And back in the present, get ready for Calling Caldecott’s Mock Caldecott Poll, coming next week.

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Last year we started with a list so we’ll do the same this year. What follows is a list of  picture books that have been starred in more than one journal or that one of us especially wants to talk about.

• And Then It’s Spring by Julie Fogliano and Erin E. Stead
• Bear has a Story to Tell by Phillip C. Stead, Erin E. Stead
• Chloe by Peter McCarty
• Extra Yarn  Mac Barnett, illus. by Jon Klassen
• Goldilocks and the three Dinosaurs by Mo Willems
• Green by Laura Vaccaro Seeger
• Hello, Hello by Matt Cordell (or Cordell’s Another Brother)
• Home for Bird by Phillip C. Stead
• Insomniacs by Karina Wolf, illus. by the Brothers Hilts
• Life in the Ocean by Claire A. Nivola
• Little Dog Lost: The True Story of a Brave Dog Named Baltic by Mônica Carnesi 
• Machines Go to Work in the City by William Low
• Mom, It’s My First Day of Kindergarten by Hyewon Yum
• Mousterpiece by Jane Breskin Zalben
• The Obstinate Pen, by Frank W. Dormer
• Ocean Sunlight by Penny Chisholm and Molly Bang, illustrated by Molly Bang
• Penny and her Song by Kevin Henkes
• Step Gently Out  by Helen Frost, photographs by Rick Lieder
• This is Not My Hat by Jon Klassen
• Z is for Moose by Kelly Bingham, illus. by Paul O. Zelinsky

Please use the comments to tell us which books you think are award-worthy — and what other books we should be talking about. And remember that there are still four more months of books we haven’t seen yet, so this is just a start.

If you are new to this blog, follow these links to learn more about Robin and Lolly.

Now… Let the discussion begin!

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Just as the proof of the pudding is in the eating, real appreciation of a picture book depends on more than a first taste, or a first look; truer evaluation becomes possible only after savoring every nuance. At first glance, illustrations may delight us with their beauty — their drafting, palette, forms, composition; with how they embody emotion, or childhood itself. One artist charms with humor, well-paced action, or visual harmony. Another captures the imagination with a beloved character or a story distilled to its irreducible essence.

But to seek a year’s “most distinguished” illustrations — to choose a Caldecott winner — is to look again: to tune in to rhythms, consider trajectories, discover details and connections; and to hope that such particulars will offer the kind of epiphany E. E. Cummings called “everything / which is natural which is infinite which is yes.” A detailed study of some of 2011’s best picture books, medaled and not, made me both more critical and more appreciative. It revealed limitations, missed on first reading, of some appealing titles; contrariwise, in the best ones, I now perceived finer crafting, richer meaning.

Here, then, are some books that seemed to merit serious consideration for the award, or that helped illuminate issues involved in a final choice. Several of these arrest the eye with their extraordinary simplicity. One such, I Want My Hat Back, was frequently mentioned as a Caldecott contender. In Jon Klassen’s neatly balanced compositions, a bear — still as a statue through much of the book — meets other near-immobile creatures in minimal settings. Only the animals’ alert, stylized eyes suggest the drama that will finally erupt on a revelatory solid-red page and set up the story’s sly conclusion. Klassen’s digitally created illustrations are austere. It’s those eyes that focus attention on what’s seen (and unseen) until memory triggers the bear’s retrospective vision — a clever scenario, elegantly rendered.

Patricia Intriago’s Dot, composed as it is of simple shapes and lines, is even more spare. Yet this able graphic designer telegraphs a lot with her graphic forms, using small additions and alterations in size, conformation, or color to convey motion and emotion, sound, taste, and more, including the night sky. Another virtuoso performance is Michael Hall’s exploration of the transformative possibilities of collages improvised, like tangrams, from squares. Like Dot, Hall’s Perfect Square is an exercise in graphic possibility, but Hall brings more ingenuity and a sense of story to the process. He tears, snips, or otherwise divides each square, then reassembles it in a simple scene, with a new color each weekday. On Sunday, the square — cleverly escaping its shape’s constraints — becomes a window through which the earlier scenes are recapped in a rainbow finale.

