The Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award is one of the highest honors in children’s literature — and thus, of course, one of the highest honors in literature, period. The prize is administered by the Swedish Arts Council and juried by twelve experts in children’s literature. Next month, H.R.H. Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden will officially present Jon with the award at the Concert Hall in Stockholm.

Created in honor of the great children’s writer Astrid Lindgren, the honor recognizes “those who continue to work in her spirit: with imagination, bravery, respect and empathy, and maintaining the highest level of artistic excellence.”

Here’s what the jury had to say about Jon:

Klassen's body of work forms a subtle, astute, and humorous investigation into existential questions, where feelings of anticipation, suspense, and shock play a central role.

Through his subtle and evocative storytelling in words and pictures, Jon Klassen opens new perspectives on our place in the universe. What happens when a rock falls from the sky, when hats disappear or a skull begins living a life of its own? With precision, emotion and inventive wit, life’s challenges of uncertainty and hopefulness are portrayed in an interplay of colour and form. Jon Klassen’s brilliant tales stand out for their effortless elegance and ambiguous depth, where the reader becomes a co-creator.

We’re very proud of Jon here at Looking At Picture Books and can’t wait to celebrate with him. Preferably in Sweden.

You can read more of the jury’s thoughts about Jon online, and, even better, listen to Jon’s reaction when he got the big phone call from the jury. He ran from school drop-off to a quiet spot to answer a mysterious number from Sweden, so he’s breathless before he even learns he’s the 2026 laureate. Beautiful.

Congratulations, Jon <3

A few weeks ago, we did a post on the evolution of our book Sam & Dave Dig A Hole, which, as far as I could remember, was the first time I’d drawn human people with eyeballs in a book. That is to say, eyes with whites and pupils, that weren’t just kind of elongated black dots. In the making of that post we actually ran across a piece of art I’d done early on in the book’s development where the characters had dot eyes instead of eyes with whites and pupils. The change was deliberate, for a few reasons.

This week I thought it’d be fun to do a post about the different eyes I’ve used in these books that I’ve illustrated, and why I used them. They are a powerful tool, and what I’ve found is that it’s not so much about how good you are at drawing eyes, but more what you want them to do for you as a storyteller, and the choices you make before you start drawing at all.

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You can still order the books and submit your receipt here until April 7th at 11:59pm ET (tonight!) to join the Now I See Mail Club. Which means you’ll receive four curated packages mailed to you, one for each season (summer 2026, fall 2026, winter 2027, and spring 2027). Please note, the Mail Club is only open to residents of the US and Canada, excluding Quebec, and there are more thrilling terms and conditions at this link.

They’ll be hitting the road through April and May to tour them, with help from a few other bookmakers.

These events are geared especially toward adults (except the Los Angeles event, where they’ll be presenting on the LA Times Book Festival Children’s Stage. That one’s for kids, and it will also have Mac & Shawn Harris presenting The Future Book). It’ll sort of be like Looking at Picture Books, except Jon and Mac will actually be, like, talking to each other (and sometimes some other writers and artists too).

Here is a rundown of all the events! If you’re close by, come on out!

April 18 — Los Angeles

April 18, LA Times Festival of Books Children’s Stage with Shawn Harris.

April 27 – Montreal

Tickets

April 28 — New York City

Tickets

April 30 — Toronto

Tickets

May 14 – San Francisco

Tickets

May 18 — Seattle

Tickets

And if those aren’t enough links for you, here are some more:

Deep dives on great picture books.

Picture book recommendations.

Working on picture books.

Looking at Picture Books merch.

There’s a story about the great children’s editor Ursula Nordstrom refusing a rabbit stew at dinner: she pushed the bowl away and said, “I’m sorry, but I can’t eat this. I publish rabbits.”

The bunny is probably the ur-picture book character. A rabbit can be cuddly; a rabbit can be tricksy. Both Jon and Mac have made books with rabbits. Here are some bunny books they like, featuring the original design of a familiar character, a rabbit who goes to jail for murder, and a peek at a strange and rare Margaret Wise Brown artifact.

