But life, real life, is also a string of accidents. Bertha Mahony was thirty-three and restless after ten years as a good right-hand at Boston’s Women’s Educational and Industrial Union when she came upon the article in the August 1915 Atlantic Monthly that, as she often said, “changed my life.” With a mix of statistics and soft soap, the author extolled bookselling as a new profession for the educated, emancipated woman.

Mahony, a serious, ambitious reader, would have liked to study librarianship years earlier at the new Simmons College, but lack of sufficient funds steered her toward the shorter secretarial course instead. As Assistant Secretary at the Union, a model of privileged progressivism, she had charge of promotional materials, in addition to her regular duties, and on her own initiative she launched a four-year series of children’s plays. Meanwhile, working with the Officers, she learned how people of influence get things done: by going to the top.

The eager bookseller-to-be scouted locations, considered and discarded the Northwest (reputedly like New England but too far away), resolved to remain in Boston despite its abundance of book-shops, and decided that hers would be a children’s bookshop — a new thing and a good thing.

By mid-October she had the backing of the Officers and Board of the Union, and a target date. She arranged a private, Saturday-morning tutorial in children’s literature with Alice Jordan, the Boston Public Library expert, and besides reading the assigned books, she studied the library booklists Jordan gave her, the compilations of Caroline Hewins and Clara Hunt. By spring, she and her newly recruited assistants were ready to place orders and Mahony herself was ready to meet the people who mattered. Bookseller and children’s-book enthusiast Frederic Melcher initiated her into the trade in Indianapolis and into the activities of the American Booksellers Association at its Chicago convention. Back East, she introduced herself to Anne Carroll Moore in New York and took a second, closer look at the Central Children’s Room; braved the elevated subway to see Clara Hunt in Brooklyn; and stopped off in Hartford to get Caroline Hewins’s blessing. “It was on this occasion,” Mahony later wrote, “that Miss Hewins promised to write for our recommended purchase list a preface on John Newbery’s ‘Juvenile Library,’ a first bookshop for children in London of the 1700’s.”

Had she asked? Had she known enough of Newbery’s historical role to ask? Had she already been thinking of her bookshop, five months before its scheduled opening, as another landmark in children’s book history? Or had this ardent young woman, with her plans for promoting books as selectively and creatively as Hewins and other librarians, and her undoubted enthusiasm for Hewins’s own celebrated list, touched a sympathetic chord?

THE BOOKSHOP OPENED on schedule on October 9, 1916, in second-floor quarters adjacent to the Union but remote from the street. There, Mahony and her close associate Elinor Whitney and their staff promoted children’s books brilliantly, with a variety of programs, exhibits, and special services, and a handsome, 110-page booklist, with the Hewins preface, that was free to all comers and all correspondents. But in the aggregate not many books were sold. Was the location solely to blame or was the concept somehow questionable? In 1921, when a larger, street-front space became available next door, adult books were sold on the ground floor and the spacious, wrap-around balcony became the new and better staging-ground for children’s books. The sign over the door now read, cunningly: The Bookshop for Boys and Girls — With Books on Many Subjects for Grown-Ups.

According to Eulalie Steinmetz Ross, Mahony’s biographer, she had decided that “a children’s bookshop per se was not theoretically sound, isolating young readers as it did from the main stream of literature.” Maintaining that children’s books were part of the literary mainstream was an article of faith with Mahony, her contemporaries and successors, so she would probably not have demurred. But offstage, in a letter, her explanation is more acute: “People want to take care of their own book needs while shopping for their children, but more important still, the children themselves like the presence of grown-up books in a nearby space.” Mahony understood and appreciated people.

For the future of children’s books, no less, it mattered. During the Bookshop’s first Christmas, Anne Carroll Moore stopped by with Caroline Hewins to look over the premises before she gave Mahony her support, privately or publicly. She was enthusiastic, Mahony was exultant, and the two struck up a friendship, with professional ramifications, that endured as long as they lived.

