by Steven Kellogg For the past fifteen years I have regularly interspersed the time I spend sequestered in my Connecticut studio writing and illustrating picture books with journeys back and forth across the country to present programs in schools, libraries, and other settings where people interested in children and their literature congregate. During that time […]
Review of Picture This
September 11, 2014 by Leave a Comment
Picture This: Perception and Composition by Molly Bang; illus. by the author Intermediate Bulfinch/Little 141 pp. 9/91 Paper ed. 0-8212-1855-7 $12.95 With a foreword by Rudolf Arnheim. If I could buy only one book this year, this would be the one. If I could take only one book on a long vacation, this would be […]
Realms of Gold and Granite
March 20, 2013 by Leave a Comment
The Bookshop for Boys and Girls was born, in a twelvemonth, with a pedigree and a distinguished list of patrons. Its role was largely determined from the outset. 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 […]
Horn Book Reminiscence
February 26, 2013 by Leave a Comment
by Elizabeth Orton Jones 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 […]
Review of A Caldecott Celebration: Six Artists and Their Paths to the Caldecott Medal
January 15, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Review of A Caldecott Celebration: Six Artists and Their Paths to the Caldecott Medal by Leonard Marcus. From the November/December 1998 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.
Editorial: Cultural Currency
November 30, 2012 by Leave a Comment
I was late for work, walking down the street to my subway stop. The trash collectors had come and gone, leaving the narrow sidewalk strewn with empty plastic barrels, upright, sideways, rolling about. Coming the other way up the walk were two tough-looking UPS ladies, and I stepped aside to let them pass. No need […]
American Picture Books from Max’s Metaphorical Monsters to Lilly’s Purple Plastic Purse
November 30, 2012 by Leave a Comment
In the course of the last thirty years or so, American picture books have become a mainstay of American life — and items of merchandise — without altogether extinguishing the individual creative voice. They have also ceased to be, in any defining way, American. Until very recently, children in Western societies teethed on nursery rhymes, […]
To Get a Little More of the Picture: Reviewing Picture Books
November 29, 2012 by 3 Comments
“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 […]
An Interview with Walter Lorraine
November 28, 2012 by Leave a Comment
The multifaceted Walter Lorraine was a designer and art director at Houghton Mifflin before being named Director of Children’s Books, a position he held from 1965–1995. He now heads his own imprint, Walter Lorraine Books. Leonard S. Marcus: How did you get started in publishing? Walter Lorraine: As a student at the Rhode Island School […]
Following in Their Fathers’ Paths
November 27, 2012 by Leave a Comment
When you follow in the path of your father, you learn to walk like him. — Ashanti proverb (from In Daddy’s Arms I Am Tall) In the late 1960s, modern African-American literature for children was just coming into its own. For some of us, the 1967 publication of Virginia Hamilton’s Zeely was a turning point, […]
