The beau mec who brings Elizabeth her croissant each morning.

In international news, French President François Hollande announced today that in gratitude for our loan of Elizabeth Law to La Ville-Lumière, he is sending some of his country’s most esteemed illustrateurs to New York City for a series of public pourparlers avec some of our own. Here’s the full lineup and schedule.

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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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Dan Yaccarino in his studio. Photo courtesy of Dan Yaccarino.

LEONARD S. MARCUS: How involved were you in designing the interactive e-book based on your board book, Five Little Pumpkins?

DAN YACCARINO: I would get the latest version and give the developers suggestions about the sound effects, music, and the “functionality” of the character—what the character can be made to do.

LSM: Who are these developers? What is their background?

DY: They are a combination of people who have come from publishing, film, TV, and games. I’ve worked in books for twenty years and in TV for at least a dozen years. It’s a convergence of all these media, and the result will be something that is greater than the sum of their parts.

LSM: Among your own picture books, are there those you think would make good e-books and others that would not make the transition especially well?

DY: There are definitely some books that should not become e-books! In general, they are the ones that tell a linear story, like Unlovable. When kids get older, they want to sit down and delve into a story. So there might be no good reason to introduce functionality—and you might end up with gratuitous moments when something moves or makes a sound simply because it can be made to do so, rather than because doing so moves your character forward. On the other hand, picture book e-books seem to work very well for books for younger kids—for concept books or early read-alouds like Five Little Pumpkins. An example of another kind of book that would be right for an interactive e-book is Go, Go America: 50 States of Fun. It’s a book of facts about the United States. I see a lot of opportunities to play around and make connections. Also remember: right now, we’re in the beginning stage when lots of pre-existing books are being retrofitted as e-books. In five years, e-books won’t look anything like the ones being made now. But we have to go through these first steps now.

LSM: Is there anything to be said for the tactile experience that traditional books offer, and that electronic devices, even if they are “hand-held,” don’t?

DY: I still love print books. I love the weight of the book in my hand and the paper. I just started my next book, and I try to do at least two books a year. The whole “e-book thing” is coming, but it’s not here yet. But I look at the talk about the superiority of printed books to books on screens as almost a fetish. When Gutenberg came along, people probably said the same thing about scrolls. Or even earlier: “I just miss the weight of that clay tablet in my lap!” Storytelling has been given a new form, and someone in my position is going to be excited about that.

LSM: Why, from this standpoint, even bother with a book?

DY: Because it’s a good vehicle for showcasing a character’s personality. But if the character Curious George were being developed today, I don’t know if I would lead with the book. Maybe I would start with a game.

LSM: Can you be more specific about how you as an illustrator might go about creating dramatic interest in an e-book as compared to a print picture book?

DY: Let’s say that you want your character to be surprised. In the traditional book form, it’s a page turn. You know, he’s walking down the road, and what does he see?…You turn the page and it’s a giant monster or whatever. The page-turn is as high tech as we get with books. In television or film, you might have a quick cut, and frame the scene so that it looks overwhelming to this tiny character. In interactive e-books…I don’t know yet what the equivalent technique would be. That’s the exciting thing. Maybe you tap the character and it grows. Or you tap it and the frame moves. We’re still inventing that language. In a picture book, you can do gatefolds. You can do pop-ups. You can do pull-tabs. We’ve pushed all that to the limit. With e-books, we’re just at the point where filmmakers were more than 100 years ago. It’s exciting to be part of that new beginning.

LSM: Pop-ups are an old way to make images actually move on the page. Do you think that pop-up books in particular will pale—and date—especially rapidly in contrast to the new media, in which animation is a given?

DY: I can’t imagine Robert Sabuda’s work ever looking quaint. It’s so beautiful and intelligent. But there will be fewer “average” pop-up books. Books in general will continue to exist, but they will become more special. They’re going to become beautiful objects, less utilitarian than they are now.

LSM: Granted that e-Book Land is fascinating new territory, is anything lost by relying so heavily on technology for storytelling for children?

DY: The main thing is that we have more options now. My daughter, who is thirteen, just saw the film Hugo and is now reading the book it is based on, Brian Selznick’s The Invention of Hugo Cabret. On Sundays in our house we have a rule: no screens. That applies to me too, unfortunately! We have a big family dinner and spend a lot of the day at home. It’s a release from technology. As a parent you need to put limits on the devices.

