come on now, new york times

In their Children's Books special issue for the fall, the New York Times has a slide show of the top 10 illustrations from picture books of the year. Excited to see some stunning imagery, I clicked on the slide show...

...only to be met with kinda crappy photos of open books where you can hardly see the pictures.

It looks like somebody just laid the books down on a black tablecloth and took a picture of them, not caring that some kind of light is reflecting off the glossy paper and making it impossible to see what the illustrations look like.

Really, New York Times? That is the best you can do?

So I guess if we want to know which are really the best illlustrations from this year, we will have to go out and look at the books ourselves.

the charming, delightful, mysterious benedict society

When was the last time you found a book to be not just good or engrossing but actually charming?

I found Trenton Lee Stewart's The Mysterious Benedict Society beguiled my socks off. And how did it do this?

Let's see...with secret agents, morse code, trickery, puzzlery, mysterious heroes, plucky orphans, villains with totalitarian ambitions, and just about every other awesome thing you could imagine...including rare plants!

The illustrations by Carson Ellis really bump this one up a notch: She only does chapter title pages in the book, not full-page illustrations, but close enough, so that the chapter titles illustrate scenes from each chapter. Her whimsical, detailed style really fits the whimsical, detailed prose.

We can only hope that as companies tighten their publishing budgets, they won't cut illustrating budgets for books such as this one, which really deserve them.

Tasha Tudor: It is healthful to sleep in a featherbed with your nose pointing north

Today we mourn the death of Tasha Tudor, an amazing illustrator who illustrated over 100 books, according to her New York Times obituary. The obit also has more on her unconventional, original life; the title of this post is advice she gave to the Times in 1977.

Aside from her classic illustrations for The Secret Garden, one of my favorites is A Brighter Garden, poems of Emily Dickinson with lush, green illustrations by Tudor. Who could ask for a better author/illustrator combo?

Although I have to say I'd love to see Maurice Sendak take a crack at Dickinson.

And, she's not a children's writer, but we also mourn the death of wonderful poet Aleda Shirley.

Millions of Cats and Total Book Lust

My late night browsing revealed this wonderful post from the Children's Picturebook Blog about how to tell if you have a first edition of Wanda Gág's Millions of Cats or not. They estimate its worth at about $4000. Now I am suddenly salivating over this book. (Do owls salivate?) The blog authors write:

The historical importance of the book is underappreciated by the general public, however not so within the bibliophile hobby, as the steep market value will attest. The book is still in print today, which is quite remarkable for a children’s picturebook. How many other picturebooks from the 1920’s are still in print today?

For those of us who can't spring for the first edition, I still recommend it for building your library or your child's library. It's a classic story with fine woodcut (I think?) illustrations - imagine a million cats eating all the grass off a hill! You have to see it to believe it.

Classic Illustrators: Lois Lenski

I'm a huge fan of line art in chapter books - those little drawings that go along with the story, interspersed in the chapters. It's too bad that these illustrators don't often get as much recognition as picture book artists. Surely they have as much to do with how a reader imagines a story as anyone! Just think of Pauline Bayne's line art for the Narnia books. Those books have been through many sets of hideous covers, but fortunately there are editions in print that use Baynes's covers as well.

But the illustrator that really got me thinking about this topic is Lois Lenski. She did the interior art for the Betsy-Tacy series by Maud Hart Lovelace, as well as writing and illustrating many books on her own. I love the whimsical folk-art quality of her drawings. Here's one of Betsy, Tacy, and Tib:



The series are about a group of girls growing up in small-town Minnesota in the early part of the twentieth century. They're classics of the Midwest (Lenski was from Ohio) as well as just all-round classic books. And who doesn't love a series where the main girl wants to be a writer? If Anne of Green Gables got in a fight with Betsy...it's hard to say who'd win.

Lenski also did the cover illustrations for the original books, which the currently in-print editions of the books have completely abandoned:




Not only do the girls in the new series look like grown-up American Girl dolls, they're playing "he loves me, he loves me not." How boring and sweetly Victorian is that? By contrast, Lenski's illustrations conveys the sense of adventure and imagination that the characters in the books actually have. Hmmph. Maybe I'll up and join The Betsy-Tacy Society after all.

Fortunately the in print editions of the Betsy-Tacy books continue to use Lenski's line art in the interior.

And keep your eye out for the old editions and first editions of these books. They're starting to be worth quite a bit.