For the cause of children’s books to prosper, there needed to be someone to create the kinds of books that Mahony and Moore could wholeheartedly support — good new books to supplement the classics and substitute for the “trashy” series that Moore threw out of her libraries and Mahony refused to stock. On a visit to New York in 1919 Mahony called on Louise Seaman, the newly appointed children’s book editor at Macmillan, when she was still in makeshift quarters. Seaman, a constant traveler, lost no time in visiting the Bookshop. And another lifelong friendship was cemented.

In the children’s book community of New York, Moore and Seaman were bound to be thrown together, but they were not bound to be friends — Moore was considerably older, Seaman considerably more sophisticated. But Moore (b. Limerick, Maine, 1871), the nineteenth-century New England woman, liked nothing better than to take a taxi back and forth across New York’s new bridges, while Seaman (b. Brooklyn, New York, 1894), Vassar graduate and progressive-school teacher, was passionate about old books, ancient civilizations, and growing roses.

To these three partisans, children’s books were vehicles of imagination, and they promoted them in imaginative, enhancing ways — with sundry booklists and other printed ephemera, with a round of exhibits and programs and special events. But it was Mahony who had the most latitude, the greatest resources, and a knack for connecting books to life that amounted to a creative genius. Bookshop exhibits extended from historical French children’s books to child art; programs ranged from poetry afternoons for adolescents to lectures on educational psychology for adults. Among the booklists was a panoramic state-by-state listing of selected titles in the order of the states’ entry into the Union, entitled “All Aboard on the Old 44” and keyed to Hader illustrations for Cornelia Meigs’s Wonderful Locomotive, the “Old 44.” Traveling with books, in Mahony’s company, could take you almost anywhere.

WITH THE HORN BOOK, she could go further. On a holiday in England in 1924, Mahony and Whitney decided to follow their promptings and start a magazine devoted entirely to children’s books. As an organ of the Bookshop, it would carry a Booklist, called just that, with brief notices of recommended new books. But it would be much more than a guide to good reading — a function Mahony and Whitney’s all-encompassing Realms of Gold soon came to perform. Rather, it would be an expression, and extension, of the Bookshop itself. A grander way, prospectively, to blow the horn for good books.

When the first issue appeared in October 1924, congratulations poured in. “I am so thrilled, excited, entranced, inspired . . . by the Horn Book that I want to send it to everyone I know,” wrote Louise Seaman, enclosing a check for eight subscriptions (at fifty cents each). Anne Carroll Moore carried around a copy and brandished it at meetings, to urge librarians to subscribe. Seaman had further reason to rejoice the following March on publication of her tribute to one of her authors, Padraic Colum, “Stories Out of the Youth of the World,” an article that Mahony had undoubtedly solicited. One hand washed the other, for decades. Mahony liked to have authors and illustrators write about themselves, and especially about the wellsprings of their work. She liked to have their editors, more than anyone else, write personality-pieces or overviews. That there might be a conflict of interest, that this might amount to unpaid advertising, never occurred to her. Everyone concerned had the same interest: the promotion of good books. And when the Horn Book produced its magnificent August 1928 issue celebrating Louise Seaman’s ten years at Macmillan, with articles on her authors and illustrators as well as on Seaman herself, Mahony was surprised and hurt at being criticized, by other publishers, for including fourteen pages from the current Macmillan catalog as a demonstration of the Seaman touch. They suspected her of being bought.

The Seaman issue came in at eighty-five substantial pages. In addition to the Macmillan material, there was a review of Bambi, still interesting today, by a well-known natural scientist; an article on the art of silhouette by John Bennett, whose new book, The Pigtail of Ah Lee Ben Loo, was illustrated with his silhouettes, and a companion-piece on Bennett’s inspired way with children by his editor Bertha Gunterman; a three-page send-off for Realms of Gold by its co-editor Elinor Whitney; and, in conclusion, a dozen pages surveying “Other Children’s Book Departments Since 1918,” their editors, and some of the books on each fall list. Coward-McCann was publishing Millions of Cats, and one of the “unusually interesting” illustrations is on the back cover.