Think of a three-year-old and Five Little Pumpkins. There is going to be interactivity with the e-book: trying out the functions, listening to the music and narration, and scrolling. The text is an old rhyme, and if the child is sitting on the parent’s lap and is saying the rhyme too, there is the interactivity of reciting the words with the person who’s reading the book. So, there are different kinds of interactivity and I don’t think that one is better than the other. If kids stare blankly at a screen, that’s not the device’s fault. I don’t see parents sharing interactive e-books with their children. It tends to be more of a solitary activity. But that could happen. And as I say, as a parent you can always turn off the narrator and just read the story.

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I would like to thank the Boston Globe–Horn Book selection committee for choosing Pocketful of Posies as an award winner this year. It is a great honor to have my work recognized this way, especially because my fabric relief illustrations are so unusual. Since my first book, The Way Home, was published twenty years ago, I’ve felt outside of the mainstream of children’s books, that my style didn’t really fit and was more of a novelty. It’s as if I had been rowing upstream, paddling with my needle and thimble, in a river of watercolors. Now, I feel that I’m playfully floating down the stream of possibilities. I think I will even manage to stitch a few French knots along the way.

Throughout my career, I have had the good fortune to work with some wonderfully supportive people who understand my need for artistic freedom. My agency, Studio Goodwin Sturges, stood by me as I took time to experiment and worked on projects other than children’s books. With Pocketful of Posies, I felt the trust of Margaret Raymo, my editor at Houghton Mifflin, who was patient while I worked alone for long periods—sometimes a year at a time without showing her anything. At home, my husband Rob Goldsborough has encouraged my endeavors, never suggesting that I get a “real” job.

Lately, I’ve been describing my work as part of a Slow Art Movement. Yes, it is very time consuming and not very practical, but that is part of what attracts me to this way of working. I sew, wrap, embroider, carve, and embellish in as many ways as I can—all by hand. What I can’t really do is speed up the process, and machines are no help. In the past I used a sewing machine but now find that I can better achieve the look I want with hand-stitching. Through the repetitive, tactile process, I find a calm satisfaction that can help lead to effective problem solving. Each illustration requires figuring out something new, whether it is a way of constructing a driftwood house or making a tiny basket, so I need time to work things out.

It would be more straightforward and faster to paint or even use paper collage, but I discovered early on that it was easier for me to express my ideas in a sculptural form. As a child, crayons were never enough, and I had the urge to sew, staple, or glue real things to my pictures. My mother kept my first book: a twelve-page tour of the things in an eight-year-old’s life. The paper and fabric collage illustrations have held up well, including a cut-out pop-up of a play kitchen. Looking back, I have early memories of sewing and constructing things at home. My sister and I would spend hours stitching outfits and creating scenes for our dolls. I was especially interested in all things miniature and coming up with ways to decorate and furnish the dolls’ environment. I can remember making a tiny bathroom and looking around the house for shower curtain material. It had to be water repellent—regular cloth would not do!

I took a pair of scissors, went into our bathroom, and cut a small piece out of the 1960s-style polka-dotted vinyl shower curtain. It took awhile for my mother to discover that the corner was cut out, but she was quite open to sacrifice in the name of art. She was an artist herself and created an atmosphere in our home where art and making things by hand was important. In our family, learning how to make things was not only fun but there was an unspoken high regard for handwork and beauty. With this in mind, I’ve dedicated
Pocketful of Posies to the memory of my remarkable parents, Mary and Jim Mavor.

Later, at the Rhode Island School of Design, I rediscovered my childhood fascination with working in three dimensions. My teacher, Judy Sue Goodwin Sturges, recognized my interest in sewing and encouraged me to work outside of the yoke of traditional illustration mediums. David Macaulay’s class assignments were more like conceptual exercises, which forced me to stretch my imagination. He once brought in a box of pumpkins and had the students transform them into something else. By my junior year at RISD, I had stopped trying to translate the pictures in my mind’s eye through a brush or pen. I found that I was happy and energized while manipulating materials in my hands. I was no longer struggling to keep in step. With a needle and thread, I could dance. For some reason, I’d been under the impression that in art school one concentrates on serious fine art, and I’d kept my interest in handcrafts underground. I used this time in school to try different ways of working and taught myself embroidery.

