THESIS

ARTISTS’ BOOKS AND CHILDREN’S BOOKS

Elizabeth A. Curren

Art and the Book

In partial fulfillment of the requirements For the Degree of Master of Arts in Art and the Book Corcoran College of Art + Design Washington, DC Spring 2013

© 2013

Elizabeth Ann Curren All Rights Reserved

CORCORAN COLLEGE OF ART + DESIGN May 6, 2013

WE HEREBY RECOMMEND THAT THE THESIS PREPARED UNDER OUR SUPERVISION BY ELIZABETH A. CURREN ENTITLED ARTISTS’ BOOKS AND CHILDREN’S BOOKS BE ACCEPTED AS FULFILLING, IN PART, REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTs IN ART AND THE BOOK.

Graduate Thesis Committee:

(Signature of Student)

Elizabeth A. Curren (Printed Name of Student)

(Signature of Thesis Reader)

Georgia Deal (Printed Name of Thesis Reader)

(Signature of Thesis Reader)

Sarah Noreen Hurtt (Printed Name of Thesis Reader)

(Signature of Program Chair and Advisor)

Kerry McAleer-Keeler (Printed Name of Program Director and Advisor)

Acknowledgements

Many people have given generously of their time, their experience and their insights to guide me through this thesis; I am extremely grateful to all of them. The faculty of the Art and The Book Program at the Corcoran College of

Art + Design have been most encouraging: Kerry McAleer-Keeler, Director, and

Professors Georgia Deal, Sarah Noreen Hurtt, Antje Kharchi, Dennis O’Neil and

Casey Smith. Students of the Corcoran’s Art and the Book program have come to the rescue many times. Many librarians gave me advice and suggestions. Mark

Dimunation, Daniel DiSimone and Eric Frazier of the Rare Books and Special

Collections at the Library of Congress have provided research support and valuable comments during the best internship opportunity anyone can ever have.

Their participation in our Masters program has enriched the curriculum and encouraged us all to be scholars. Erik Delfino, also of the Library of Congress, translated and interpreted library jargon into language I could understand.

Jacqueline Coleburn showed me a trolley of treasures from the Library’s

Children’s Collection and offered great ideas. Laurie Whitehill Chong, Curator of

Artists’ Books for the Rhode Island School of Design, presented beautiful books from the Fleet Library’s Special Collections. Kathie Meizner, Library Manager for Maryland’s Montgomery County Libraries, has talked and walked me through children’s books, introduced me to authors and illustrators, and been a true friend. Artist/author Peter Sís graciously invited me to send him a list of questions and then spoke with me on the phone for ninety minutes. And my husband, Dwain Winters, and our daughter, Meredith, have provided technical support and endless mugs of tea; I could not have done this without them.

i Contents

Acknowledgements i

Table of Contents ii

Thesis Statement iii

List of Figures and Illustrations iv

Introduction 1

Chapter 1. A Short History of Children’s Book Publishing 8

Chapter 2. Maurice Sendak 19

Chapter 3. Peter Sís 31

Chapter 4. Hybrid 41

Chapter 5. Conclusion 45

Illustrations 49

Bibliography 59

ii Thesis Statement

The genre of Artists’ Books, with its historical roots in folk tales, culture and the printing industry, has evolved alongside the genre of Children’s Picture Books and Literature. Many artist/authors of children’s literature, in particular, Maurice Sendak and Peter Sis, have produced books that they maintain are not intended only for children. Some questions addressed will be: have some children’s book artist/authors been influenced by the Artists’ Book genre? And, can these commercially published books be considered Artists’ Books or should they be considered hybrids?

iii

Illustrations

Figures

1. Maurice Sendak, “Max in his bedroom”, Where the Wild Things Are

2. Maurice Sendak, “The Wild Rumpus”, Where the Wild Things Are

3. Maurice Sendak, “Now Mickey Cried Cock-a-Doodle-Doo!”, In the Night Kitchen

4. Maurice Sendak, “The Goblins Stole the Baby Sister”, Outside Over There

5. Peter Sís, “Madlenka and the Neighbors”, Madlenka’s Dog

6. Peter Sís, “Madlenka and the Neighbors” [flaps up], Madlenka’s Dog

7. Peter Sís, “Gallileo’s Notes on the Phases of the Moon”, Starry Messenger

8. Peter Sís, “The Meeting with the Hoopoe Bird”, The Conference of the Birds

9. Whitney Stahl, 2013 photograph of Peter Sís’s The Conference of the Birds, shelved with art books in store

iv Introduction

The Artists’ Book genre, with its historical roots in folk tales, the avant- garde movement and the print industry, has evolved alongside the genre of

Children’s Books, each influencing the other. Artist/authors of illustrated

Children’s Literature have produced books that they maintain are not intended only for children. Can some of these crossover books be considered Artists’

Books or should they be considered hybrids?

Artists’ Books and the field of Book Arts incorporate intentionality, the use of the senses, deliberate choices about all aspects of the book’s form, and an assumption of heightened involvement and participation on the part of the reader. “Every aspect of the artist’s book,” writes historian Betty Bright, “from content to materials to format, must respond to the intent of the artist and cohere into a work that is set in motion with a reader’s touch.”1

In this strict sense of definition, most Children’s Illustrated Books, or

Picture Books, would not fit within the genre of Artists’ Books. Their focus and aim are different. To borrow a quote concerning livres des artistes from art historian Johanna Drucker, Children’s Books, “stop just at the threshold of the conceptual space in which artists’ books operate.”2

Children’s Books, while often akin to Artists’ Books in being self- conscious about the structure and meaning of the book as a form, have different goals and strive for a different audience. Their function is to tell a story, in book

1 Betty Bright, No Longer Innocent: Book Art in America 1960-1980 (New York: Granary Books, 2005), 3. 2 Johanna Drucker, The Century of Artists’ Books, (New York: Granary Books, 2004), 3.

2 form that will be published, marketed and purchased for the edification and entertainment of children.

Nonetheless, Artists’ Books and Children’s books have much in common.

The parallels include many of the same features: a story to be told; deliberate pacing, layout and design; the use of negative space and the relationship between text and images; creative use of type and changes in font; attention to details such as binding and paper choices; experimentation with format; and elements of surprise. It can be argued that these are simply universal elements of good design. However, book artists and children’s book illustrators thrive on bending the rules and pushing the boundaries. Both genres have many participants, admirers, even champions and yet each has struggled for recognition and status within their respective fields. It is hoped that examining these parallels will lead to a better understanding of why both genres, during the

20th century and into the 21st, have remained on the outer edges of their respective fields and how that positioning has been a mixed blessing for the practitioners.

The field of Artist’s Books and Book Arts has existed for over a hundred years; both Johanna Drucker and Betty Bright make compelling arguments for the field to be considered to be “the 20th century artform par excellence.” 3 Yet even fine artists are surprised by its existence. The genre suffers by comparison to painting, sculpture, and printmaking even though those disciplines are often incorporated into artists’ books. It may be the very “bookness” that alters the perception of the book art objects as unworthy of the elevated status of fine art.

3 Drucker, Century of Artists’ Books, 4. 3

The very accessibility and familiarity with books that we, as readers, have all come to depend upon may make it more challenging to agree that such common objects are art.

Book artists concern themselves with all elements of the book form and they do so in order to fully engage the reader by requiring that, once the artist’s book is complete, the reader must shoulder the responsibility for meaning.

There is nothing passive about experiencing an artist’s book.

Children’s book art has exerted an influence on artist’s books; however, this influence is rarely recognized and, in fact, many artists shy away from acknowledging it. “Don’t go there; we have enough trouble getting our work to be taken seriously,” is often the response. But there are many connections and it should be possible to examine these issues without a loss of integrity.

Books, especially science and technical volumes, have incorporated movable parts for hundreds of years and Pop-ups became well known in the

Victorian era.4 Cut outs, accordion folds, collage, and textural elements have been used in children’s books in ingenious ways to entice children’s senses and engage their full attention. Book artists employ these techniques as part of their esthetic repertoire and adults must realign their accustomed ways of reading a book to accommodate these new elements. The creators of Artist’s Books often subvert the traditional role of the book, as a vessel of knowledge and information. What printer Walter Hamady referred to as “the Trojan Horse of

4 Renee Riese Hubert and Judd D. Hubert, The Cutting Edge of Reading: Artists’ Books (New York: Granary Books, 1999), 8. 4 art”, can “insinuate itself into a reader’s consciousness while it delivers content that may be unexpected or disturbing.”5

With a few notable exceptions, such as the multiples of Ed Ruscha, and the offset printed books by Brad Freeman, very few Artists’ Books are produced in large editions. Since most artists consider the intense involvement in all aspects of production of Artists’ Books to be essential, editions are limited. Most book artists choose to distinguish their work “as completely as possible from those of commercial publishers.”6

Those book artists who deliberately choose to use techniques associated with children’s books or who set their stories within the context of childhood, establish a distinction between that of a book intended for adults and a book that a child might have conceivably produced. Susan King, who mines a great deal of autobiographical material from her childhood in Kentucky, uses movable parts in many of her books. In Women and Cars (1983), King has printed on both sides of the flag structure, taught to her by Hedi Kyle, to create her homage to the relationships women have with automobiles. It is a rich textual and tactile sensation for the reader, as one must manipulate the structure in many ways to experience the book. There is a great deal of printed text. An earlier Artist’s

Book, Always a Bridesmaid, Never a Bride (1978), recalls the mock wedding ceremony in which King participated as a child. The little girls were dressed in white gowns and carried bouquets, and the boys wore suits; the child bride

(Susan) had a veil. The mock ritual and other real weddings are described in layers of text. The book has white covers and fits into two envelopes, mimicking

5 Bright, No Longer Innocent, 6. 6 Hubert and Hubert, Cutting Edge of Reading, 10. 5 a wedding invitation, except that its purpose is to announce the publication of

Susan King’s book, Always a Bridesmaid, Never a Bride. This is serious play indeed.