THE MAGAZINE WAS METAMORPHOSING, slowly and then quickly, from an oversize bookshop newsletter into the all-but-official journal of “the new children’s book movement,” as Frederic Melcher called it. The subscription price doubled, to one dollar; the quarterly became a bimonthly, with ads. But the significant changes were internal. In 1932 Bertha Mahony married a wealthy furniture-manufacturer whose home was in Ashburnham, in central Massachusetts, beyond daily commuting range; she began to divide her time between Ashburnham and Boston. In 1934 she and Elinor Whitney resigned from the Bookshop to concentrate on the Horn Book, and it acquired its own good right-hand in the person of Beulah Folmsbee, an all-around professional who ran the office, handled subscriptions and advertising, designed the magazine, and got it out. In 1936 the Union, unable to replace Mahony and Whitney at the Bookshop, sold it into oblivion; Elinor Whitney married prep-school headmaster William Field, and withdrew from month-to-month operations; and Bertha Mahony Miller and Elinor Whitney Field, with their husbands and Horn Book printer Thomas Todd, assumed ownership of the magazine (upon William Miller’s putting its finances to rights).

To Anne Carroll Moore and other old Horn Book friends, this was a new beginning, both a casting off of fetters and an embarkation upon stormy seas. Moore was contributing advice, suggestions, admonishments, and articles right along; she put together an issue honoring Marie Shedlock, the fabled English storyteller, and wrote about Kenneth Grahame and other English personalities she’d known. In 1936, learning that the Horn Book was floating loose, she offered to donate to the cause — “if you think it would strengthen your subscription appeal” — a revived version of her old “Three Owls” column of critical commentary. At sixty-six, Moore was four years short of mandatory retirement, with its loss of entitlements; as a Horn Book fixture, she was sure to get review books and due respect. The magazine, in turn, got a splash of vinegar, a crusty voice.

Louise Seaman had meanwhile married corporate lawyer Edwin DeT. Bechtel; had sustained a horseback-riding injury that hadn’t healed properly; and in 1934 had resigned from Macmillan — all the better, it turned out, to learn about children and books. Especially young children and books. American picture books were in a state of infancy but growing faster than the ability to assess them soundly. The pictures were not traditional illustrations and not to be judged by traditional norms: Bertha Mahony Miller’s most aesthetic friend, Marguerite Mitchell, who had run the Bookshop gallery, could not see anything good in Marjorie Flack’s Angus books, for instance. Picture book texts were a new form of writing altogether.

Among the books by progressive educators that Louise Seaman Bechtel published at Macmillan were two unorthodox geographies by Lucy Sprague Mitchell of the Bank Street School, then called the Bureau of Educational Experiments. Much impressed with Mitchell’s work, Bechtel contributed to the second Here and Now storybook, Another Here and Now Story Book (1937) and took a special interest in the Writers Laboratory that Mitchell started, where Bechtel met and became friends with Margaret Wise Brown. The immediate consequence was an article on Mitchell by Brown and a Bank Street colleague run in tandem with a featured review of Another Here and Now Story Book by Bertha Miller — who admits to “doubting” the first book — in the May 1937 issue of the Horn Book. In effect, Horn Book star treatment for one of Anne Carroll Moore’s least favored people.

Bechtel herself wrote two keystone articles on the newest of the new, “Gertrude Stein for Children” and “Books Before Five.” She took on the comics, in 1941, when that was the hottest topic in children’s bookdom. She wrote major pieces about Elizabeth Coatsworth, Helen Sewell, Rachel Field, and others she’d worked with. When she went to Egypt, she discoursed on the year’s Egyptian books; when she delivered a paper, as she was often asked to do, it usually saw print in the Horn Book. She was a fluent, eloquent writer, vastly informed, and a balance to Moore in her outlook and tastes. But she was enough like Moore to write a lovely appreciation of Walter de la Mare — and Moore was enough like her to also like Gertrude Stein.