I’ve never taken any classes in fiber art or sewing, except for a 4-H class in my childhood. I don’t think I would have made a very cooperative embroidery student, given my tendency to resist conformity and inability to follow patterns and instructions. I just figured out stitches by looking at diagrams and sewing obsessively.

I’ve spent years developing a technique I call fabric relief, which eventually led to illustrating children’s books. My early creations were more sculptural, with dolls set up in three-dimensional scenes. One of my first jobs was illustrating a story for an educational reader about a community of ecologically minded insects who made a town out of trash. I tested out the three-inch spider made of wire and fabric by hanging it inside the communal refrigerator in the house where I was living. The resulting scream from my roommate was proof that I was headed in the right direction. However, during the photo shoot for the story, I realized that I was unprepared for the complexities of setting up the 3-D scenes for the photographer. Making the bugs and their mushroom houses was the easy part.

Even though I wasn’t behind the camera, I had to direct the shots, keeping in mind how they would appear on the book’s pages. There were backgrounds to create, and lighting concerns, as well as how much depth of focus would work best—too much for me to handle with my lack of experience. After that, I lost interest in pursuing illustration work and focused on making dolls and designing sewing projects for women’s magazines. The experience of writing out directions would come in handy twenty years later, when I wrote my how-to book of projects, Felt Wee Folk. I worked continually, mass producing and selling hundreds of things at shops and craft cooperatives. But I had a nagging feeling that I wanted to do more with my skills as a fiber artist and was frustrated by the lack of respect given to needlework by the art world.

In an effort to make what I was doing fit into more conventional notions of art, I adapted my figures and environments to fit into the confines of a frame. I figured that if my work could hang on a wall, it would be recognized as art. Later on, I found that this change in presentation also made it easier to make pictures that could be photographed and used as illustrations. During the 1980s, I kept up a busy schedule in the evenings after my children went to bed, making individual pieces and working out new ways of combining materials in a relief format. My method of working progressed for about ten years before I was ready to make the jump from producing stand-alone pieces to illustrating my first thirty-two-page picture book in 1991. Throughout my thirty-year career, I’ve been involved in many design enterprises, all commonly expressing a world held together with a needle and thread. Since I continue to explore different creative areas, I prefer to call myself an artist who also illustrates children’s books.

I find primitive and folk art stimulating, with its blending of abstraction and untrained rendering of real life. Although my pictures are not realistic, I feel a compulsion to use real things in my artwork. Somehow, these objects force me to move in surprising directions, to go to places where I wouldn’t artistically venture otherwise. I also find that welcoming found objects into my work can become a trap. Some very interesting-looking things can seduce me into thinking they belong in a picture. Later, if it’s distracting or doesn’t contribute to the story, I’ll have to make the painful decision to kick it out. That’s hard, especially when I really like the object. Writer friends tell me that they encounter something similar in their writing. They have to get rid of clever characters, witty dialogue, or funny situations that seemed perfect earlier. We agree that it’s all part of the creative process, that every step is important along the way.

Pocketful of Posies is a culmination of decades of single-minded focus and motherhood, bringing together what I’ve learned about sewing, color, design, storytelling, and children. From the start, I was attracted by the idea of using nursery rhymes and squeezing the action into a series of very different pictures. I didn’t have to repeat characters and environments throughout the book, as illustrators usually have to do in a story book. This was an opportunity to include one-of-a-kind found objects that I wouldn’t normally be able to use because I didn’t have to replicate or change the scale of the object throughout the book. The variety of rhymes held my attention through the five-year duration of the project. Every page was completely different and fresh, making it possible to start over again and again, meeting and falling in love with a new cast of characters every few weeks. I’ve noticed that this book has broken through age- and gender barriers, appealing to young children as well as great-grandparents.

It’s a great responsibility to connect with children through picture books and create their first introduction to art. Communicating ideas and stimulating the imagination interests me more than technique. I want to show the reader something they can care about and attach to. Adults call attention to my labor-intensive and inventive approach to illustrating; children respond directly to the emotional gestalt of a story with pictures.

I’m inspired by the words of Lolly Robinson, who teaches children’s literature at Harvard. I printed out this quote before I found out that she also works at the Horn Book. She says, “The best picture books are more than text and art bound together. They are small movable sculptures: a combination of kinetic and performance art.”