Lois Ehlert’s art, too, is rooted in graphic design. In RRRalph, she composes a dog from amusingly recognizable objects like buttons, a pop-top, and a zipper. Ralph, a character of buoyant, spread-dominating energy,enacts such pun-ready sounds as wolf, rough, and bark. Printed in handsome boldface, Ralph’s “words” and the large-type commentary by his unseen human are as intrinsic to the striking design as Ralph himself. These minimalist titles may not have the singular quality that evokes that rare sense of Cummings’s “Yes”; still, they’re entirely worthy, fine just as they are.

Among possible nonfiction Caldecott contenders this year were two memoirs. In Orani: My Father’s Village, Claire A. Nivola describes her father’s birthplace as she recalls it from childhood visits. In her realistic, decorative art, the red-roofed Sardinian village nestles in a sun-washed landscape, its people — including crowds of children — engaged in traditional work and play, indoors and out. The busy scenes, expertly organized for clarity of meaning and visual harmony, employ a minimum of detail, yet the simply characterized figures brim with good humor and purposeful activity.

Contrasting with Nivola’s sunny, harmonious paintings, Ed Young’s tribute to his father, and to the fortress-like house he built in wartime Shanghai, is a kaleidoscope of media and memories. The House Baba Built combines collage (flat and textured); photos, maps, and architectural drawings; sketches; nuanced portraits; and more — all jostling together among several gatefolds and against bright backgrounds, like the extended family and numerous others who found companionable refuge together in that island of safety. Resembling an album of long ago, the book’s imagery mirrors Young’s memories — precise, vivid, and sometimes shadowed with retrospective understanding — like the masses of crows that presage the bombers Baba’s house was destined to survive.

Kadir Nelson’s portraits for Heart and Soul are splendid. Is this “Story of America and African Americans” a picture book? Since its meaning would be severely truncated without those inspiring paintings, it could be argued that the book falls within the award guidelines. Are these heroic figures idealized? There is a consistency to their nobility; still, each person is individual, recognizable. If I’d been on the committee, I’d have wanted to discuss these distinguished illustrations.

One work of nonfiction did receive a 2012 Caldecott Honor: Me…Jane, by Patrick McDonnell, creator of the comic strip Mutts. At first glance, this introduction to Jane Goodall recalls the comic strip’s endearing style: McDonnell’s visual narrative focuses on lively, observant young Jane exploring her childhood territory and imagining faraway Africa. But like Ed Young, McDonnell incorporates other media. Contrasting with the briskly (and affectionately) drafted characters, his more realistic watercolor settings are invitingly verdant outdoors, cozy within. Old engravings in pale hues provide backgrounds for the verso text, balancing the more saturated recto colors. There are photos, too, and precocious art by thriving, inquisitive young Jane herself, all expertly integrated to suggest the many facets of the scientist’s life.

Nancy Ekholm Burkert also imagines Africa, but in her quintessentially elegant style that’s entirely different from McDonnell’s cartoons. Mouse and Lion appear in specific, meticulously researched detail, formally framed in classic rule. Landscape features enhance some full spreads, but Burkert usually suggests settings with just a few significant details amid plentiful white space, the better to focus on action she evokes with repeated images of the mouse, or by showing only the lion’s gaping mouth. This is entrancing, gently humorous storytelling, a perfect match for Rand Burkert’s lively adaptation.