Many book artists use elements borrowed from the structures of children’s books that appeal to our subconscious memories of the visual and tactile qualities of certain materials such as Keith Smith’s use of string, John Eric

Broaddus’s use of cut outs, and Clarissa Sligh’s roof shapes in an accordion fold format. Often the narrative voice and the markings within the pages consciously evoke the hallmarks of childhood. Such Artists’ Books are very successful in provoking a response, sharing uncomfortable truths or leaving a reader with the understanding of a disturbing situation.

The field of Book Arts remains under-appreciated and poorly understood, even by other artists. The genre of Children’s Books also struggles for recognition and acceptance as a full-fledged literary form. One factor common to both fields is the presence of women. Despite advances in cultural consciousness in the last forty years, the numbers of successful women artists still lag behind the statistics for men: more women attend art schools and more men are represented in art galleries and museums. However, Artists’ Books is one of the art genres where women are better represented. There are three hundred and sixteen catalogued artist’s books by 241 artists at Library of Congress; 78 of the artists are women.7 While this statistic (roughly 33%) may not seem high, it is well beyond the 8% figure representing the number of women in exhibits at

7 Research conducted as part of a survey of Artists’ Books and Fine Press, at the Library of Congress, Rare Book and Special Collections, 2012. Researchers: Elizabeth Curren, Sydney Jean Reisen and Whitney Stahl. 6

MOMA in 2010. This statistic has remained relatively constant since 2006.8

Children’s literature has also been a field where women authors and illustrators have achieved success. The influence of women librarians on the genre of children’s books has a strong history; library science has traditionally been a profession that has welcomed and employed women. When publishing houses first opened children’s book divisions, women librarians were hired as editors, often providing the first opportunities for women in a field that had primarily been limited to men.9

Critics and scholars have marginalized the genre of Children’s Books, especially Picture Books, because neither the writing nor the illustrations are judged to be on a par with adult literature and fine art. Historically, the same critical eyes that pay tribute to art world trends such as abstract art, Op art, and cubism have dismissed children’s picture books as simple and unremarkable.

The younger the intended audience for these books, the less likely the work is to be taken seriously.

This paper will profile the work of two children’s book artists, Maurice

Sendak and Peter Sís. Both began as illustrators and have achieved their own vision as artist/authors of significant children’s books. Each of them has won the Caldecott Medal and other honors. Their work is well known, well loved and very successful. They have been chosen for profiling because both have pushed the limitations of their genre and have created works that have been successfully marketed to both adults as well as children. Both have insisted that

8 Lindsay Pollock, “Where Are the Women?”, June 17, 2010. www.theartnewspaper.com/articles/Where-ar-the-women?/21076 9 Leonard S. Marcus, The Minders of Make-Believe (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2008), 64. 7 their work be judged by the same criteria as would be applied to mainstream art and literature. They have been disappointed to discover that some (critics, publishers, booksellers, readers) would prefer they confine their interests to the same category they are known for; that changes in their art are not always welcomed.

The three hundred year history of children’s literature in the United States has been shaped by the reality that the purchase of books for children is most often done by adults. It is, of course, hoped that these books will be read and re- read and enjoyed by children. Leonard Marcus, children’s book historian, points out, “It has been a defining feature of children’s publishing, as contrasted with other kinds, that the people who buy the books have not been the people for whom the books were intended.”10

To understand children’s literature in the United States, it is necessary to have a sense of the publishing history of this genre. One of the very first books produced in the American colonies was The New England Primer, in 1689, by

Benjamin Harris. It is a children’s book.

10 Marcus, Minders of Make-Believe, ix. 8

A Short History of Children’s Book Publishing in the United States

The three hundred year old history of children’s literature in the United

States evolved from a strictly proscribed, lengthy European tradition with roots in morality tales and religious parables. In the year 1500, Wynkyn de Worde, the first known printer on Fleet Street, sold Latin textbooks and illustrated children’s books at the bookstall he set up in St. Paul’s Churchyard in London.11 Bible stories and instruction in morality comprised much of the earliest printed matter aimed directly at children. The Christian Church viewed the innocent natures and unformed characters of children as liabilities: if not trained early to embrace the teachings of Scripture, they would be in danger of losing their immortal souls. The Puritans believed that every child, by nature, was willful and stubborn. The prevailing assumption was that these qualities must be “carefully restrained and repressed…” as such willfulness was “the fruit of natural corruption and the root of actual rebellion against God and man.”12

Since literacy allowed believers to learn Scripture and the Bible, thus paving the way to eternal salvation, the Puritans were early proponents of teaching very young children how to read. By 1642, laws were passed in

Massachusetts, mandating that “all children, servants and apprentices” living in the Bay Colony “acquire the ability to read & understand the principles of religion & the capital laws of this country.”13 Fiction was considered anathema as

11 Simon Garfield, Just My Type (New York: Gotham Books, Penguin Group, 2010), 83. 12 John M. Barry, Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul (New York: Viking, 2012), 170-171. 13 Marcus, Minders of Make-Believe, 1. 9 it was “untrue and therefore a lie, and therefore damnably wicked.”14 This viewpoint, that fiction was a wicked and wasteful use of the critical skill of learning to read, lasted through the Revolutionary War and up to the Civil War.

Children’s books often had anguished dialogue between young characters, worried about the ‘truthfulness’ of invented stories: the ‘good’ child always opted for a ‘true story’, rather than the made-up one that was offered.15

The Massachusetts Bay Colony had mandated compulsory education in

1647 (most schools were church-based and charged tuition) and in 1852, as a

Commonwealth, Massachusetts became the first state to require every town to create and operate a grammar school, funded by taxes and open to all. In 1917,

Mississippi became the last of the 48 states to enact compulsory education laws.

This meant that most children between the ages of six and sixteen were intended to be in school for nine months of the year. The reality was quite different: until the Fair Labor Standards Act was signed into law by President Franklin D.

Roosevelt in 1938, thousands of children worked six days a week in industry and agriculture. Nonetheless, the compulsory education laws and laws restricting harsh labor reflected a major shift in society’s view of the status of children: no longer viewed as chattel, children were perceived as beings to be protected by the state.

The end of the Civil War had seen the rise of the magazine industry in the

United States. The network of railways, advances in printing production, the introduction of the chromolithography, and the expansion of the middle class, all

14 Gillian Avery, Behold the Child: American Children and their Books 1621- 1922 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1994), 26. 15 Marcus, Minders of Make-Believe, 20. 10 led to an increased demand for inexpensive, illustrated literary entertainment.

Publishing houses discovered that magazines were the perfect format for advertising their firms’ books and in 1865 a Boston publisher, Ticknor & Fields

(publisher of Atlantic Monthly), introduced Our Young Folks: An Illustrated

Magazine for Boys and Girls. The publishers pushed against the long-held belief in the inherent dangers of fiction. The magazine declared itself as “dedicated to placing literary excellence above moral instruction”; a bold claim at that time. Its circulation rapidly grew to 75,000, with subscribers from as far away as Ontario,

Alabama and California. It was the first publication of its kind.16

As views of the nature of childhood evolved, teachers and librarians sought books whose contents went beyond primers, ABC’s and Bible stories.

Minerva Sanders (1837-1912), a librarian in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, was a pioneer who, in 1887, set up a specific area open to children in that town’s library. She provided book lists and guidance. She sawed the legs off the tables and chairs to modify them so that the children would be more comfortable. She collaborated with schools to encourage reading programs specifically aimed towards children.17 In doing so, Sanders changed the public perception of the free library from that of an adults-only enclave into an institution open to all.

Soon after, the American Library Association advocated setting aside areas for children in all public libraries, and in 1890 the Pratt Institute Library

School in Brooklyn created the first specialized program in children’s librarianship.18 One of the program’s early alumnae, Anne Carroll Moore, went

16 Marcus, Minders of Make-Believe, 35-36. 17 Marcus, Minders of Make-Believe, 64. 18 Ibid. 11 on to become the very influential director, in 1906, of the New York Public

Library’s Office of Work with Children (a post she held until she reached the mandatory retirement age in 1941).19 The position of Children’s Librarian began to have an increasing impact on children’s book publishing. Until very recently in United States history, most children had little pocket money and a peculiarity of the book trade was that, for the most part, those customers who purchased children’s books were not the ones for whom the books were written. Librarians chose the books, largely based on what they thought was ‘best’ for children.