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to share my ideas and life’s work. I hope that my book will encourage more illustrators, writers, art directors, publishers, and children to see the creative possibilities in even the smallest things around us.

Dean Schneider introduces Sally Mavor, who accepts the 2011 Boston Globe-Horn Book Award for Picture Book for Pocketful of Posies: A Treasury of Nursery Rhymes, at the September 30th BGHB award ceremony at Simmons College in Boston, Massachusetts.

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Imagine a picture book world where such principles governed, a place where artists, publishers, reviewers, librarians, and teachers kept this proclamation pinned to their walls and close to their hearts. To my mind, however, they largely already do. So why, then, did these twenty-two authors and illustrators put together their pennies to buy a full-page ad in The Horn Book? I think it is because there is a disconnection between what is in our hearts and what we are publishing for children. And let me urge you back to page 57 again. This is not just about picture books: I challenge you to find anything there that is not equally pertinent to fiction and nonfiction published for youth.

I was lucky enough to spend a day in September with Maurice Sendak and his “Sendak Fellows,” four illustrators nominated unawares and selected by Sendak to spend a month with him, and given studios, support, and advice. Here was the Proclamation in action. The four artists—Ali Bahrampour, Denise Saldutti Egielski, Frann Preston-Gannon, and Sergio Ruzzier—had a month to work on what they wished, whether it was a painting, a portfolio, a new book, a contracted manuscript, a resurrected project, or nothing at all. I saw tentative sketches and nearly complete dummies. The light-filled house where they stayed and worked, the presence of enough peers for camaraderie, and the example of Sendak, someone who was living the principles of the Proclamation since before its signers were born (I peg signer Jon Scieszka as the token old guy, and he’s my age), were prods to both freedom and industry.

Over lunch with the Fellows and me, Sendak described how his career grew, from illustrating picture books and chapter books by other people to books of his own, the first of which (Kenny’s Window) was not commercially successful but whose promise nevertheless encouraged his publisher to sign him up for another one and another one, with Where the Wild Things Are not appearing until seven years later. “Are illustrators still allowed this kind of growth?” he asked. Glum faces around the table answered him. I was reminded of what my friend Elizabeth Law once told me, that while there is support for and attention paid to first books, it’s the second ones that really need the help.

But if we all agree that a book “should be fresh, honest, piquant, and beautiful,” then why are “imitation, laziness, and timidity poisoning a great art form”? (If in fact they are—safe and formulaic books have always been with us.) Who is allowing this to happen? It’s easy to blame greedy-guts publishers, but I can’t think of one house that doesn’t publish something each season out of sheer love. Yes, they should do this more often. But we—librarians, teachers, parents—have to do our part. We may pride ourselves on our ability to find for a young reader “another one just like it!” but if we stop there we’ve left the job half done. If we want artists and writers to take risks, and publishers to do the same, we have to read, and promote reading, with the same spirit.

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For Cooney, it was the work of a lifetime that began auspiciously in Brooklyn in 1917. Father was a stockbroker with New England roots. Mother was an amateur painter from a prominent German-American family of art and music patrons; she was proudest, however, of the forebear who painted oils-by-the-yard and cigar store Indians. Summers Cooney spent with her paternal grandmother on the Maine coast, the start of another lifelong allegiance. In due course she went to boarding school, then to Smith College. Though she had always drawn, it didn’t occur to her to go to art school — a matter sometimes of regret, sometimes of pride — but apparently she never considered being anything but a children’s book illustrator. “The answer is that I love stories.”

Between 1940 and 1943 she illustrated three books, to some small effect, and wrote three of her own, to less effect. Then, after a brief wartime stint in the Women’s Army Corps (WACs), she entered upon a progression common to women of her generation: twenty busy years of “getting married and having children” (two marriages, four children), of “staying home and taking care of my family” — and, in Cooney’s case, “decorating books.”