The person who stabilized the troika of Bechtel, Miller, and Moore was the Boston Public Library’s Alice Jordan, scholar of American children’s literature and a steady, persuasive reviewer. What she taught Bertha Miller about children’s books by special arrangement, she taught formally to Elinor Whitney Field and decades of Bookshop/Horn Book hands at the Simmons Library School. It was she who gave Miller her first public recognition, in the June 1929 Atlantic Monthly (the portrait on this issue’s cover appeared with that tribute); she who wrote the studies of nineteenth-century American writers that first appeared in the Horn Book in the early 1930s and eventually saw publication as From Rollo to Tom Sawyer (1948); she who touched off the Caroline M. Hewins Lectures, underwritten by Frederic Melcher, on historic New England writers and publishers, that the Horn Book, Inc., also published. And it was Jordan to whom Bertha Miller turned in 1939 to take over the Booklist when total responsibility for the magazine, along with personal concerns, overwhelmed her. For the next eleven years the Horn Book boasted short, substantive reviews — light enough for layfolk, knowledgeable enough for professionals.

Jordan and Bechtel and Moore also went on the masthead that year, along with Elinor Field, to shore up the Horn Book and its frazzled editor. This was no mere window dressing: the erstwhile colleagues became active collaborators, and Miller, to secure their advice and assistance, had to listen to Bechtel’s recital of her shortcomings and Moore’s reproaches for one dereliction or another (each endangering the future of children’s books). Pressures to change, pressures not to change.

Bechtel faulted her for New England insularity — and that, for Miller, was easy to correct. She entered into a correspondence with Gladys English, of the Los Angeles Public Library, to secure an article about Arna Bontemps and an article by him — both appeared in the January 1939 issue — and took up English’s suggestion that the Horn Book have a California issue timed to the forthcoming ALA Los Angeles conference. She started a new department, Hunters Fare, in which a librarian would answer readers’ (alleged) questions about books, and recruited Siri Andrews, then of the University of Washington, to take a turn conducting it. She invited Eulalie Steinmetz Ross, in charge of children’s work at Cincinnati, to speak frankly about Horn Book policies and practices — and Ross did. Andrews later became part of the Horn Book inner circle, and Ross became Miller’s biographer.

OVERALL, SHE HELD TO HER COURSE. And with Beulah Folmsbee to faithfully execute her projects, Alice Jordan to depend on for reviewing, and counselors near and far, she was poised for a decade of enormous productivity. It might be her last — she could not stave off retirement much longer. In the Horn Book she moved away from literature pure-and-simple and toward controversial subjects. Under the auspices of The Horn Book, Inc. — “our little close corporation” — she published the books that would keep her original vision alive and intact, notably Paul Hazard’s lyrical Books, Children and Men and the imposing volume widely known as “Mahony,” Illustrators of Children’s Books: 1744–1945. Both books had their roots in the Bookshop and exude its cultural aura. Serene and good-mannered, they seemed ageless a decade after their publication.

Miller worked devotedly on these books for many years — the same years she was reaching out to working librarians on the West Coast, in the Midwest and the South, and monitoring the news of the world for its relation to children. When she stepped down from the Horn Book editorship in 1951, she left it suspended between the timeless and the timely. And why not?

From the September/October 1999 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

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Tchrr-r-r-r! The phone would ring. I’d answer, and after a considerable while I’d hear a faint little quavery voice, as if someone were calling me from beyond the Pleiades…“E-li-i-izabeth?”

It would be my dear friend Bertha Mahony Miller, calling from Ashburnham, Massachusetts, about seventeen miles from Mason, New Hampshire, where I lived then (and still do), about something very important — always something important! Could she come over right now to talk about whatever it was?

“Why, of course, Bertha!” I’d say. What other answer could there be?

In an unbelievably short length of time, a great big automobile, with no driver visible above the steering wheel, would swerve into the parking place at my house and stop with dramatic suddenness. The driver’s-side door would open, and out would step a demure little smiling white-haired lady in a pale blue dotted-Swiss dress with a neat lace collar, wearing a stylish navy-blue straw hat and lugging a giant-size briefcase, or perhaps a purse roomy enough to hold a couple of picture books plus a thick sheaf of typewritten pages.

