Publications about books for children and young adults
Markers for art were a happy surprise. I was a pre-marker child and learned to draw and color with crayons. Markers were for addressing packages. Until Best Friends Think Alike, I illustrated my picture books with watercolor and black ink in a technical pen. In designing each of my books, I try to match method [...]
“It is only in childhood that books have any deep influence on our lives.” — Graham Greene “Any book which is at all important should be reread immediately.” — Schopenhauer The management has suggested that I review picture book reviewing. “Feel free to rant about its sorry state.” I also feel wary, as I did [...]
By Charlotte Zolotow The beginning of a picture book comes before the pictures. In Margaret Wise Brown’s beautiful Goodnight Moon, it was the magic of her words, their simplicity and the music in them, that made Clement Hurd’s now-famous visual interpretation possible. Unless the writer is also an illustrator, the writing always comes first. Many [...]
By Barbara Cooney I don’t know exactly how I came to be an illustrator of books. Certainly much art throughout the ages has been in the form of illustration, although not necessarily in books. Since I was very little, I intended to be an artist of some sort. As I grew older, I wanted also [...]
I was illustrating before I knew what illustrating means. And I knew Hans Christian Andersen stories before I knew who he was. I was always drawing because I was a child growing up in the age before television, computers, and iPhones. I did not know anything about the size of my country or the politics [...]
by Esther Averill from Caldecott Medal Books: 1938–1957 edited by Bertha Mahony Miller and Elinor Whitney Field; published by The Horn Book, 1957 The time has come to attempt a critical appraisal of the twenty books which have won the Caldecott Award for their illustrators. I almost wish the task had fallen to another person, [...]
“It’s language that’s intellectual,” notes Michael Hazanavicius, director of the 2012 Academy Award-winning silent film The Artist. “Images are about feelings.” Different images, different feelings. Distinct images, distinct feelings. A closed door is a mystery. What’s inside? Who will come out? One house sits prettily in a garden, set apart — vines curving up in [...]
On Thursday the Horn Book will launch its contribution to Picture Book Month — which you may or may not be aware of. Last year Dianne de Las Casas came up with the idea of celebrating PBs with their own month, in part as a response to a 2010 article in the New York Times that said [...]