From the mid-1940s through the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, there were very few years when she didn’t illustrate at least two or three books; in 1952 her name was on six. Many she did for money, not for love: all those younglings to educate. But the 1952 batch included two by Margaret Wise Brown, Where Have You Been? and Christmas in the Barn (both Crowell) — and led to another warmly regarded Brown/Cooney Christmas book, The Little Fir Tree (Crowell, 1954). In Cooney’s mind, children and animals were always with her, in person and on paper; and she was plagued by the thought that the number of her commissions depended on “the quality of the fur she drew.” To outsiders, she was a Little Master. Just as her gentle, grave, very plain illustrations give conviction to Brown’s rural New England Nativity — or rather, turn Brown’s all-inclusive narrative into a New England Nativity — her crisp, animated embellishments are the making of Ruth Crawford Seeger’s American Folk Songs for Children (Doubleday, 1948) and its successors.

In the 1950s and 1960s the Cooney name was synonymous with scratchboard, and, in the United States at least, she was the prime exponent of the medium most closely associated with book illustrations. This made sense: she had come into children’s books as a black-and-white artist in order to illustrate, decorate, do a job — not, like a painter or designer or cartoonist, to create independently. For the 1960s Horn Book series “The Artist at Work,” she wrote a description of scratchboard illustration, a model of its kind, that says a good deal about Cooney herself.

Each illustrating medium has a character of its own. Like wood engraving, which it resembles in appearance, scratchboard has an affinity for the printed page. The crisp, forthright technique makes a happy marriage with the clean letters of type. The flat black-and-white surface of the drawing preserves the flat surface of the page and the unity of text and illustration. For the artist, the medium is a good disciplinarian. It allows no subterfuge, no sketchy representations, no incomplete statements. Weaknesses cannot be hidden. The results may be delicate or brutal, but they are never indecisive. In short, the artist must know how to draw and he must draw with precision, for there is a finality too in drawing on scratchboard….

For Cooney, scratchboard was a source of pride and vexation. She liked the demands it made, the results she achieved; she didn’t like her work to be valued, by anyone, for “the quality of the fur.” She knew it was essentially a black-and-white medium; she didn’t like being told, when she asked for full, camera-separated color, that she had “no color sense.” To do scratchboard illustrations in two, three, or four colors was laborious — you made the black key plate on scratchboard, then scraped or scratched the design for each additional color into a transparent overlay — but in the world of children’s books, where color cost money, each additional color added to the artist’s standing. For the first picture book of her own, an adaptation of “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale” from Chaucer, Cooney was granted five colors, at least for half the pages. Some double spreads would be in five colors, some in two colors, and some would be split — ideally, in such a way that the discrepancy would be unnoticed and the picture might actually benefit; such is the case with the barnyard scene, described below, which is the most reproduced illustration in the book. Chanticleer and the Fox, a work of craftsmanship and intelligence, won the Caldecott.

The farmyard scene that sets the stage is a Late Medieval idyll, poor as the widow and her daughters are said to be. We are charmed by the sight of the winsome little girl snuggling up to the stout, flower-wreathed old sheep that has eyes only for the flowering tip of the mullein, one of nature’s least graceful creations. We take delight in the sows feeding in their thatched and planked and split-log surrounds, a vignette remindful of Thomas Bewick, the father of wood engraving. These goodies are but prelude to the fable of the vain rooster Chanticleer; the worshipful little hen, Demoiselle Partlet, too doting to believe her dream of imminent danger; and the sly fox whose appeal to Chanticleer’s vanity almost succeeds as a consequence. From the tip of his comb to his taloned toes, from his proud, puffed-up breast to his sweeping tail feathers, Chanticleer is an image fit for an English inn sign. But the story only gets up off the page when Cooney is stalking the fox, or stirring up the chickens, in two colors. The multicolor pictures are too decorative and diffuse, perhaps, to be effective as dramatic vehicles.

With the success of Chanticleer, the constraints on Cooney eased. She took her family to France for the summer, the start of a twenty-year, mid-career period of foreign travel and engagement with things French, then things Spanish, things Greek. She worked at her art and, without abandoning scratchboard, tried other media. Early in the French days she did The Little Juggler (Hastings House, 1961), adapted from the legend of the juggler of Notre Dame, and illustrated it with scratchboard drawings, in one and four colors, that attest to her burgeoning sense of place. Though the color is still conventionalized, the drawing is much freer; and to Cooney’s gratification the people are much more “a part of the place.” She illustrated French versions of nonsense verse by Edward Lear and Eugene Field — in a new, light-and-dark technique — and she was asked to do Mother Goose in French (Crowell, 1964) in full color. It was not a good idea, for Barbara Cooney or Mother Goose: the pretty, picturesque illustrations could pass as French travel ads of the time. Cooney was not yet a painter or a colorist.

