts or their footprints discovered in the dust.

For flowers we turned to the Book of Wild Flowers for Young People by F. Schuyler Mathews, and for insects, we started with a children’s book, Insects in Their World by Su Zan Noguchi Swain, and then went into a technical book An Introduction to Entomology by John Henry Comstock for brief but exciting excursions.

And so, that summer we learned the hills of New York through the arrival of a grosbeak in our home.

Admittedly a grosbeak is exotic. But the same chain of events can take place with the most common of the earth’s creatures. All children exposed to the earth and sky are collectors, and I am sure every home has had its share of worms, insects, polliwogs, and flowers, brought in by the curious young. We have found that the best thing to do when the air warms and the doors open is to invest in five good guide books — on birds, mammals, trees, flowers and insects — and keep them near a supply of empty jars on the kitchen sink, for in our house all life enters through the kitchen door.

These books are inexpensive and are regional. It is best to pick them up in your own neighborhood, for then you are sure that if you live in Maine you are not going to get birds and mammals and insects of California. (We picked up a nice series of these books in the gift shop at the New York Museum of Natural History.) After a few hours of helping the children name what they have found, they are usually off to the library to find out more about the foundling creatures. They are good systematists — all children are.

Our six-year-old-son, Craig, was worm-conscious one summer. He carried worms wherever he went. They brought him some inner satisfaction. After about a month of this, he became curious about the earth they lived in, and why they didn’t have any eyes. An excavation in the backyard marked his probe into the mysterious underworld. He found roots, ants and stones. At the end of this expedition into the earth he asked, “Where does the earth end?”

I got out The World We Live In by Lincoln Barnett and the editors of Life, an adult book that our children have claimed. Craig moved in new spheres. From land to sky, through space to the planets. And then he alighted on the dinosaurs! Fortunately there are several good dinosaur books for six-year-olds, an age when the giants of the earth are particularly appealing for some mysterious six-year-old reason. Two favorites are: So Long Ago by E. Boyd Smith and Dinosaurs by Marie Halun Bloch. Craig liked these because they use the scientific names. “Tyrannosaurus rex” is a name he tosses off with the same abandon as “Georgieporgiepuddin’n pie.”

We realized later that Craig would have discovered dinosaurs very soon via the cereal boxes, but we like to think that he came upon this fascinating world all on his own through worms. However, we are so grateful for any source of inspiration — be it cereal boxes or TV — that we are delighted no matter what provokes a question. Our only formula is that when the questions arise we have the books to answer them, or make some effort to get the inquirer to the library where we can search for the answer.

As a family we have a very strong sense of environment and to spend a summer vacation in a country where the animals, birds and plants are strangers makes us feel like outcasts. None of us knew much about the seashore when we started off for the ocean front along Delaware, so in addition to bathing suits we packed guide books on shells, seabirds and marine life, then took a bearing on the local library before finding a home on the beach.

A seashore makes a collector out of the most resistant. There is something about a shell gleaming in the sand that defies you to pass over it, and so our front porch became a marine zoological laboratory as all of us, children and adults, added to the collection. As soon as the tide went out, the children and I hurried down to the edge of the water to see what enchanting bit of life or debris the tide had brought ashore for us this time. The shells, of course, we learned first, gluing them on cardboard, looking them up in the guidebook and labeling them. Then came the crabs, two species of which we kept alive in an old tub. Twig and Craig would spend hours watching them eat or signal each other with their claws. They called them by their scientific names, Uca Pugnax and Minax. When we tired of crabs, there were the turtles and fish to learn, and many trips to the library to bring back every book that pertained to the sea. The Illustrated Book of the Sea by Leon A. Hausman and Felix Sutton was a fine juvenile version of our own technical book (Field Book of Seashore Life by Roy Waldo Miner). My husband, John, and I found that we learned pleasantly from this book, too. Then we discovered Wilfrid Bronson and his Children of the Sea. This story of a child and a porpoise took our own children beyond naming and labeling into the heart of the ocean. Pagoo by Holling Clancy Holling renewed the children’s interest in their crabs as the life history of a little hermit crab made a personality out of their pet in the tub on the porch. Oley, The Sea Monster by Marie Hall Ets brought man and the little seal from the wide ocean together in an amusing way for the children, and, as the evening closed over the ocean they would look out across the vast world of water and wonder if they could find an Oley.