“Oh, E-li-i-i-i-izabeth!” Her blue eyes would twinkle. “I have an entirely new idea to share with you. I can hardly wait to know what you think!”

Up into the woods we’d go. Bertha would always prefer, weather permitting, to talk over a matter of import in the woods rather than inside a house. Out would come a brand-new book, just off the press, or several clipped-together typewritten pages — an article, an editorial for the next issue of the Horn Book, or simply an idea, a plan, a broader view. The talk would always be about imagination, originality, beauty of expression, inspiration, depth of concept; about truth, about things waiting to be which had not yet been. There we would sit on two mossy rocks with birds flitting hither and yon, and now and then a butterfly, with pine boughs moving gently according to each passing breeze, talking about the world and children, about dreams, high hopes transformed into actualities through words and pictures — Bertha’s specialty.

I didn’t know her when she had brown hair. I didn’t know her before she married William D. Miller and became mistress of that beautiful estate in Ashburnham, with its rambling house, its 
classic tiered gardens outside, its wealth of books inside. I didn’t know Bertha until she had fly-away white hair (such as I have now—wouldn’t she be surprised!). She was a year older than my father, yet I never had the slightest inclination to think of her as belonging to the “older” generation. I thought of her as my contemporary, even though the year The Bookshop for Boys and Girls opened in Boston was the year I entered first grade in Highland Park, Illinois. Publication of The Horn Book Magazine commenced the year I graduated from eighth grade. Not until after I graduated from college and had spent a year studying art in France, then another year in New York trying to find a place for my work, was I introduced to Bertha through a happenstance that I described at length thirty-five years later in the October 1969 issue of the Horn Book. I told about how my mother, having just presented my watercolors at a Newbury Street gallery and having received a disheartening verdict, was plodding doggedly ahead on Boylston Street when she suddenly stopped, fascinated, before the window of The Bookshop for Boys and Girls, and ventured inside to see more. She met Beulah Folmsbee and then Bertha, and the outcome of this happenstance was Bertha’s curiosity to see what was in the portfolio that Mother was carrying, followed by Bertha’s insistence on an exhibit of those watercolors and more, at the Bookshop: my first one-man show, the first stepping-stone on the path to my future, and the beginning of a significant and unique friendship that was to last for thirty-five years.

Rich years they were, holding unforgettable experiences: the Caldecott Medal, for instance, in 1945. Bertha wrote to me in May of that year:

I hope you will see that the amplifier at the dinner is fixed just right for you when you speak, and that you will “speak” your paper, not read it. I want the audience not to miss a bit of it.

The intensity of her interest reached beyond her own plans and projects in behalf of children and their reading. When I was involved in trying to create a children’s room in our small public library here in Mason — painting old discarded furniture in bright Czech folk style, trying to create something out of nothing, fairy-tale-fashion — Bertha would come with cartons of new books sent by publishers for Horn Book reviews, along with window curtains trimmed in rick-rack and peasant-design braid, sewn by herself. She would bring important people in the children’s book world to see the new room, to show them what could be done to bring reading to the children of a small town at no cost.

When I was painting the murals-that-never-got-finished at the Crotched Mountain Rehabilitation Center in Greenfield, New Hampshire, Bertha would bring armloads of picture books for the children as well as such people as the Cronans (the storytellers of Boston) to delight them. Not only did Bertha coax me to write about this magic mountain place for the Horn Book, but when we gave a Christmas pageant, the first in which most of these handicapped children had ever taken part, Bertha insisted on publishing the story of it in book form: a small volume entitled How Far Is It to Bethlehem?

She had no children of her own; yet in a rarer, more long-lasting sense, all children everywhere were hers.

Now and again I happen to meet someone I’ve never met before, and in some mysterious way, the conversation may lead to a mention of the Horn Book.

“The Horn Book, did you say? Do you know the Horn Book?”

“Know it!” exclaimed the person I met just the other day. “I love it! To me, the Horn Book is indispensable!”

Wow! Did you hear that, Bertha, wherever you may be, beyond the Pleiades, perhaps? I somehow know you heard.