They also kept track of which books were of the most interest to the children who patronized the library, noticing that the favorites were not always what adults had expected or would have recommended.

While the ever-expanding publishing industry was a largely male domain, libraries and teaching were careers open to women and they exerted a considerable influence on the genre of children’s literature. They took their responsibilities very seriously and saw their mission, as Leonard Marcus writes,

“through the lens of their professional vision of themselves as children’s moral and cultural guardians”.20 The dedication and persistence of these women librarians resulted in a wider understanding of what appealed to children, even if these guardians did not always agree with the children’s tastes.

Publishers and authors of children’s literature looked to librarians and teachers to assist with editorial duties and selection of manuscripts submitted for publication. Publishing houses recognized the children’s literature market and listened to the ideas and opinions of young authors, such as Horace Scudder

19 Marcus, Minders of Make-Believe, 64-65. 20 Marcus, Minders of Make-Believe, x. 12

(1863-1902) whose children’s stories brought him to the attention of the printer,

Henry Houghton, (first of Riverside Press and then co-founder of Houghton &

Hurd, later to become Houghton Mifflin). Scudder developed the Riverside

Magazine for Young People, inaugurated in December of 1866, and was the first editor of what was to become the Children’s Division in 1872.21 In 1874, Scribner began to publish the literary magazine, St. Nicholas, a concept developed and edited by Mary Mapes Dodge, one of the first women to be hired as a senior editor by a major publishing house.22 These magazines invited aspiring young writers and artists to submit poems, stories and illustrations, providing an early publishing opportunity for such writers as Edna St. Vincent Millay. The October

1910 issue of St. Nicholas includes her thank-you letter, written at age 18, in which she gushes over the new volume of Browning poems purchased with the

$5 prize she received. She promises to remain a life-long fan. 23

The Children’s Book genre gathered momentum, carried forward into the

20th century by the talents of authors, illustrators, educators and critics. By the end of the First World War, Macmillan Publishing Company was the largest publisher in the US. Like other firms, it had embraced the modern concept of departmentalization and created the Department of Books for Boys and Girls in

1919; its first editor was Louise Seaman Bechtel. A graduate of Vassar College, she had studied economics, edited the Vassar Miscellany Weekly, and developed a passion for journalism. According to children’s literature historian, Leonard

Marcus, Macmillan’s president, George Brett, “had acted on the belief—gospel to many employers of the day—that women knew more than men about children

21 Marcus, Minders of Make-Believe, 42. 22 Marcus, Minders of Make-Believe, 55-56. 23 Marcus, Minders of Make-Believe, 68. 13 and were thus better equipped for work that ministered to children’s needs.”24

Marcus writes that the in the 1920’s the career of “editing of children’s books joined school teaching, library service to children, and missionary work, in the sisterhood of ‘mothering’ professionals”, giving women “their first entrée into the upper reaches of a profession long regarded as an all-male domain, a gentlemen’s club.”25

This is not to say that there were no men to champion the cause of children’s literature. In 1921, a bookseller named Frederic Melcher proposed the establishment of a prize for achievement for writing for children. This was in response to what he saw was a failure of the newly established Pulitzer Prize in

1919: it had no award for Children’s Literature. Melcher suggested that an award be named for John Newbery, the 18th century English bookseller who had promoted the idea that children’s literature should delight as well as instruct.

The award was to be sponsored by the American Library Association; librarians would be the primary judges and this validated their own efforts to champion the cause of children’s literature. Although publishing house and editors would promote their own authors’ works, hoping to bask in the reflected glory of the winner, the final decision would be in the hands of the American Library

Association. Needless to say, the reaction from librarians was ecstatic.26

There was also the belief that such an award would encourage established writers to delve into the genre. Despite a rocky start, the guidelines were written and Melcher himself quietly underwrote the design of the medal. The result was a huge success. Encouraged by this and in recognition of the role of

24 Marcus, Minders of Make-Believe, 78. 25 Ibid. 26 Marcus, Minders of Make-Believe, 85-86. 14 artist/illustrators in children’s picture books, in 1937 Melcher proposed an additional award to be named in honor of Randolph Caldecott, the 19th century

English illustrator of children’s books.27

The Newbery and Caldecott Medals, and the accompanying runner- up ‘Honor Awards’ for each category, remain the highest honors for children’s literature in the United States. The competition surrounding the awards continues to be fierce: for those who create books for children it is a thrilling achievement; for the publishing houses that produce the winning titles it is a ratification of taste, skill, and experience. While the marketing implications are enormous, the achievement is paramount. Publishing house departments take great pride in the accomplishments of their authors and the tally of awards is important, rather like the medal count in the Olympics.

Children’s literature continued to suffer from the misconception that such writing did not require the same level of commitment and skill needed for other,

‘higher’ genres. Before initiating his own very successful books for children, E.B.

White had written in his column in Harper’s, “It must be a lot of fun to write for children— reasonably easy work, perhaps even important work.”28 When Anne

Carroll Moore responded to the column by encouraging him to try his hand at the genre, White backpedaled. “My fears about writing for children are great—- one can so easily slip into a cheap sort of whimsy or cuteness. I don’t trust myself in this treacherous field unless I am running a degree of fever.”29

27 Marcus, Minders of Make-Believe, 134-135. 28 Marcus, Minders of Make-Believe, 112. 29 Ibid. 15

E.B. White’s comments speak volumes. His original light-hearted statement reflects the common misconception about the craft of writing for children: that it must be simple, implying that anyone can do it. White quickly experienced the keen understanding, shared by author/illustrators of books for children: faced with the actual challenge, the task is quite daunting. It is White’s initial perception that is key to understanding one of the persistent conundrums of the genre of Children’s Literature and Children’s Picture Books. This perception continues in the 21st century.

This happens because the genre’s readership is comprised of individuals who are not adults, because the product is often altered specifically for concerns of profit and marketability, and because its audience is deemed to lack sophistication and depth. It was not until the third quarter of the 20th century that the critical analysis of children’s literature was acknowledged at the university level to be a legitimate field of study.30

This late recognition is inextricably interwoven with the status of women in the field of children’s literature, a status that has been reflective of society as a whole. Few women exemplify this better than Ursula Nordstrom, whose life spanned the 20th century and whose influence on children’s literature has been extraordinary. A brilliant, inquisitive child whose glamorous, divorced parents shuttled her between boarding schools, she was denied the opportunity to go to college (that was considered by her stepfather to be a waste of good money) and attended secretarial school instead. In 1936 she took a clerical job at Harper &

Brothers (eventually to be called HarperCollins), and became the assistant to

Louise Raymond, director of the very small Department of Books for Boys and

30 Marcus, Minders of Make-Believe, xi. 16

Girls. When Raymond retired to raise a family, the head of Harper’s asked,

“Well, do you think your assistant could take over?” As Nordstrom recalled,

“That’s how much they thought of children’s books—-it was such a tiny department, you know…So they gave me the opportunity.”31

Nordstrom’s very pragmatic personality and voracious reading habits set her apart from her contemporaries. She was a fan of comic books, recognizing that the humor, action and colorful graphics in such a very affordable and accessible format had a powerful appeal to children. From the start it was clear that she recognized talent, early on signing such authors and illustrators as

Clement Hurd and Ruth Krauss, and later championing such mavericks as

Maurice Sendak. She claimed that her motto was “good books for bad children” and when asked by Anne Carroll Moore what qualified her to publish books for boys and girls (Nordstrom had no children, no college degree and no library training), she answered, “I am a former child and I haven’t forgotten a thing.”32

During and after World War II, Nordstrom optimistically took advantage of the state of austerity in which much of the work was produced in black and white:

In those days you were able to do a lot of experimentation because you could print such small editions. I printed five thousand at a dollar a copy of Bears by Ruth Krauss…and 7500 [for the first edition] of the Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein. I was fortunate that the management didn’t interfere with me and I could do so-called crazy books.33

31 Marcus, Minders of Make-Believe, 159. 32 Marcus, Minders of Make-Believe, 160. 33 Roni Natov and Geraldine Deluca, “Discovering Contemporary Classics: An Interview with Ursula Nordstrom,” The Lion and the Unicorn (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press), Vol. 3, No. 1, 1979, 120. 17

Her years at Harper were characterized by hard work, the fostering of talented writers and illustrators, and brilliant editorial decisions, personally guiding author/illustrators such as John Steptoe (Stevie, in 1969) and Maurice

Sendak (Where the Wild Things Are, in 1963). Such was her influence that Sendak’s later book, Outside Over There (HarperCollins, 1981) bears her name on the copyright page: “An Ursula Nordstrom Book”. It was the last book published under her imprint.34

Leonard Marcus notes that the author/illustrators understood the distance between what women in publishing were able to accomplish and the recognition they were denied. John Donovan, executive director of the

Children’s Book Council wrote in 1985: “Perhaps there are now more women not quite getting to the top than there were more than a decade ago…[But] that the women who work in children’s books---those who have made fortunes for publishers—-have not ended up running some of those companies is an astonishment.”35

It was in the mid 1990’s, that the gathering social forces (a backlash against the Moral Majority’s call for censorship of works by such authors as Judy

Blume; a renewed interest in lavish coffee table art books; the new print technologies and trend towards digitalization) resulted in the output of children’s book publishing virtually doubling its volumes from the previous decade. Tom Feeling’s extraordinary chronicle of Africans who endured the slave voyages, Middle Passages (1995, Dial Books) arrived in book stores and was priced at $40; at the time, such a cost for a children’s book was unique; however,

34 Marcus, Minders of Make-Believe, 286. 35 Marcus, Minders of Make-Believe, 287. 18 the price was not unusual for an art book. Middle Passages, which went into production in 1994, was considered to be a “crossover”, a book that held special appeal to both adults and children. Its success marked a turn, a change that emboldened publishers to look beyond the influence of librarians and teachers.