Maurice Sendak can summon every bit as much elegance as Burkert (see Dear Mili); he’s also a master of the profoundly witty sketch (I Saw Esau). In Bumble-Ardy, as so often before, he uses both. At this birthday masquerade, a fulsome array of pigs caricature their Dickensian (and often scary) human counterparts. Still, Bumble-Ardy’s party makes an amusing wild rumpus; and if Aunt Adeline’s righteous anger is over the top, so is her affectionate forgiveness (including a scrumptious birthday treat — sweeter than a still-hot supper). The treasure, here, is Sendak’s art — its impeccable drafting, diversity of strange characters, and subtle transitions between mayhem and cozy order.

John Rocco’s 2012 Caldecott Honor, Blackout, celebrates pretty much the opposite of Bumble-Ardy’s illicit gathering. Deprived of their solitary plugged-in pursuits, people discover community in the nighttime street and at a rooftop party; one family’s new-found camaraderie even survives the power’s coming back on. Rocco’s angular characters are comfortably ordinary. What shines here, besides the wonderful play of light and shadow, is composition: the Brooklyn Bridge looming over a rectilinear street, its lights continuing the line of a diagonal fire escape; varied points of view and rhythmic frames (including windows); figures silhouetted against a starry sky. Having the lights come on is a letdown, reflected in a suddenly drab palette. Then, at the close, the magic Rocco has brought to life with each detail, stance, hue, and shade is recaptured in candlelight.

Beth Krommes’s radiant art for Swirl by Swirl: Spirals in Nature amplifies and extends Joyce Sidman’s poetic observations with delightful ingenuity. From a chipmunk “snuggling” in its burrow to maturing nautilus shells, from a wave’s curl to vines’ tendrils, spirals are, fascinatingly, everywhere. Krommes composes each spread with clarity, grace, and even more species than Sidman mentions, catching their essence in crisp black scratchboard and an intense natural palette — golden browns, glowing rust, gentle blues and greens. Here’s art that serves science while enriching the reader’s visual imagination. From fern frond to spiral galaxy, this perfectly integrated picture book epitomizes that “which is natural which is infinite which is yes.”

As does, for the youngest, Kevin Henkes’s deceptively simple Little White Rabbit. Limned in broad, elemental strokes, surrounded by soft springtime colors, Rabbit ventures forth, explores, is frightened by a cat, and hops safely home to mother. But there’s such lovely variety here! What would it be like to be green? Tall? Still as a stone? Between neatly framed hops, Rabbit’s wonderment bursts into lush, full-bleed spreads that expand the very concept of imagination—and then balance that freedom with a satisfying dose of reality, to arrive at an emotional truth that Henkes underlines with each delicate sweep of his brush, each tender hue.

The winsome narrator in Lane Smith’s 2012 Caldecott Honor, Grandpa Green, also takes an imaginative journey, one whose layers of meaning, again, are suggested by using more than one medium. Smith renders present-day characters in brush and ink; for the “foliage” (topiary) that depicts Grandpa’s history, he uses watercolor, oils, and digital paint. It’s a felicitous pairing. Delicate drafting and the little boy’s self-assured stance and stride imbue him with reality, while his tale in topiary is more fantastical, quite like a child’s understanding of an old man’s reminiscences. As the boy observes, “The garden remembers”; and if some of those dappled green figures are impossibly agile for actual boxwood, the amiable characters and their present-day projects are as real as Grandpa’s lost-and-found glasses. Grandpa Green is a magical vision of how an old man’s memories, simplified by time, can generate a child’s imaginative understanding. And what a potent image is the serene topiary! Like a good story retold, it’s timeless, constantly growing, changing with each judicious trimming. It’s like memories shared with a beloved child — some mysterious dark foliage but no shadows, with boundless white space for imagination to roam. Natural. Infinite. Yes!