As for you, dear beloved Horn Book: Happy seventy-fifth birthday to you! May you continue to thrive and to be indispensable for many and many a year to come!

This article, originally published in the September/October 1999 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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A Caldecott Celebration: Six Artists and Their Paths to the Caldecott Medal

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Eight picture book artists talk shop in these pieces about tools and techniques

“Ticonderoga #2″ by Donald Crews

“Pulp Painting” by Denise Fleming

“The Sculptural Quality” by Arthur Geisert

“Family Albums” by Margaret Miller

“My Next Medium” by Chris Raschka

“Sharpie Markers to the Rescue” by Lynn Reiser

“Tiny Pieces of Paint” by Peter Sís

“Why I Use Oil Paints So Much” by Paul O. Zelinsky

Originally published in the March/April 1998 issue of The Horn Book Magazine, these pieces are part of our Picture Book Month 2012 coverage.

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My mother taught me photography. She was a superb amateur photographer, and as a child I was introduced early to the wonders of a darkroom. I grew up in a house filled with family photographs that were valued and enjoyed. And even when I was young I was aware that my mother’s photographs provided strong visual connections to the past.

I think of my books as extended family albums. In fact, many of the children have appeared in four or five of my books as they’ve grown from cradle to nursery school. But, more importantly, I seek a close “family” connection with each child that combines both photography and friendship.

None of the kids in my books is a model. They are children of friends, friends of friends, or strangers that I approach in the grocery store or the park. Sometimes I have never laid eyes on the child until I show up with my camera and lighting equipment in tow.

When I walk through the front door, I’m hunting for an emotional bond with the child, the joy of new-found friends that animates a photograph. In my ideal picture, the child is comfortable and relaxed and at the same time radiates an appealing energy. Overcoming the basic discomfort of the situation — the common anxiety of being photographed, the flashing strobes — is a continual challenge.

I always arrive with a wish list of photos, but I have learned to go with the flow of the child and to improvise quickly. I will use every device from silly animal noises to playing hide-and-seek to sharing crackers to create my personal hybrid: a photo playdate. As I pack up my equipment and say good-bye, I may be tired, but I’m also high with excitement because I’ve tapped into a special pool of energy — I’ve found the genuine smile.

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

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See, the thing about the medium I’m using now is, every morning I get up to it, or sit down with it, and I try just a little red with it, and BANG I have the same trouble with that red as I did yesterday. But that’s the medium I’m using now. Cat hair. Did I mention cat hair? There will be no cat hair problems with the new medium. Also, and this is important, my new medium is not going to be the kind of medium that would have me work for months with it, finish page upon page of paintings using it, only to find, after some reflection, that I am disgusted with both it and them. My next medium is the medium I never looked at through the spaces between my fingers, hands over my eyes.

My next medium is going to flow like mad, fluid, yes, mmm, like honey but not so sticky, like butter but not so greasy, like melted chocolate but cool.

All that I ask of a medium is that it let me create something that looks like you could hold it, like a real object, something that could carry some story along. That it look like it was really easy to do, just this side of uncouth, held there by the lightest touch, that still satisfies me just as colored shapes and lines. I want a medium that can be applied simply, casually, which, if repeated and layered in some hitherto unfathomed sequence, will knock me on the head and make me leave my table to dance the Hucklebuck.

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

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“While there is copper there is hope.” — an old French proverb

As an etcher, I think etching, of all graphic media, is the most beautiful way of putting ink on paper. The lines are both freely drawn and sculptural. I love etching.

I’ve tried other graphic techniques but had difficulty getting the desired expressiveness from the techniques that require manually manipulated tools to form images in hard surfaces—woodcuts, wood engraving, and metal engraving. Other techniques that I’ve tried are lithography and serigraphy. And, although both allow ease of movement when making lines, the resulting prints look flat to me when compared to the sculptural quality of etchings.

All graphic media have special qualities difficult to achieve in another media: crisp whites — woodcut and wood engraving; clean precise lines that swell and taper — metal engraving; subtle tonal gradations — lithography; large solid shapes with precise edges — serigraphy.