In 1994 Random House fired several senior staffers from its Books for

Young Readers division, including the art director, Frances Foster, who promoted the talents of Phillip Pullman, Louis Sachar and Peter Sís. According to Leonard Marcus, when the dust had settled, the reason offered was that “with the retail market for juveniles as strong as it was, the department no longer needed to cater to the needs of librarians and schools.”36 The power at the publishing houses had transferred from the editors to the marketing executives.

The field of children’s book publishing was being taken seriously, far more seriously than the actual genre of children’s literature.

But, as was noted in articles, newspapers and avenues of social media, no one should underestimate the power of children: between 1998 and 2007 what became known as “the Potter Phenomenon” defied the long-held belief that pre- teen children could not and would not read a novel over three hundred pages

(the final volume in the series runs to 732 pages). The works of a first-time

Scottish novelist, J.K. Rowling, fired the imaginations and became the ultimate crossover book. It appealed to both genders and to all ages. It was, and continues to be, successful beyond all predictions. As the Puritans suspected, children proved that they are, indeed, willful and stubborn.

36 Marcus, Minders of Make-Believe, 311. 19

Maurice Sendak

The tactile experience of holding a book begins, if we are lucky, in our early childhood. Because it is most often shared in an intimate, physical way, with an adult who is reading and exploring it with us, these beginnings form part of our cultural consciousness. It is surprising how vivid most people’s memories are of the books they read as young children. One of the great challenges for the artist/authors of books for young children is achieving the balance of gaining the interest and approval of the adult while engaging and sustaining the attention of the child, the person for whom the book has been created. Maurice Sendak is an author who has achieved this balance.

Arguably the best-known author of children’s literature in our times,

Maurice Sendak has steadfastly claimed that his books are about children, but not always for them. His books explore themes of anger, abandonment, jealousy, and the common crimes of childhood. The protagonists of Sendak’s stories are flawed beings: they are naughty, they disobey, they are resentful and churlish; they take out their petty grievances on their more vulnerable siblings. They are also capable of, and display, courage, bravery, curiosity, ingenuity and affection.

In short, Sendak’s protagonists behave like real children.

Born in New York in 1928, Maurice Sendak grew up in Brooklyn, the youngest child in a family of Jewish immigrants who had fled persecution in

Poland only to face prejudice in New York City. He was a sickly child who spent a great deal of time, housebound, observing the anxious, unhappy adults of his extended family. The infamous kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh, Jr., in 1932, 20 terrified him.37 The memory of the sensationalism of that crime and the fear it inspired in young children remained with him for the rest of his life. Sendak was exposed to many such anxieties in his childhood. Many relatives of the Sendak family perished in the Holocaust; the intense sadness that seeped into the house pervaded all aspects of daily life. These memories became part of Sendak’s artistic vocabulary; most of his work concentrates on these themes of loss and fear, how children cope, and the resiliency they discover in themselves.

Maurice Sendak was allowed to draw while he was in bed and spent hours of his childhood watching the world pass by his window. Despite the inherent sadness in his family’s story, he had a warm and loving relationship with his older brother, Jack, and his older sister, Natalie. The three children were inextricably bound to one another.

He loved to draw. He decided to become an artist after seeing the Disney film, “Fantasia”; it was a revelation to him that a career could be made out of comics and cartoons. He developed enough skill by the time he was fifteen to be hired part-time at All American Comics. After high school graduation, he became an assistant window designer for the toy store, FAO Schwarz. It was during this time that he took his only formal training, night classes at the Art

Students League.38

His work as a window designer attracted the attention of Frances

Chrystie, Schwarz’ children’s book buyer, who arranged for Ursula Nordstrom, the juvenile book editor of Harper and Row, to see his portfolio. She

37 Jonathan Cott, “Maurice Sendak, King of All Wild Things”, December 30, 1976. http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/maurice=sendak=king=of=all=wil d=things-20120508?page=5; accessed May 8, 2012. 38 Cott, “Sendak”, 1. 21 immediately hired Sendak to illustrate Marcel Aymes’ The Wonderful Farm, published in 1951. Sendak was thrilled: “It made me an official person.”39

Sendak achieved his breakthrough with Where the Wild Things Are, published in 1963 by Harper & Row. The story presents a small boy’s dream as the artist interprets it and without apology or explanation. The original destination, for the child who had been sent to his room after a tantrum, was an escape to a land of wild horses. This idea had to be scrapped: it became apparent that the artist did not really know how to draw horses. Instead, he created his

“Wild Things”, basing them on caricatures of relatives. Where the Wild Things Are was awarded the Caldecott Medal in 1964. Despite early lukewarm reviews by critics, children immediately loved it and checked it out of school libraries over and over again.40

Its popularity has not waned since its debut nearly fifty years ago. Where the Wild Things Are was recently included in the Library of Congress’ exhibition of Books That Shaped America. [June 25-September 29, 2012, Library of

Congress, Washington, D.C] In an interview, Mark Dimunation, Chief of Rare

Books and Special Collections, discussed the qualities that appealed to the committee that chose the books for the exhibition:

This book represented a fundamental shift in the history of children’s book publishing: the secret lives and fantasies of children were pointedly separate from that of their ‘mean parents’. It was a very conscious, a very deliberate choice. The child is sent to bed, hungry, without any supper. And he thumbs his nose at his mother. He doesn’t mope around; he creates this rich fantasy

39 Cott, “Sendak”, 2. 40 Antoinette Sarfaty, librarian at the Chatsworth Avenue in Larchmont, NY, in an interview with the author in 2009. 22

world which is terribly more exciting than his boring room. Also, the illustrations are just incredible.41

The book’s plot involves a child who interacts with an unseen parent. The small boy, Max, dresses in his Wolf costume, then misbehaves and roars at his mother, until he is sent to his room without supper. He is unrepentant and as his imagination takes hold, his room turns into a magical forest and ocean.

Entranced, Max sails the seas in a small boat all the way to the land where the

‘Wild Things’ live. Once there, he encounters fierce great beasts, with “terrible claws, terrible eyes, terrible teeth and terrible roars”, but Max is even fiercer and he is rewarded when the Wild Things crown him king. After a period of revelry,

“the wild rumpus”, Max becomes homesick and forlorn; he misses his mother.

He sails back home to his own room where he wakes and finds that his supper is waiting for him, on the table next to his bed, and it is still hot. [Fig. 1]

Sendak grappled with the ending: how to get Max to leave the magical land of the wild rumpus. Sendak, ever the practical observer of human nature, came up with a solution that reminds us of the simple truth: “…As Max ‘s rage engorges him, those pictures fill the page. When his anger turns to a kind of wild jungle pleasure, the words are pushed off the page altogether. And then he deflates like any child; he’s getting hungry, he’s getting tired and he wants to go home.”42 Max wants to be back home where his mother loves him.

Sendak’s style recalls his fascination with comic book characters; the figures of Max and the Wild Things are drawn simply yet with great expression,

41 Mark Dimunation, Chief of Rare Books and Special Collections, Library of Congress, in an interview with the author in October of 2012. 42 Maurice Sendak quoted in Leonard Marcus, Show Me a Story! Why Picture Books Matter (Somerville, MA: Candlewick Press, 2012), 195. 23 in a palette of secondary colors. The Wild Things are so enormous that they barely fit into the frame of the page. They are all clearly of the same genus and yet each has its own distinctive characteristics, and one has peculiarly human- like feet. Sendak has stated that he modeled the Wild Things after his gregarious and melodramatic aunts and uncles whose weekly presence in his childhood filled the house with noise and tension. (When Where the Wild Things Are was later staged as a musical in 1979, Sendak gave the beast characters the names of his relatives: Moishe, Tzippy, Emile, Aaron and Bernard.) 43 The shape of the book is distinctive: short, wide and thin, with 48 pages. The influence of

Sendak’s love of comics is evident in the rendering of the boy, the boat and the beasts. [Fig. 2]

Maurice Sendak was a prolific author, exploring many literary forms; in addition to Where the Wild Things Are, two of his later books also touch on themes that are true to his vision of the secret lives of children. Each book has generated controversy: In the Night Kitchen (1970, HarperCollins) and Outside Over There

(1981, HarperCollins) are not the standard children’s bedtime fare.