“Yo! Yes!” Chris Raschka’s characters agree, sealing their new friendship in his 1994 Caldecott Honor book of the same name. His wordless Caldecott Medal winner this year is a more elaborate take on the theme of friendship. Words aren’t needed in A Ball for Daisy: the action and emotion are all in the body language and subtly shifting color. Raschka’s relaxed lines, too, are wondrously expressive. Daisy the dog is unconfined by the broad, freely brushed gray that suggests her shape and movements, while her eloquent face, ears, and tail telegraph her emotions in bold black. Daisy is all emotion: joy in possessing and chasing her ball (stand-in for a blanket, or a friend); despair when it pops; solace, cuddling on the sofa; joy again at getting a new ball and making a dog friend, too. Romping right along with Daisy across the liberating white space, Raschka’s brush develops each emotional state with expertly paced vignettes. Each double-page spread grouping is a compositional tour de force and a delight. Minimal backgrounds signal mood: joy is a glow of yellow with touches of sky blue and spring green; angst, a cloud of deepening violets and grays. Daisy’s owner is outside the pup’s focus (and ours: she’s seen from Daisy’s level, waist down) until after Daisy’s loss, when we finally see the whole child, suggesting that Daisy’s relationship with her human, too, has expanded, and that the pup’s happiness is enriched as well as regained.

At first glance this looks so simple, this mini saga of loss and reparation. Yet Raschka’s characterization is marvelously deft. With a wealth of suggestive and telling touches of his nimble brush, Daisy goes from self-absorbed ebullience to utter resignation to congenial frolic. She’s the essence of young dog — and of a two-year-old child becoming a wiser three. Though her story is simple, it’s transcendent: “everything / which is natural which is infinite which is yes.”

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Photo (and cake): Mary Wong

Roger Sutton’s Live Five interviews and blog posts about them—videos coming soon! (We’ll let you know when they’re up.)

Profile of Newbery Award winner Jack Gantos by editor Wesley Adams.

Profile of Caldecott Award winner Chris Raschka by his wife Lydie Raschka.

Ashley Bryan’s 2012 Coretta Scott King—Virginia Hamilton Award for Lifetime Achievement acceptance speech.

Kadir Nelson’s Coretta Scott King Author Award acceptance speech and profile of Kadir by publisher Donna Bray.

Shane W. Evans’s Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award acceptance speech and profile of Shane by his friend, actor Taye Diggs.

My Favorite Newbery/Caldecott Matching Game: Medalists reveal their choices.

The Search for Distinguished: K. T. Horning revives a decades-old Newbery debate.

2012 Mind the Gap Awards: The books that didn‘t win.

Caldecott 2012: “everything…which is yes” by Joanna Rudge Long.

Newbery 2012: “The Year in Words” by Nina Lindsay.

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Photo by Catherine Wink.

Chris wakes up at five o’clock in the morning and prepares breakfast according to plan: Monday — eggs; Tuesday — cereal; Wednesday — oatmeal. At six thirty he wakes our son, Ingo, and after breakfast they eventually leave the house together. Ingo turns east to cross Central Park to go to school and Chris walks north along the Hudson River to his studio. Every day at the same spot, opposite a certain lamppost, he leans over the wide wooden rail to check the progress of the tide, which, he will tell you, fluctuates by about one hour per day.

Chris’s habits are as regular as the tide. The organization of each day is the key to his productivity. Picasso said, “Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.” One manifestation of Chris’s daily work habits is his collection of sixty-five sketchbooks spanning twenty-six years.

The first sketchbook is dated 1986, two years after we were married. At 8½ by 11 inches, it is one of the largest, a black hardcover with unlined white pages. At the start of the book, he was working part-time as a lawyer’s assistant in Ann Arbor, Michigan, a job he took to free up time for art after a wrenching decision to give up his spot in the freshman class at the University of Michigan Medical School. By the final pages we were living in New York, where I was teaching and he was pursuing art at a worktable in the living room of our small one-bedroom apartment. As I adjusted to my new job, he took on most of the domestic chores that year. Tucked among the sketchbook’s drawings is a grocery list: 1 dozen eggs, 2 frozen piecrusts, 1 loaf bread.