Where Is It? by Tana Hoban

Tana Hoban, as we’ve discussed, was mainly known for her amazing photography concept books, based around patterns and shape finding. She was a pioneer of these kinds of books, an incredible book designer, and a world class photographer to boot. Where Is It is actually a departure from the kind of thing she’s best known for — it’s a narrative book using pictures as the illustrations for the story. The text is written as the rabbit’s inner monologue as he searches for something that is left mysterious until the end.

The basic visual structure throughout is a white rabbit against dark backgrounds and he does pop beautifully.

The video we linked to at the end of this post of Hoban and her editor discussing this book in particular is worth revisting, because of the rigor they both applied to the process:

The final product feels loose and charming, but it’s nice to hear that behind the scenes they were both dead serious about making it work as well as it could.

It’s super difficult to pull off narrative photograph books, I think, and it’s hard here to totally immerse yourself in the storytelling without picturing Hoban out in the grass snapping away at this oblivious rabbit. The better spreads are the ones where we don’t see the rabbit’s face and Hoban’s playing with what an iconic shape they make — like that first page with the ears sticking out of the bush.

On the final page where the rabbit finds the basket he was apparently looking for, he has this super scared look on his face like they just yelled at him to get him to look at the camera. The text going all caps and exclamation mark’d only enhances this impression.

I feel like Hoban, perhaps more comfortable with iconography than depicting narrative emotion, maybe saw this one develop and was like: “yes, he looks terrified, but the ears are perfect,” and she’s right.
—JON

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So, yeah — Jon and Mac have some board books coming out in March! If you preorder the books and submit your receipt here, you will join the Now I See Mail Club, which means you’ll receive four curated and themed packages from Jon/Mac/Tundra Books, one in each season (summer 2026, fall 2026, winter 2027, and spring 2027). Please note, the Mail Club is only open to residents of the US and Canada, excluding Quebec, and there are more thrilling terms and conditions at this link.

Also, there are now navy blue shirts in the shop.

And:

• Deep dives on great picture books.

• Picture book recommendations.

• Working on picture books.

OK, on to trailer talk.

MAC: Hi Jon.

JON: Hi Mac.

MAC: I guess first of all we should say we made a book trailer and you can watch it.

JON: It’s actually the first in a series of short videos — or “trailers” — all directed by Nathan Zack, for our new series of board books: the Now I See series, published by Tundra Books.

There are four books in the series, one for each season. Each of the books contain the same text, and the illustrations change according to the titular season.

MAC: The book trailer has become a standard part of marketing a book, although its purpose, to me at least, has always been a bit mysterious. Are they supposed to spread awareness of a new book, and even entice people to buy them? And if so, entice whom? Booksellers? Librarians? Teachers? Parents? Kids? Probably not kids, because kids don’t have money. Are book trailers for librarians and teachers to screen for kids before reading our book aloud (I wouldn’t have thought so, but it happens!)?

Historically, I’ve handled these questions by trying not to think about them.

Jon, what even are book trailers??

JON: Book trailers are little commercials or teasers for books that are being released. They came about as a publishing marketing tool with the advent of YouTube and social media.

MAC: I do remember first learning about book trailers, a conversation with a marketing person, who asked me, in a hushed tone, in 2009, if I had ever heard of YouTube.

(I had 😎)

JON: I think book trailers also come out of the idea that releasing a book can be viewed a little like releasing a film. There is a similarity to movie releases in the kind of urgency to create momentum in the first few weeks they are out — to get on bestseller lists and just generally break away from the pack, before the next wave of stuff is released and buries you.

MAC: :(

JON: The trouble with the movie trailer comparison is that movies and picture books are very different. Movies are long. You can show SOME things from them without showing everything, leaving your audience wanting to see the rest of the things. Picture books are short. Simply teasing a picture book is hard. The publisher often, understandably, doesn’t want to show too much of the book (something we, ourselves actually don’t mind doing, but that’s another post).

So what’s left for us to show or establish in a trailer is maybe a premise, or explaining some kind of hook or mechanic you might have employed, but increasingly we’ve also kind of settled into using book trailers for just… like…vibes.

MAC: 😎

JON: That sounds like a joke, but really, think about why you buy a picture book, or why you remember one that you had. Often a lot of it IS vibes! We work hard on the story and the page-by-page construction of them — this newsletter is basically about appreciating exactly that — but we also have a healthy interest in, and respect for, vibes.