In the Night Kitchen tells the story of Mickey, who wakes in his bed, sheds his pajamas and floats down to the Night Kitchen where he falls into a mixing bowl of batter for a ‘morning cake’. A triplet of chubby bakers seems not to notice and when the batter is ready, the morning cake is popped into the oven.

Mickey emerges, unscathed, about half way through the baking. He flies a dough airplane into a giant milk bottle, and then pours the milk so the bakers can finish

43 Margalit Fox, “Maurice Sendak: A Conjurer of Luminous Worlds”, New York Times obituary, Wednesday, May 9, 2012, B18. 24 making the cake. As first light dawns, Mickey is back in his bed and the world is back in order.

Mickey’s nudity (he is a toddler) is portrayed in anatomical correctness; when the book was first reviewed, there was speculation that the milk bottle is a phallic symbol, and the whole sequence is a wet dream. As a result, this book was ranked #25 on the “100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990-2000”.44

It is often deemed unsuitable for children. [Fig. 3]

Maurice Sendak noted that he had drawn the three baker’s mustaches to be vaguely like that of Adolph Hitler, and the bakers’ attempt to put Mickey in the oven was a reference to the Holocaust.45 Maurice Sendak had a fascination with the Sunshine Bakers, the cracker company whose motto, “We Bake While

You Sleep”, captivated him as a boy. “I wanted to stay up and watch the three fat little Sunshine Bakers going off to this magic place at night, wherever it was, to have fun while I had to go to bed.”46

As a child, Maurice Sendak had been enchanted by the comic strip, “Little

Nemo in Slumberland”, drawn by Winsor McCay, featured in the Sunday funnies between 1905 and 1914; and again between 1924 and 1927. McCay excelled at portraying the dream sequences experienced by his protagonist, Little

Nemo; McCay used vivid colors, unusual points of view and perspective, and topsy-turvy landscapes. The frames of the storyline were sometimes round or trapezoid; occasionally the characters burst through the edges. It was a comic

44 Cott, “Sendak”, 1. 45 Maurice Sendak, interviewed by Bill Moyers, NOW, www.pbs.org/now/arts/sendak.html, 2004. Accessed 12/6/2012. 46 Cott, “Sendak”, 2.

25 strip but it was more than just a simple children’s story: sometimes the themes were dark, surreal and nightmarish. The strip’s unusual features appealed to

Sendak and he paid tribute to Winsor McKay: in the background of In the Night

Kitchen, one can see the label on a baking canister; it says “Nemo”. Mickey, like

Little Nemo, flies exuberantly and effortlessly in his dream.47

The hatch marks and faded palette of his previous work have been replaced with strong color; the skyline of Manhattan, reminiscent of Sendak’s view of it as a child in Bensonhurst, fills the background. The sense of mischief remains.

In Outside Over There, (1981) Sendak returns to themes of danger and mortality in a deeply disturbing story. Ida is an adolescent girl, resentful that she must always take care of the baby who gets the lion’s share of their father’s attention. She turns her back on her sister who has been put to bed in her bassinette. While Ida plays her beloved horn, goblins climb a ladder, enter through the bedroom window and kidnap the baby. When Ida, contrite at ignoring her sister, turns back to give her love, she discovers that a changeling has been left in the crib: a melting ice-baby. To rescue her sister, Ida climbs backwards out the window, “a serious mistake” according to the narration as this causes her to tumble from her world into that of “Outside Over There”, a land of goblins and strange magic. [Fig. 4]

The experience of flying nearly causes Ida to be distracted from her quest, but she marshals her concentration and finds the goblins; we, the readers, realize that they have been part of the story all along, embedded in each page, disguised

47 Cott, “Sendak”, 2. 26 in homespun hooded cloaks. When Ida confronts them, she discovers they are all babies, squalling and roughhousing, looking nearly identical to her sister.

Ida charms them with her horn, forcing the goblins to dance themselves into a rushing, swirling torrent. Only Ida’s baby is left on the riverbank. The sisters are reunited and make their way home to where their mother awaits with a letter from their father. Ida resolves to take care of her little sister and keep her safe.

Sendak’s child protagonists are strong characters who react in believable ways to unbelievable events. When Ida decides to rescue her sister she doesn’t dwell on why, or try to downplay her own mistakes; she knows it is too late for excuses. The goblins have stolen her baby sister and Ida needs to get her back.

Like Max and Mickey, she faces the strange worlds of goblins and wild things and imaginary forests and unusual beings. Each child reacts, adapts and decides what to do. Then each child goes home, back to bed, back to supper, back to the reassurance of every day life. The reader is left to decide if and how the experience has changed Sendak’s created children.

There is little in this story that is normally found in books for young children. According to Leonard Marcus, the process of writing and illustrating

Outside Over There took Sendak nearly five years. Before it went to the publisher

(Harper and Sons), Sendak brought the artwork to his friend and mentor, Ursula

Nordstrom, who “wept at the sight of the ravishing watercolors.”48 Marcus cites two very unusual details surrounding the book’s publication: first, that there was no copy on the book’s jacket---the reputation of the artist/author was such

48 Marcus, Minders of Make-Believe, 286. 27 that no embellishment was deemed necessary; second, “Harper presented

Sendak’s book on both its adult and junior lists.” 49 This was momentous for

Sendak who said, “I had waited a long time to be taken out of kiddy-book land and allowed to join the artists of America.”50

Another validation occurred with the publication by Harry N. Abrams, in

1980, of Selma G. Lanes’ book, The Art of Maurice Sendak. It was a big “coffee table” book, a full-fledged art book. Lanes, a well-known critic, linked Sendak’s work to the tradition of William Blake. She also documented Sendak’s love of popular comics, of Winsor McKay’s dreamscapes and Disney productions. In citing these influences, Sendak was sending a clear message: that what had been considered “low brow” and inferior by the pillars of society deserved recognition and appreciation. According to Leonard Marcus, the Art of Maurice Sendak by

Selma G. Lanes was produced as a serious art book with “an elaborate paper- engineered version of a mechanical wooden toy that the Sendak brothers had cobbled together…and a tipped-in facsimile of the artist’s speculative first dummy, dating from 1955 [for Where the Wild Things Are].”51

Sendak muses that he never set out to do books for children; however, he vividly describes his connection to them:

I do books for children but I don’t know why. To me, the greatest writers—-like the greatest illustrators—-for children are those who draw on their own child sources, their dream sources—- they don’t forget them. There’s William Blake, Charles Dickens…that peculiar charm of being in a room in a Dickens’ novel, where the furniture is alive, the fire is alive, where the chairs move, where every inanimate object has a personality.52

49 Marcus, Minders of Make-Believe, 287. 50 Selma G. Lanes, The Art of Maurice Sendak (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1980), 235. 51 Marcus, Minders of Make-Believe, 285. 52 Cott, “Sendak”, 5. 28

Not everyone acknowledged Sendak’s talent in the beginning. Bruno

Bettelheim, the noted scholar and critic, warned parents against purchasing

Where the Wild Things Are; he worried that Max’s “dreamlike foray into the world of befangled and beclawed monsters would scare children”. Also, he deemed

Max’s rebellion against adult authority as “psychologically harmful.”53 The

Journal of Nursery Education took an almost Victorian view: “We should not like to have it left about where a sensitive child might find it to pore over in the twilight.”54

Maurice Sendak addressed these concerns in his acceptance speech at the

Caldecott Medal ceremony in 1964 for Where the Wild Things Are. “To master their fears, children turn to fantasy: that imagined world where disturbing emotional situations are solved to their satisfaction. Through fantasy, Max discharges his anger against his mother and returns to the real world, sleepy, hungry and at peace with himself.”55

With Outside Over There, Sendak achieved a milestone: recognition from publishers and readers that his work merited being judged on its own terms, outside the classification of booksellers. Its underlying themes of sibling rivalry and abandonment leave many adults unsettled. “Can Outside Over There really be a children’s book?” asked Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in the New York

Times. “Is it appropriate for a children’s book to be raising such questions?”56

53 Cott,”Sendak”, 1. 54 Ibid. 55 Ibid. 56 Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, review of Outside Over There by Maurice Sendak, Books of the Times, New York Times, www.nytimes.com/1981/06/01/books/books-of-the-times-139237.html. Accessed 4/27/13 29

The persistent evolution of Sendak’s bookmaking continued as his reputation grew and he was able to exercise more and more creative control over his work. In his 1993 book Down in the Dumps with Jack and Guy (New York:

HarperCollins), Sendak intertwines two poems to highlight the lives of homeless children. The kids are dressed in old newspaper and live in cardboard boxes.

Sendak uses the newspaper headlines to provide information to the reader; as the book progresses, the headlines transform from light-hearted (“Elect a kid for president!”) to dark and painful, revealing articles about drive-by shootings and

AIDS. The children in this story emerge as young heroes who persevere and care for each other and for the most vulnerable among them. Sendak sends the message, “Where are the grown-ups to help with this emergency?”

Sendak explained to Leonard Marcus:

This book is also being marketed to adults…It’s a blessing that it has turned out that way. I’ve been struggling with the constrainst of being a children’s-book illustrator/writer for years. The discomfort has nothing to do with my passion for children but with grown-ups there’s always the subtle implication that your work is not very important. That’s always plagued us in this business.57

As in Artist’s Books, the work of Sendak evokes story-telling on multiple levels.