The notebooks also hold quotes from whatever Chris is reading — such as favorite poets like Elizabeth Bishop or W. H. Auden — as well as scenes of daily life in watercolor, pencil, and ink. Like all of his notebooks, number thirty-five, from 2006, shows a continuous evolution of style. It looks like he was on a Picasso kick that year, and next to pencil studies of Picasso’s cubist compositions are words from the master: “To repeat is to run counter to spiritual laws … Copying others is necessary, but what a pity to copy oneself!” A nod to cubism can be found in Chris’s work: in the skewed facial features in I Pledge Allegiance and in the face of the Can’t Sleep moon.

The sketchbooks contain all the beginnings of Chris’s picture books. In notebook fifty-five, spring 2010, he was still experimenting with loose roughs of a small white dog. One page is covered with titles: “The Ball,” “Two Balls,” “My Best Ball,” “Daisy’s Ball.” An ink drawing of a dog drowning in water seems to allude to work-related stress with its tagline “dream.”

Another studio shelf holds a jumbled box of book dummies. To me, the dummies are the most precious items in the studio, and I sometimes badger Chris to preserve them better. These miniatures are raw inspiration-on-the-page, and I often like them better than the polished final products. Each book is handcrafted in a variety of binding and stitching patterns. The texts are hand-lettered with a Raphael 8404 paintbrush, his favorite. Once, after an art director had handed back a dummy filled with the dreaded editorial sticky notes, Chris removed the stickies and transferred the comments directly onto the dummy pages with red paint, as if to take control of his work again.

I also like the studio scrap pile. Characteristically, the scraps have a specific place, the bottom drawer of the flat file. Chris cuts his art rejects into small squares and collects them, loose, in handmade portfolios—folders fashioned from butterboard, bookcloth, and fine papers, and secured with cotton tape ties. Each square has a fragment of picture-book art — a rabbit’s ear or a little black crow — on one side and a blank side that is perfectly usable for new drawings on the other. These portfolios become picture-logs of solo or family trips to Pennsylvania, Michigan, Singapore, or Rome. When we stay with someone we know, he’ll remove a sketch and prop it by the nightstand as a surprise gift for our host.

A dislike of waste and a penchant for order characterized Chris’s childhood in a Chicago suburb. His Viennese mother sorted Legos by color and size, and she rotated breakfast foods according to a schedule. The family went camping on summer vacations to save money for occasional trips to Europe, and his thrifty mother darned the family’s socks. In this orderly setting, Chris’s interests were supported. He kept a succession of salamanders, turtles, and even a baby caiman in a large tank in the kitchen. He took art classes and played viola and recorder.

In his studio, Chris tends snails in a tank and twenty-six cacti on the windowsill. If something breaks, he mends it — a teapot, a chair, the leather handle of an old briefcase. He sewed a waterproof cover for his bicycle seat out of a plaid Chinatown bag. As he works, he listens to music on the radio. He is big on schedules, like a year-at-a-glance pie chart. It’s a ring divided into twelve sections with images from the books he plans to be working on drawn in each wedge. Some people draw or paint to generate order: Chris creates order to release wobbly, unrestricted lines.

When he is in the midst of a project, Chris fixates on things he will need, like trees or hair or yellow windows burning in the dark. For his latest book, he’s been watching kids on bikes. He studies the way a helmet appears to overbalance a small child’s body, the chunky sneakers on the pedals, and the sense of pride in the upright posture.

Chris doesn’t confine sketching to a nine-to-five schedule, like the rest of his workday. He always travels with paint, brush, notebook, and a small bottle of water. At church, he used to draw detailed mazes to keep Ingo from getting restless during the sermon. Once I watched as he eyed a small child one pew over who held a fistful of crayons. She was absorbed in her drawing, and Chris was engrossed by her art-induced hypnosis. Before my eyes she morphed into a Raschka drawing.