More happily met, from those restless, ambitious years, is a book of modest intention; a story that, like “Old Mother Hubbard,” has tempted artists known and unknown since the first nursery books were printed: “Cock Robin.” Or, in the complete form in which Cooney did it, The Courtship, Merry Marriage, and Feast of Cock Robin and Jenny Wren, to which is added the Doleful Death of Cock Robin. She had settled on Chanticleer, Cooney used to say, because she wanted to draw chickens. Songbirds are birds of another feather, true, but Cock Robin cuts a fine figure, Jenny Wren is enchanting as a blushing bride, the proceedings tap a vein of merry spoofery in Cooney, and she draws and colors with a lightness of touch she seldom exhibited elsewhere.

Mere excellence was not enough, though. To end her apprenticeship, as she put it — to come into her own, we might say — Cooney needed a major achievement in full color. The opportunity, when it came, could have been tailor-made. To illustrate Donald Hall’s homespun prose-poem Ox-Cart Man, she did a set of folk art-ish paintings that gained her a second Caldecott and freed her forever from unwanted commissions and pre-separation. With the kudos also came the confidence to think of telling stories of her own. She was sixty-two.

Hall’s methodical, cadenced account of a nineteenth-century New England farmer and his family through the seasons — a steady round of growth and work and going to market — draws upon Cooney’s long-standing affinity for vintage Americana and her later-come ability to integrate people and places. The artwork is the new thing. Did she realize that her natural inclination toward silhouetted forms, flat planes, precise detail, and needlepoint verdure gives an appearance of folk painting? That, with Ox-Cart Man, she might be in her element: a sophisticated artist working in a naïve style? So we have, on oh-so-formal display, the family members, the family sheep, and the goods each family member has made from the sheep, ready for the farmer to take to market…where he will purchase new tools and equipment, and “two pounds of wintergreen peppermint candy,” that all hands will enjoy together in a glowing fireside scene.

Many years ago I went on record as finding the landscape too immaculate, the town scenes too tidy, the whole effect more quaint and tranquil than Hall’s plain words dictate. Indeed, Ox-Cart Man is the New England myth of industry, equanimity, and stability incarnate, and people love it for just that reason.

After Ox-Cart Man, Cooney might have coasted along as the newest New England icon. But that wasn’t enough, either. She continued to accept commissions, selectively, and especially welcomed the chance to go to new places and learn new things. To illustrate John Bierhorst’s Spirit Child, a Mexican story of the Nativity (Morrow, 1984), she went to Mexico; for Louhi, Witch of North Farm, a Finnish tale retold by Toni de Gerez (Viking, 1986), she was off to Finland. But mainly she wrote and illustrated Miss Rumphius and the two other highly personal books, Island Boy and Hattie and the Wild Waves, that she referred to collectively as “my trilogy.”

The wonder is that it took this born storyteller and fine writer — see her Caldecott acceptance papers, the scratchboard piece — forty years of illustrating other people’s stories before she was ready to put words to paper again. She lacked confidence, she said. But it may also have helped that she was back in the Maine of her childhood at a time in life when looking backward comes naturally. It was a time in American life, too, when the urge toward personal retrospection was strong; Ox-Cart Man had its source in family legend. There is also the woman factor: the two dominant books in the trilogy are both about determined, creative women, like Cooney herself.

Potentially, Miss Rumphius is a snooze and a sermon — the long, undramatic life of a spinster librarian who, in her last years, makes the world beautiful by scattering lupine seeds. As Cooney pictures her — in words and in pictures — she’s Katharine Hepburn without attitude. The words are as good as the pictures. Little Alice Rumphius (who has a corolla of red hair) sits on the knee of her beloved painter grandfather in her sailor suit; when she grows up, she tells him, she too will go to faraway places and live by the sea. She must do a third thing, he says, she must make the world more beautiful; and she agrees, not knowing what that might be. “In the meantime Alice got up and washed her face and ate porridge for breakfast. She went to school and came home and did her homework.” New paragraph: “And pretty soon she was grown up.”