Each book rewards careful examination of all its elements. The different styles of imagery engender reminiscences of times gone by, of cartoons and charicatures, of traditional folk tales, of historical references, of joyous moments and sinister events. There are hints of death, loss and deep sadness. Much of Sendak’s storylines revolve around what Sendak refers to as “this minute of distraction…the quirky minute when things just don’t work out…The question I

57 Marcus, Show Me a Story, 205. 30 am obsessed with is, how do children survive?”58 While Sendak’s stories are resolved with reassurance that, for most children, there is goodness and love, these benign endings are achieved through the resilience and actions of flawed individuals. There may be magic but in the end, gravity prevails.

That moment of distraction is the lynchpin, the key to it all. It is as if it stops time, making everything stand still. The suspension of time creates tension that in turn slows the pace of the narrative. Artist’s Books often explore such themes of the suspension of time. Keith Smith’s artist book, Swimmer (1986) incorporates a continuous text along the borders of an accordian fold book while a nude swimmer floats (or maybe dreams of flying) through the space of the pages. Johanna Drucker describes it as “the duality of representation –the tension between surface and illusion…the flow and break which is the basic internal dialogue of a book form. 59

Artist’s Books span a broad spectrum; some of the best appear to be deceptively simple, with careful attention to scale, negative space and perspective. Many employ very little text and encrypt their message in seemingly random notations, such as the invented language used by Timothy

Ely in Scighte, (1987, Poote Press). Others explore repetition and counting, using cut-aways and transparencies, such as Joan Wolbier’s 23 Eggs (1988, Pyramid

Atlantic) or use bright colors and highly textured materials as in Sweet Potato by

Tina Hudak (1988, Pyramid Atlantic). These are Artist’s Books that may incorporate or use references from childhood but are intended for adults.

58 Marcus, Show Me a Story, 197. 59 Drucker, Century of Artists’ Books, 140. 31

Peter Sís

Peter Sís comes to Book Arts from a background steeped in storytelling, symbolism and displacement. He was born in 1949 in Brno, near Prague,

Czechoslovakia, the son of a filmmaker and a teacher who raised their children to create art amid political repression. Sís was fascinated by his father’s descriptions of the faraway places that were visited as location sites for movie production.

While his children were quite young, Vladimir Sís was sent by the Czech government to oversee a documentary film in China and to assist in setting up a government-sponsored film board in that country. All involved understood that it was to be a short-term project. During the project, Mr. Sís taught film production, including the mechanics of remote location work, in western China along the Tibetan and Indian borders. A landslide separated Vladimir Sís from his Chinese hosts and he was lost, wandering, until local people found him and helped him make his way to Lhasa, the capital of Tibet. There, Vladimir Sís was taken to meet the young Dalai Lama (before the Dalai Lama escaped to India ahead of the Chinese invasion in 1956). The chance meeting had a profound impact on Vladimir Sís. It was a year before he was able to return to his family in

Prague.60 This story became part of the Sís family’s oral history and eventually was worked into a book by Peter, Tibet Through the Red Box, published in 1998 by

Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

60 Richard Bernstein, “Once Upon a Time in a Land Full of Wonder, Books of the Times, NY Times, December 2, 1998. www.nytimes.com/1998/12/02/books/books-of-the-times-once-upon-a-time- in-a-land-full-of-wonder.html?ref=petersis. Accessed 10/17/12. 32

Peter was a very observant child but an indifferent student. He loved to draw but his work did not conform to the guidelines set up by his Soviet trained art teachers. “I did not want to draw a tree their way. I wanted it to be more than just to look like a tree. This was not acceptable to them.”61 Yet his talent was recognized and he was accepted to art school where he studied illustration, animation and filmmaking. Peter Sís, as part of a Czech delegation, traveled to

Los Angeles in 1982 to produce an animated film for the 1984 Olympics. When the Eastern Bloc countries, in a protest against American foreign policy, withdrew from the Olympic Games, the Czech government ordered Sís to return home. Instead, he stalled until the deadline had passed, knowing full well that the decision would be irreversible and might have repercussions for the family left behind. He chose to defect. He spent a challenging year in California, learning English, working sporadically, and struggling to complete an animated short film. He wrote to Maurice Sendak, sent him some drawings, and asked for guidance. Sendak encouraged Sís to move to New York, so Sís bought a second- hand car and drove across America. The trip was pivotal, giving him his first real sense of the dimensions of the United States, and a feel for the regional differences of this country.62

Although Sís thought of himself as an animator, Sendak and others encouraged him to break into the world of children’s book illustration. He was desperate for work and he began to see the children’s book genre as a way to combine his love for storytelling with his love of drawing. After several collaborations, he became both author and artist. While most of his early books

61 Peter Sís, telephone interview with author, November 14, 2012. 62 Ibid. 33 were geared specifically towards children, their multi-age appeal made them distinctive. His many successful books include: Rainbow Rhino (1987, Alfred

Knopf), Komodo! (1993, Greenwillow Books at HarperCollins), Fire Truck (1998,

Greenwillow Books at HarperCollins), Madlenka (2000, Farrar, Straus and

Giroux), and Madlenka’s Dog (2002, Farrar, Straus and Giroux). [Fig. 5 and 6]

The Wall: Growing up Behind the Iron Curtain (2007, Farrar, Straus and

Giroux), which deals with Sís’s memories of life under communist rule, was awarded both a Caldecott Honor and the Robert F. Sibert Medal in 2008. Sís had an opportunity to interact with a special group of critics when he visited the

Leesburgh Juvenile Detention Facility, in Loudon County, VA. He was deeply impressed with the observation and analytical skills of the sixteen- and seventeen- year-old boys. Perhaps because they are restricted from internet use and television viewing, they had studied the text in such great detail. The boys had noticed and evaluated very minute elements of the illustrations in these books and had many questions about symbolism and placement. “’The flags in the attic: why were those flags chosen? What about the black and white inks?

How were the decisions made from page to page?’ They [the inmates] were relentless: they demanded answers.” These books had demonstrated the crossover element that Sís had hoped for, an appeal to multiple ages. The impact had far exceeded expectations.63

For Sís, the creative process involves multiple revisions, research and hundreds of drawings and paintings; he thrives on it. He has won the New York

Times Book Review’s Best Illustrated Book of the Year Award six times and is still excited about it. He loves meeting people and makes a point of visiting a local

63 Ibid. 34 library in virtually every city to which he travels. He likes to talk with librarians, teachers, children and artists; he is always gathering information.64 He has produced over a thousand illustrations for various publications.

Peter Sís was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2003, an honor that both thrilled and troubled him. “It is such a big honor and it allowed me to think four, maybe five projects ahead without worrying so much about finances, but everyone, when they meet me, they ask about the money, always about the money.”65 This link between his art and a large financial reward was a new experience and while he is appreciative, it has made him cautious. The

MacArthur grant carries great prestige and is often seen as the culmination of a career when, in fact, its intent is to allow the recipient to be fully immersed in a chosen field. Sís expresses his concern, “Of course I have to worry about money, everyone does, but no artist wants the money to be in charge of the art.”66

As his own two children have grown, Sís wonders if the process of adjusting life to their changing needs has made him a bit less accurate in putting his finger on just what very young children will be interested to read. In the past few years he has begun to explore new themes in his work. A few of his books, while still marketed as children’s literature, have sophistication and complexity that is geared more towards adults. Starry Messenger (1997), Tibet Through the Red

Box (1998), The Tree of Life, (2003), The Wall (2007) are titles which have been consciously marketed as having wider appeal than the traditional picture books for children. [Fig. 7]

64 Ibid. 65 Ibid. 66 Ibid. 35

Not all reviewers are convinced that Sís is successful in his choices of those details he reveals in his books. Richard Bernstein, critic for the New York

Times, while impressed with the power of Sís’s art, was left feeling unsatisfied with Tibet: Through the Red Box:

Tibet is…a charming book and a visually beautiful one, but it is also precious and unsatisfyingly cryptic. In appearance and textural style it is a children’s book, but it requires a good deal more knowledge of political matters…for it to be fully grasped by children…At the same time it is too childlike in tone and structure to engage the adult mind even while its adult themes are not for children. One wishes he had told the story more fully, even straightforwardly, rather than engage in all that artifice, enticing us with fragments, lavishly decorated hints.67

In 2011, Sís created The Conference of the Birds, based on a poem by twelfth century Persian poet, Farid Ud-Din. He considers it to be a story for adults. All the birds in the world gather to hear the hoopoe bird speak. The hoopoe is considered to be a wise leader and the birds have chosen to listen to him. The hoopoe cites all the ills and troubles of the world and encourages the assembled birds to “seek a king who will have all the answers. We must go and find him.”68

The birds set off on the quest, which is long and dangerous. Some of the birds fall from the sky; others give up and settle in trees along the way. Those who persist in the quest and arrive at the mystical mountain, Kaf, where they find the king, eventually come to realize that the answers lie within themselves; they must be their own saviors.