At the risk of over-quoting a muse, here’s one more from Picasso: “Everybody has the same energy potential. The average person wastes his in a dozen little ways.” Chris cuts down on distractions in a dozen little ways. By checking e-mail only once or twice a week, he generates less e-mail and is able to preserve more time for work. One of his maxims is: “Do the most important thing first.” Art and writing therefore take place in the morning. The order in which lesser tasks happen is left to fate, sometimes literally, by tossing a paper cube with a task stamped on each side, among them MAIL, FILE, CALL, LOG. Afternoons are for buying art supplies or visiting editors by bike or on foot.

I’m a person who gets immersed in one project at a time, so I admire Chris’s ability to stop one thing in the middle and start another. He wrote the first draft of Seriously, Norman!, his first novel for children, over the course of one year in strict two-hour morning sessions. He began by walking with no fixed destination in the vicinity of the library, which did not open until nine o’clock. By the time he sat down to work he had sentences in his head ready for the page. He wrote with an HB pencil in one of a series of slim black notebooks from Muji, the artsy Japanese stationery store. At eleven he packed everything up, rode his bike to the studio, paused for coffee, then switched to painting.

Like every artist, Chris gets stalled. This happens surprisingly often for someone who has completed sixty-three picture books. “I can’t remember how to draw,” he’ll say after returning home from the studio, or, “I can’t find the right style.” Restless, he’ll wake at three or four instead of five and read in the living room. To reopen channels of creative work he’ll “shake up the schedule,” as he calls it, with a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to look intently at Chinese paintings, or he’ll stop at the St. Agnes Library book sale on Amsterdam and 81st Street to comb the shelves for art books by Bonnard or Klee or J.M.W. Turner.

When the Caldecott committee called on a Monday morning in January, Chris was on his way to work as usual. I happened to accompany him that day, and that’s why neither of us was home to receive the call. Chris had left his cell phone at the studio, so he was totally unreachable. We were down by the river. He had pulled me to the water’s edge to lean over the wide wooden rail to check the tide, which, like a disciplined creative life, leaves a lasting and visible pattern on the shore.

Chris Raschka’s picture book A Ball for Daisy won the 2012 Caldecott Medal. Read his acceptance speech in the July/August 2012 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

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That book did of course win the 1964 Medal, a very nice cherry on top of Sendak’s five previous Caldecott Honors (which would be joined by two more in later years). For Sendak, the best part of Where the Wild Things Are’s success was the financial security it brought (“It bought me my house,” he told me) and the freedom to do the projects he liked: “I took good advantage of [its] popularity to illustrate books that I passionately wanted to do without having to worry if they were commercial or not.” While the publishing economy of today might have encouraged Where the Wild Things Went and Where the Wild Things Went Next, Sendak mostly left the (considerable) spinning-off to others in order to to do what he wanted in a career that would include big books and small books, color and black-and-white, books by himself and books by others, opera and ballet design. Most Caldecott Medalists can’t afford to rest on their laurels; Sendak could, and didn’t.

When I look through the roster of Caldecott winners (seventy-five as of this year), I see dozens of fine books, but only three classics: Make Way for Ducklings, The Snowy Day, and Where the Wild Things Are. And of those, only the third has made the leap from the children’s bookshelf to become, as well, a touchstone of twentieth-century American art and culture. Maurice would sometimes complain about his other work being overshadowed, but come on, I would say, that’s huge. If sometimes he knew this and sometimes he forgot, what matters most is that it didn’t make one bit of difference either way to his work.

When I was speaking at the Eric Carle Museum recently, someone asked me if I thought Where the Wild Things Are could be published today. It’s an impossible question, because that book gave artists and publishers and librarians and children a new way to read. Its belief in an audience that could compose its own music for three wordless spreads and draw its own picture on the final page was generous. Its messages—that you can imagine without restraint, yell your head off, and still be altogether worthy of love—remain.

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Photo: Nicole Haley

After winning the 2011 Caldecott Medal for A Sick Day for Amos McGee, written by her husband, Philip, Erin E. Stead returns with a second picture book, this one about waiting and planning and hope. And Then It’s Spring (5–8 years) grows out of a long friendship; see below.