The narrator is a child, elderly Miss Rumphius’s great-niece, telling the story — partly as her great-aunt has told it to her, partly in her own droll way — to other children. The text is pithy, exquisitely paced, and consistently interesting. In composition and execution, the pictures are a leap and a bound beyond their counterparts in Ox-Cart Man. We are not looking at a scene, we are on the scene; Cooney has raised the sightline and let the forms bleed off the page. She has learned to draw architecture, like the Old Masters, to create multiple settings and points of interest. Her silhouetted forms have substance; her interior has light and air. She has achieved complexity without losing focus. The fashionable lady in the lower stacks, the two children on the heavenly second level, the tot in the nook beyond — all these claim interest, along with the newspaper reader, the trim young miss and her pug, the revolving bookstand, the stuffed animals…while only reinforcing the centrality of Miss Rumphius, in the picture and the library.

Her exotic, far-flung travel is complete in two magic Movieland scenes, with accompanying vignettes, that are at once spare and suggestive. There’s wit, too, in Miss Rumphius atop the mountain encouraging her male companion below — and then, on the opposite page, hurting her back getting off a camel. It’s time, maybe, to find her place by the sea.

The pages flow. The clean, spacious design — a collaboration between Cooney and Viking art director Barbara Hennessy — allows each small figure its gesture, then carries the eye onward. In full color, artist and designer have achieved the happy union with paper that was once the preserve of scratchboard and other linear techniques — a union more easily achieved, in paint, with transparent washes. Cooney, working in acrylic, had to adapt.

When Miss Rumphius is settled in her house by the sea, the picture expands onto the facing page, like the opening picture of the harbor her grandfather sailed into. And when she has become That Crazy Old Lady who scatters lupine seeds to the winds, we have a double-page spread — in the breezy spirit of a bygone New Yorker cover — that positions the reader along a lupine-lined lane to watch her approach.

Island Boy (Viking, 1988), the second book in Cooney’s trilogy, tells of a Maine family resolved to remain on their island, generation after generation, and hold off summer “rusticators.” It’s a slight, predictable work borne along by sincerity. Hattie and the Wild Waves (Viking, 1990), based on the childhood of Cooney’s mother, has a great deal of substance: it’s set firmly in the turn-of-the-century household of a prosperous, refined German-American family where Hattie and her brother and sister have a full life upstairs and downstairs at holiday celebrations and during summers at the seashore. It’s at the shore that Hattie, the family picture-maker, is inspired to become a painter; she persists through the society marriage of her sister, the business success of her brother, winters at the downtown Brooklyn hotel he builds (the historic Bossert), evenings of going to the opera with Mama and Papa — until, hearing a young performer “[sing] her heart out,” she takes the plunge and enters art school. The pictures are some of Cooney’s loosest and freshest: the scene of the children playing cards with the servants below-stairs has the rugged expressiveness of a genre painting; the scene aboard Papa’s “beautiful boat” gives a new, dramatic thrust to Cooney’s penchant for parallels. But Hattie and the Wild Waves remains family history pointed up, and social history by the by, where Miss Rumphius is legend.

Together the two books launched a new subgenre of pictorial life-portraits suited to “different” women and other out-of-the-way figures. Cooney herself wrote and illustrated a biography of Eleanor Roosevelt, Eleanor (Viking, 1996) and illustrated a book about Emily Dickinson conceived in a Cooney-esque way, Michael Bedard’s Emily (Doubleday, 1992). The last book she illustrated, Mary Lyn Ray’s true-to-life story of a family of basket-weaving backcountry outcasts, Basket Moon (Little, Brown, 1999), is a departure for Cooney in subject and treatment — a somber tale with a violent, transforming climax.

Barbara Cooney died in March 2000, working away as if she would indeed, as she once said, live to be a hundred.

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Barbara Cooney was almost uniquely a librarians’ illustrator. For the greater part of her career she illustrated quietly disarming books — like Lee Kingman’s The Best Christmas and Peter’s Long Walk — that lived full, rich lives in school and public libraries; and for the most part it was librarians (along with fellow artists) who admired and appreciated her work. Consciously or not, she gave back their love — our love — with Miss Rumphius. The child who grows up enterprising, adventurous, and romantic becomes a world-traveling librarian. Then, retired to her seaside cottage, she watches as the local children gather up lupines, her wild lupines, by the armful. To a children’s librarian, that’s a job description.

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