For The Conference of the Birds, Peter Sís used pen and ink and watercolor, along with increasingly fine brushes, to paint the thousands of birds. Each page was originally illustrated by hand. Sís considered that perhaps he should have

67 Richard Bernstein, NY Times Book Review, 1998. 68 Sis, interview with author, November 14, 2012. 36 used a computer program but was unable to find one and ultimately found that the tiny brush was all that was needed.69 Sís’s affinity for birds stems from his childhood in Prague where his family of artists had to balance the desire for creativity against the restraint and muted expression required of living in a repressive society. “My friends and I loved to watch the birds; they needed no passports. They were free to come and go, they were symbols of free movements.”70

Unrestricted by a pre-determined number of pages, Sís felt free to let the story un-fold, as he believed it should. There are 159 pages on lovely, heavy paper; the paper, produced in China where the book was printed, is coated; the process is an industrial secret. At 7.5” x 10.25”, its smaller size sets it apart from some children’s books.

The illustrations, with the multiples of birds emulating flocks and schools of fish, evoke a sense of fluttering paper cut outs and seem to fly off the page.

The result is a sense of dimensionality, calling to mind the installation work of book artist, Su Blackwell, whose cut paper and sculptural books defy easy classification. The sizing of the paper pieces in her work, and their suspension in space, allows the eye of the viewer to extend the metaphor, so to speak, and as a result Blackwell’s installations completely redefine the space that they occupy.

The upward sweep appears to go on into infinity.71 Sís’s drawings, some of which bleed across two consecutive page spreads in the Conference of the Birds,

69 Peter Sís, lecture, The Children’s Book Guild of Washington, D.C., Nonfiction Award, April 21, 2012. 70 Peter Sís, lecture, The Folger Theatre, Washington, D.C., November 2, 2012. 71 Su Blackwell, website: www.sublackwell.co.uk/ 2012. 37 show birds within birds, birds within flocks, flocks within infinite skies. He employs circles within many of his illustrations, filled with multiple tiny details that also evoke the infinity of that universal shape. [Fig. 8]

Sís considers much of his work to occupy the ground between children’s literature and adult’s literature. The European tradition in which he was trained recognizes illustration and book design as fine art and provides a “more complete training”. Yet in the United States, his adopted country “of such great opportunities”, there exists a dilemma concerning children’s book illustration: it is considered something less than real art. Sís, like other artists, has noticed and rankles at the use of the word “just”, as in “it’s just a children’s book”. He spoke of having to disprove a negative, “trying to prove [his work] is not ‘just’ a children’s book.”72 [Fig. 9]

This dilemma sets up a conflict between the artist and the children’s book editor, and both are trying to win the favor of the librarian. Sís has struggled to tell stories which are important to him but is often told that they are ‘too complicated’ for children; yet, in following an editor’s suggestions, he may find that the result has gotten too far away from its original source and is no longer recognizable to him.

He points out that this is a conundrum that all children’s book artists must confront. If an editor does not approve of the content, for instance, the book might not get past the development stage. If the publisher balks at a cover illustration, the book might not get published, or if a librarian deems the subject

72 Peter Sís, interview with the author, November 14, 2012. 38 matter to be too mature for children, the completed book might not be put out on the shelf. The business element is always looming.

It is in this commercial aspect that Sís notes a major difference between children’s illustrated books and fine art:

We do not have the same courage as fine artists. We makers of children’s books, we talk to the publisher or the editor and if [the project is accepted], we get money in advance. We must work within the system. Whereas fine artists, they paint and sculpt, they invest all this creativity and work and then they must wait, and wait to see if the work is appreciated and if it will sell. 73

The risk, as he sees it, is that children can be tough customers. “They will show us themselves, their inner selves, if they are interested in the book.” He pointed out that the books of his mentor, Maurice Sendak, were considered avant-garde when first published and were “dismissed by some of the critics” and yet children proved those critics to be wrong: “they clamored for the books and they still do. And [Sendak’s] books have stood the test of time. For the kids, right now, the first time they read these books, it is all new and they are so excited by them.”74

Sís has created books for his own children, a few which have been published: Madlenka ( Farrar Straus Giroux, 2002) for his daughter and Fire Truck

(Farrar Straus Giroux, 1998) for his son. Fire Truck has had an especially poignant trajectory: it was loosely based on the firefighters and equipment of the firehouse on his street in New York; just “a humble little picture book for boys and girls who like the big red trucks, you know.” Like many city neighborhood firehouses, it received lots of young visitors. On September 11, 2001, the firefighters were among the first responders and nearly all of them died when

73 Ibid. 74 Ibid. 39 the World Trade Center buildings collapsed. Fire Truck became a symbol, first for those firefighters’ families, and then for the New York City Fire Department.

The book is now officially dedicated to the firehouse. In three different presentations, Sís has struggled to articulate what this means to him in the wake of such tragedy. Each time he has pointed out, “There are no words for this.75

Peter Sís has strong opinions about the importance of early exposure to books. He has his own memories; because his parents valued such things, he may have had more variety in exposure than the average Czech child of his generation (1950’s). Most of the books available were printed on cheap paper in black and white; color was too expensive. But the storytelling was rich and he was encouraged to draw. He cites this early influence, along with the physical act of putting pencil and crayon to paper, as being part of how he now builds a story in his own work.

For Sís, each book begins with a story. He turned down the opportunity to create a book for children based on the lyrics of Bob Dylan’s songs because, after thinking it over, he found himself unable “to do it just for the sake of form, just so Bob Dylan could be the author of a children’s book; it made no sense to me.”76 He cannot begin with a form and try to create a story for it; for him it must be the other way around.

He recognizes that children’s literature and picture books are routinely marginalized. “Lots of people almost have a complex about this,” he says.

Authors and artists “don’t want to be associated with children’s literature because in doing so, they will become marginalized as well.” He attributes a

75 Sis, lectures at Children’s Book Guild, and at the Folger. 76 Sis, in interview with author, November 14, 2012. 40 great deal of this literary and artistic inferiority complex to publishers who nowadays rely on focus groups to determine so many of the details of children’s literature:

If they like you, you are on Cloud Nine. But God forbid something wouldn’t be appealing to booksellers; they might refuse to put the books on the [store’s] shelves. The bookstores now tell the publishers they won’t carry that book, they don’t like that cover… The publishers, they don’t think highly of their own children’s book departments. As important as we [parents, teachers, readers] think children’s books are in this country, in publishing, the books are still dismissed as being less: they are ‘just’ children’s books.77

He believes that all artists are essentially trying to remember and reinterpret their childhoods: their fears, their worries, their joys, their discoveries, and their secrets. He referenced Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince, completed in 1943, as a classic author-illustrated book that defied the constraints of classification. Sís speculated, “Is it a book for children or for adults? In the re- reading, as one grows older, the understanding comes in different stages. It’s beautiful.”78

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union when Peter Sís was allowed to return home to Prague, he discovered, up in the attic, that his mother had kept a box of books from his childhood, which surprised him. When he opened the box he found three or four children’s books, the first books he can remember:

They were unremarkable books, really, not sophisticated. But it made me remember reading with my mother. And just for a moment, I had this amazing, amazing powerful memory: that one second when you feel so completely safe—-all of a sudden, I had that feeling again. And it meant everything, everything to me.79

77 Sis, in interview with the author, November 14, 2012. 78 Ibid. 79 Ibid. 41

Hybrid

Artist’s Books have been created from children’s books, and in some cases, inspired by illustrated books. The Library of Congress has a deluxe 25th anniversary edition of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are that is beautifully bound and boxed and includes a hand-drawn sketch of Max in his

Wolf suit. Leonard Baskin’s Gehenna Press produced a gorgeous Artist’s Book on the work of Eric Carle: The Magical Painted Papers of Eric Carle (1997), that includes a short autobiography, an essay by Sidney E. Berger, and tipped in, original, painted papers from Mr. Carle’s famous collage collection. Book artists have created homages to Beatrix Potter, Edward Gorey, and Theodor Geisel (Dr.

Seuss). Such works fit solidly within the Artist’s Book genre: they are rare, produced in limited editions at printmaking studios, designed by artists and hand-bound with special papers and archival materials.

In strict terms, children’s picture books, even exceptional ones, are not

Artists’ Books. Certain artists’ books, intended for an adult audience, evoke childhood and children’s narrative voices to allow viewers to pull deep from within themselves and recreate memories, often vivid ones, even if unrelated to the artist’s storyline. This creates a bond with the artist although those memories may prove to be unsettling. These books require an adult’s sensibility and understanding of the world to be comprehensible on an adult level. Careless reading or hurried judgment can cause an artist’s book to be dismissed as simple and unremarkable; the same can happen to a children’s book. Most Artist’s

Books and Fine Press books are produced in limited editions in contrast to the large print runs of commercial books. 42

Many of the books created by the artist/authors Maurice Sendak and

Peter Sís, that have been discussed in this paper, sit uneasily in the categories devised by commercial publishing: too complex, too dark, too complicated for the tastes and understanding of many children (and their parents); not enough text, not enough action, not enough edification to satisfy restless adult readers.