My work is almost entirely line, and I rely on the ease of execution that moving an etching needle through wax allows. The sculptural quality is just an added benefit. Run your finger gently over the surface of an etching and you can feel the relief.

If you could see an etching at its most beautiful — when it is first pulled off the plate with the paper still damp and soft, the ink shiny and glistening, and the relief of the lines at its highest — you would see exactly what I mean.

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

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I have to fix dinner every day at six p.m. Watercolors dry too slowly, but I can dry them in front of the oven, and bake while I’m drying my pictures. I notice people’s surprise when they meet me in the street carrying a bag smelling like a roast or a chicken. Some of the shapes on my pictures just might be sauce. Now that I have gotten used to watercolors, Madeleine paints at home (with oil).

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

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With the lead from a pencil I can make thin delicate words and lines, bold solid black forms, and wispy, smooth gray shadings. All with the same soft lead. Everybody can, anybody — no experience necessary. Everybody can do it, from the very beginning, right out of the box.

Any pencil will do, but my absolute favorite would have to be a TICONDEROGA #2, brand new (they don’t last long) and freshly sharpened. Golden yellow (Cadmium yellow), six-sided, with yellow and green ferrule, and at one end a pink eraser.

Sharpening a new pencil, cutting away the wood to get at the lead, was, at first, very conservative: a hand-held sharpener with one or more hobs for various thickness of pencil. A little later on, and more interesting and bold: a penknife (a non-threatening, pencil-sharpening-only penknife). More limiting: a wall- or desk-mounted hand-turned apparatus.

Up/down, side/side, cross/cross, scribble/scribble, swirl, and then smudge/smudge with a thumb or finger. A wonderful way to make marks on paper. Spare use of the eraser preserves it and avoids losing some potentially useful bit.

Number two is a degree of lead soft enough for most of my needs, but if I must have a very bold, extra-black image for a dog or a train in a tunnel or the night sky, only an EBONY VERIBLACK will do. The whole pencil is black, the lead very soft with unparalleled smudge-ability.

Sketching, note-taking, list-making using a lead pencil in sketchbooks, on envelopes, and on bits of paper of every size and description is a necessary, useful, and pleasurable part of my life. Finding a bit of an old pencil note or sketch, no matter how cryptic, can bring entire events into focus.

Never-used lead pencils also have their place. I often come across pencils in my drawer that say Grand Rapids, Michigan; Bismark, North Dakota; Meteor Crater, Arizona; Mississippi State University. I’m sure the lead in any of these pencils would produce very satisfactory images, but I can’t bring myself to spoil the typography in order to use them. So I’ll just sharpen another TICONDEROGA #2 and get busy.

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

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Cotton rag fiber suspended in water (a wet, messy, colorful slurry) is poured through hand-cut stencils (made from foam meat trays) onto a screen (a window screen will do). The result—an image in handmade paper. The paper is the picture. The picture is the paper.

The advantages of this technique are many:

I now have a use for all those discarded yogurt containers and hair coloring squeeze bottles; they make excellent pouring cups and drawing tools.

I’ve developed marvelous upper-body strength, without the cost of a gym membership, from hauling forty-two pound pails of damp fiber (pulp) around the studio.

At the market I’m known for my fashion sense; my pulp splattered clothing makes quite an impression.

I’ve discovered that a bucket of pulp is the better mousetrap (I am withholding the disgusting details).

Looking for additions to my motley collection of blenders (used to mix pigment and chemicals) gives me a reason to stop and shop garage sales.

Friends have found that the five-gallon pulp shipping pails make nifty nesting buckets for Rhode Island Reds.

And, of course, there is the pleasure of swirling my hands through five gallons of glorious color to mix fiber and pigment.

The drawbacks are few:

Cotton rag fiber spoils, and it is no secret when it does. Open the doors and windows and turn on the fans!

Then there is the problem of color test strips catching fire in the microwave — quite a dramatic touch, but a bit dangerous.

So why pulp painting? It works.

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

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