1. What about Julie Fogliano’s (glorious) text helped you decide to illustrate it?

Erin E. Stead: Julie is a friend of mine who, like me, is quite shy about her work. I met Julie almost ten years ago when we both worked in a bookstore in New York (she was my assistant manager). For the majority of those years, I knew Julie was a writer but never saw a thing she wrote. Since I was the same way, I never put any pressure on her. Then one day, out of the blue, she emailed me a poem. I loved it. I know her, so I knew it was her voice, but I also thought it had the lightness and the seriousness that I (or my six-year-old self) could relate to. She told me she had received some advice to push the text into a more traditional story. I suddenly felt very protective of the original poem. Obviously, the next step was to send it (without telling her) to my editor, Neal Porter.

Neal wrote: “This is lovely. Would you be interested in illustrating?”

So I did. I’ve been able to work with two writers (my husband, Philip, and Julie) with whom I am very close, which has really worked for me. They both give me plenty of say and plenty of space. Julie’s books (I am wrapping up the second book now) are so interesting to work on. The texts are abstract, which allows me to make a lot of decisions about how I’d like to pull the reader through the story. It’s a lot of freedom for an illustrator. Most of the time that is wonderful, but there are always moments where I am lying on the floor of my studio in despair. I want to do her delicate texts justice. It’s a great challenge.

2. What picture book text from the past do you most wish you could have illustrated?

EES: Tough question for an illustrator. There are many books I would love to have illustrated, but I wouldn’t be able to do as good a job as the illustrator whose name is already on the book. James Thurber’s Many Moons is probably one of my top picks, although I am no Louis Slobodkin — let alone Marc Simont.

3. My favorite spring song is “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most.” What’s yours?

EES: I haven’t been able to think of anything that tops Mel Brooks’s “Springtime for Hitler.”

4. You’re a signatory to the Picture Book Proclamation. Which of its sixteen “We Believes?” means the most to you?

EES: Tough question #2. I am not positive my answer would be the same every time you asked me. Four out of five times though, I would probably answer: “We should know our history.”

I don’t necessarily mean the books that have become part of the canon (although that is an excellent place to start). A lot of good books can get lost in today’s online-blogging-twitter-algorithm shopping, but it’s nothing a good library, new or used bookstore, or a little Leonard S. Marcus can’t fix. Sometimes I worry that we’ve given up a little of the weird or the dark in picture books, while not realizing that some of the books we still love are entirely weird. I love Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, but as an elevator pitch, that book is strange.

I also think knowing your history means learning about some mistakes. I own some beautifully illustrated books from the 1950s with story morals like: “So he pretended to be like everyone else, and finally everyone liked him. The end.” I’d like to try to avoid stories like that in my career.

Picture books are a restricted art form. Nonetheless illustrations and text can vary wildly from one book to another. I try to read as many as possible. There are times when this makes me a little tired, but I also hope it makes me better at my job.

5. What color could you not live without?

EES: I live in Michigan, where we hear things like “lake effect snow” and “overcast” for months at a time (I’m looking at you, February and March). There are entire weeks where I am convinced that there is no color left in the world. And then the sun comes out, and while my retinas might burn a little at its return, I realize I could not live without blue. And sometimes green.

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I’ll be in Dallas for ALA tomorrow through Monday, serving on the Batchelder Award committee and schmoozing with our advertisers, who, it is interesting, are among the supporters of the deservedly maligned SOPA Act proposal that prompted Wikipedia and others to protest. I’ll have to remember to ask if that Dead End in Norvelt cover I plucked from cyberspace to put here yesterday is going to get us in trouble. More chills!

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P.S. Don’t forget that you will be able to watch the award announcements live at 8:45 AM EST on the 23^rd. Visit ALSC for details about the webcast.

Roger Sutton
Editor in Chief

The post From the Editor – January 2012 appeared first on The Horn Book.