Commercially printed in large editions, they are outside the boundaries of most acknowledged definitions of Artist’s Books and yet these unusual books do fit within one of Johanna Drucker’s criteria for an Artist’s Book, which is “to have some conviction, some soul, some reason to be and to be a book in order to succeed.”80 While both Sendak and Sís have had works adapted for other media, their original creations depend on their ‘bookness’ for success; the artwork without the texts would be merely pictures and the texts without the art would be irrevocably changed. As artist/illustrators of accomplished works, they have exercised more control over the final product (the spare, unadorned cover flap of

Sendak’s Outside Over There, and the ability to choose the number of pages in

Sís’s The Conference of Birds). Their elements have been meticulously forged and each component interacts with, and depends upon, one another. The works would not be finished or complete were they not inextricably books. The question becomes one of labeling, as we seem to need a name for everything in order to establish its credibility.

These books are hybrids. Webster’s defines hybrid as “something that has two different types of components performing essentially the same function.”81

80 Drucker, The Century of Artists’ Books, 10-11. 81 Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Tenth Edition (Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster, Inc., 2002) 566 . 43

There are interesting negative connotations associated with the word (cur, mongrel, miscegenation) and yet a ‘hybrid’, like an alloy, is often appreciated for its strength, for its innovation and its adaptability. Artists often make their own decisions, choose their own paths, and do what they will do, rather than change their work to fit another’s definition.

It will be interesting to see what new term will be attached to these hybrids. Rebranding is a very important commercial concept. ‘Children’s

Literature’ has overtaken the once-popular ‘Juvenile’ (too often associated in newspapers with the word ‘delinquent’); ‘Young Adult Fiction’ has replaced

‘Teen Novels’. We may still buy ‘Comic Books’ but we also read ‘Graphic

Novels’. ‘Crossover’ is used for Young Adult Fiction that also appeals to grownups but the term eliminates most illustrated texts. The commercial publishing, as an industry, has cautiously ventured into ‘alternative’ or ‘outsider’ works, such as the Griffin and Sabine trilogy by Nick Bantock (1991, Chronicle

Books) or the Pop Up books that have been designed by Robert Sabuda since

1994. These books have been favorably reviewed, and have been very popular

(Griffin and Sabine spent over two years on the New York Times Best Sellers List).

Artist/authors continue to experiment and rework their methods of storytelling; we can expect more of these hybrids to come on the market. These books are also hybrids in their likeness to Artists’ Books: they are commercially produced but have many of the attributes associated with Book Arts, those elusive qualities described by Drucker and Bright that make an Artist’s Book so much about being a book.

The entire commercial publishing industry is reevaluating itself in light of electronic and digital books. It is hoped, however, that readers of all ages will 44 continue to be engaged by books that employ excellent art, tactile materials and good graphic design to enhance strong, focused storylines.

45

Conclusion

Technology’s impact on the book publishing industry remains a hotly debated topic as virtually all participants of 21st century societies balance the values of electronic communication and storage, along with the inherently tactile nature of humans who experience the ineluctable urge to handle and cradle what they read. Art and book arts have been changed by the presence of technology and the genres will evolve as their practitioners explore the possibilities and opportunities. Books will continue to change and new genres will emerge.

Fields, such as science fiction and graphic novels, that were once dismissed as lightweight are strengthened by competitiveness and criticism, by good writing and good art; eventually, publishers catch on, especially if it makes good business sense to devote time and attention to an emerging genre.

The hybrid books of artist/authors, such as Maurice Sendak and Peter Sís, will find their own niche. These authors are not alone: Lauren Redniss, Brian

Selznick and Chris Van Allsburg, are all creating unusual books which rely heavily on visual elements and the tension created by combining the art with bold writing. Embedded in these books are strong themes.

Redniss, in Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout

(HarperCollins, 2010) has produced an illustrated biography of chemists Marie and Pierre Curie who introduced the world to radium and polonium. The science is real and the author incorporates complicated explanations into this very compelling biography of a brilliant couple that combined their love for science with their love for one another. The book employs a typeface, invented by the

Redniss, and makes full use of the page spread, incorporating cyanotype printing to capture the quality that the author refers to as “what Marie Curie called 46 radium’s ‘spontaneous luminosity.” 82 Even after the book is closed, it continues to surprise the reader: the book glows in the dark.

Brian Selznick’s runaway hit, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, (Scholastic

Press, 2007) was the first novel to win the Caldecott Medal in 2008 (the Caldecott is designated for picture books); there are 284 illustrations on 526 pages. This book is also a hybrid: Selznick described it as “not exactly a novel, not quite a picture book, not really a graphic novel or a flip book…but a combination of all these things.”83 He has continued to explore this hybrid method in his latest work, Wonderstruck: A Novel in Words and Pictures (Scholastic Press, 2011) that has

637 pages and multiple drawn images to convey its mysterious tale of silence and stillness.

Chris Van Allsburg has consistently created memorable stories that teeter between the expectedness of a children’s book and the eeriness of adult science fiction, winning two Caldecott Medals (1982 and 1985). “[Illustrated books are] a unique medium that allows an artist/author to deal with the passage of time and the unfolding of events…the opportunity, to create a small world between two pieces of cardboard, where time exists yet stands still, where people talk and I tell them what to say, is exciting and rewarding.”84

Each of these artist/authors recognize that their work moves beyond the categories to which the public has become accustomed; all express confidence that this concern can be overcome. We do not know for certain how Maurice

Sendak, who died in 2012, would regard the word ‘hybrid’ as a category; what is

82 Lauren Redniss, Radioactive: A Tale of Love and Fallout (New York: It Books of HarperCollins, 2011. 83 Selznick, “Stories of Magic, Medieval Times Win Book Awards”, 2008. 84 Chris Van Allsburg, Caldecott Awards speech, 1985. 47 known is that he was adamant that his work be recognized as both art and literature. He viewed the field of children’s illustrated books very seriously but chafed at the restrictions placed on it by outsiders. In interviews, speeches and conversations he maintained that while his books were constructed around themes of childhood, they were also intended to engage adults.

Peter Sís has great regard for his audience, young and adult, and continues to explore the book as a medium that allows for new ways of expression; he said he asks himself, “Where do I stand on all of this? What are books actually for?”85 He has concluded that, as an artist and author, he must tell stories that are important to him, personally; that resonate with him and sustain him through all the drafts, sketches, re-writing and re-working that must go into any serious project. He hopes that publishers of adult literature will take the risk to publish his work, those of his books that appear to occupy the space between children’s illustrated books and Artist’s Books.

The field of Artist’s Books also continues to evolve and change, finding new ways to communicate, even as it invites participants to maintain the use of traditional methods, craft and equipment. The hands-on approach truly does transform an artist as the physical act of manipulating the media has an impact on the make, and the process, over time, transforms the art. For the Book Arts to continue to resonate with artists and readers, there must be room for change, room for the genre to evolve and for its practitioners to interact with the restrictions and boundaries, as all artists do in all media. There must continue to be new terminology and new criticism so that the conversation can continue.

85 Sis, in interview with the author, November 14, 2012. 48

As Peter Sís put it, echoing the sensibility of many artist/authors across multiple genres: “We all are irresistibly drawn to books that invite us to touch them.”86

86 Ibid. 49

Illustrations

Figures

1. Maurice Sendak, “Max in his bedroom”, Where the Wild Things Are

2. Maurice Sendak, “The Wild Rumpus”, Where the Wild Things Are

3. Maurice Sendak, “Now Mickey Cried Cock-a-Doodle-Doo!”, In the Night Kitchen

4. Maurice Sendak, “The Goblins Stole the Baby Sister”, Outside Over There

5. Peter Sís, “Madlenka and the Neighbors”, Madlenka’s Dog

6. Peter Sís, “Madlenka and the Neighbors” [flaps up], Madlenka’s Dog

7. Peter Sís, “Gallileo’s Notes on the Phases of the Moon”, Starry Messenger

8. Peter Sís, “The Meeting with the Hoopoe Bird”, The Conference of the Birds

9. Whitney Stahl, 2013 photograph of Peter Sís’s The Conference of the Birds, shelved with art books in store 50

Fig. 1: Maurice Sendak, “Max in his bedroom”, Where the Wild Things Are

51

Fig. 2: Maurice Sendak, “The Wild Rumpus”, Where the Wild Things Are

52

Fig. 3: Maurice Sendak, “Now Mickey Cried Cock-a-Doodle-Doo!”, In the Night Kitchen

53

Fig. 4: Maurice Sendak, “The Goblins Stole the Baby Sister”, Outside Over There

54

Fig. 5: Peter Sís, “Madlenka and the Neighbors”, Madlenka’s Dog

55

Fig. 6: Peter Sís, “Madlenka and the Neighbors” [flaps up], Madlenka’s Dog

56

Fig. 7: Peter Sís, “Gallileo’s Notes on the Phases of the Moon”, Starry Messenger

57

Fig 8: Peter Sís, “The Meeting with the Hoopoe Bird”, The Conference of the Birds

58

Fig. 9: Whitney Stahl, 2013 photograph of Peter Sís’s The Conference of the Birds, shelved with art books in store 59

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