We usually let the children set the pace in these adventures into nature, but since both John and I are deeply interested in natural history, we no doubt encourage any spark of curiosity they show. Any parents can do it, however, by simply being interested in what is around them and in what the children bring home. Fortunately the treasures from the wild fall into one of three groups, and it is easy to get the child started. It has to be either a plant, animal, or rock (mineral). With that decided, the book is the next step. A few minutes taken away from the ironing or dishwashing is all one needs, and, as for me, I need no encouragement. If it is an animal — a frog let us say — we next go after his markings, size and color. If it is an insect, we are usually satisfied to discover that it is a beetle — there are so many of these that I give up on any further identification unless it is big and common. Fortunately for parents, children have a habit of bringing in the big and the common. About June, I always brush up on walking sticks and praying mantises, ants and bees, as we are almost sure to have several of each every year.

Home and the backyard can be wonderfully stimulating to parent and child alike. Travel, of course, is a magnificent family adventure. However, we have discovered this: all too soon the sights grow mundane and the glitter and newness of an area tarnishes. Then there is nothing like a walk to collect the natural souvenirs of the land.

We went west several summers ago. At first, the cowboys were the thing. We all but tackled every cowboy during the first week we were in Wyoming. As it turned out, they were all good cowboys and nobody had shot anybody, and the west began to dull. Then one night the voices of the coyotes rose around our tent. Wide-eyed and goose-bumpy, the children sat up and listened. We talked about them until everyone was calm and sleepy. The next day however, we had to go out and see where the coyote lived. We walked through scratchy sage brush and over rocks, and all we found was a den, dry and uninteresting. Fortunately, the cousins we were visiting had a book Wild Animals of the Five Rivers Country by George Cory Franklin. The chapter on the coyote opened his dry den to us. We learned his habits and his food, and the following week we had to take another trip to see the pocket gophers. On this trip what we could not see was there anyway, as we knew all about the wild animals of this area. All About the Desert by Sam and Beryl Epstein brought more activity to the dry country.

Because it is hard to see much of the life that inhabits an area, we usually try to stop at roadside zoos as we travel. Although it is sad to see some of the bigger animals chained, this is an excellent way to see the animals and birds of a region. It also keeps the children content in the car for the next hundred miles or so, drawing the animals they saw or finding them in books. We also picnic along the way, and when the sandwiches are devoured and the adults are still eating, we send the children off into the woods to find as many new things as they can.

When they return with armloads of the countryside, we pack children and specimens in the car and put them to work making things out of them — dolls, hats, boats, necklaces — for there is a point beyond which all this scientific business becomes dull and must be replenished from play. Very often out of this kind of play comes the interest to collect, as it did in my own case, when I was a little older than my Craig. I was making boats of milkweed pods when it occurred to me that there were two different pods. I took them home to my father and he told me one was orange milkweed and the other was common milkweed. I went back for the plants and picked and pressed them. Later I pasted them on paper and wrote the names beside them. Other flowers joined the collection.

Then came the day when I walked into the meadow near Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and everything was familiar. The bone-set, the ironweed, the butter-and-eggs were no longer masses of weeds. They were familiar faces. I shan’t forget the feeling of intimacy and comfort as I lay down among them to rest. No longer was the meadow full of “grass.” It was now filled with things that were mine. I had a sense of belonging that I had never known before. To this day the familiar eastern meadow brings a sense of quiet to me, and all the quaint and loved names rush hack to mind.

Experiences like this drove John and me to writing about the natural world. Both of us had a desire to pass on to our children and other children the smell of a summer meadow, the sounds of a winter night; for to us one of the great emotional experiences of life is to be so familiar with a spot of earth that it “belongs” to you. There is a feeling of security in looking at a familiar yard, or a street with elms along it. It gives one a sense of identity that all life craves whether it be raccoon or bird, turtle or child.

The human being is so mobile in the twentieth century that this experience is often missed; but it can happen to every child, whether he lives on the streets of a city or on a wandering trailer. A bird that comes to a feeding station, a tree that grows by an apartment door can become the poetry of a lifetime. Childhood is brief, but its impressions are indelible, and it is little enough to tell a child that the tree by the door is a sycamore, that robins nest in it pigeons sit on it starlings sleep in it, and that its roots go into the earth.

And then to give him a library card.

Article originally appeared in the June 1959 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

The post Summer and Children and Birds and Animals and Flowers and Trees and Bees and Books appeared first on The Horn Book.