MAC: 😎

JON: And film is very good at vibes. It gives you vibey things that books don’t give you. It gives you sound and editing. You can spend a long, satisfying time with good sound and a good edit and not get into any kind of actual plot or story, classically speaking.

One of our early forays into this more vibes-based approach was the trailer for Sam & Dave Dig A Hole, in 2014.

It was a memorable day. It was actually shot by the venerable , and the three of us went out to the desert in what we were confident would be a short excursion. Surely we would drive 20 minutes outside of Los Angeles and come upon a place to dig a hole. This did not happen, and we narrowly avoided some pretty meth’d-out situations.

MAC: There was a troubling incident with some guys who’d converted a golf cart into a four-wheel drive vehicle to patrol their desert, and I’m guessing at this point, secret laboratory.

JON: Late afternoon we finally found a non-meth spot by some railroad tracks and it ended up being okay that it had taken all day because the light was great, and we got to shoot over the sunset.

The final thing ended up being about a minute of video that was hopefully fun to watch, established the title, us, the very basic gist of the book, and not much else, which had been the goal.

MAC: (The other goal was to avoid, if possible, any animation of Jon’s artwork from the books, something book trailers do sometimes, and something that, with a few exceptions shown later, kind of hurts Jon’s eyes when it happens to his stuff.)

(These animations, it seems worth saying, are my mom’s favorite genre of book trailer.)

But yeah, I think this established a style of trailer for us, something you could call Jon & Mac Act a Fool.

JON: The same general approach was applied years later to the trailer for The Three Billy Goats Gruff. Shawn shot it again, and, again, it is less about the book itself and more about vibes.

MAC: And goats.

JON: We had the advantage on that book that most people know that story, but still. Good vibes.

MAC: But this approach didn’t feel right for the Now I See books.

JON: Yeah, the job of the Now I See trailers was to kind of tip how the books worked, but we also wanted to try to get at how we wanted this whole project to feel more generally.

MAC: We first met Nathan Zack when he made a short about Looking at Picture Books for a series called Substack on Film.

JON: We called him and asked him to make a bunch of quick, more abstract-feeling pieces about the Now I See books, along with some longer ones. We’ll be scattering them out there as the release approaches.

MAC: I think we wanted these little films to get at some of what it felt like to read with our own kids when they were very young, and also to make something that felt consonant with the gentle spirit of these particular board books.

We had a bunch of reference stuff: films we felt that got childhood right, often in some subjective, experiential sense. Sometimes these were videos that we remembered watching as kids — and feeling, as kids, that they were right and true.

JON: One of the tonal touchstones that came up were these short interstitials we saw when we were kids called “Hinterland Who’s Who.”

MAC: I didn’t see them as a kid. They’re Canadian. You and Nate were really going nuts over them, though. Vibing.

JON: These shorts were made by The National Film Board of Canada. They were very straightforward, filmed naturalistically and narrated plainly with simple facts about the animals they focused on. But there was something about the format and treatment that also lent them a poetry that made them memorable.

MAC: The brevity.

JON: Also the music, the same flute melody that played behind all of them. A meandering, gently mysterious piece called “Flute Poem” witten by television score composer Jon Cacavas.

As much as they was very informative, the final products also felt like little tonal jewels.

MAC: Poetry and science at peace.

JON: Each video ended with a federal agency graphic over the footage. Canada’s federal identity design, in its heyday, was unmatched.

The National Film Board logo was not far from our minds when making the logo for this newsletter.

The endings to the “Hinterland” shorts always looked great, too. (They also recommended that for more information on the animal in question, just contact the government. Verrrry cuuuute.)

We tried for the same general approach to our type treatment on these trailers.

We thought the down shot of the books being arranged from above was a little like Sesame Street videos where you’d see downshots of shapes being moved around.

MAC: I think about and talk about old Sesame Street a lot. This short didn’t influence our trailers as much as the book itself. The sound is godawful. Sesame Workshop, please save us and upload a good version to the Sesame Street Classics channel.

There’s a series of shorts, directed by Jim Henson, that show kids playing with toy vehicles, intercut with footage of the toys’ real-world equivalents at work. The whole concept displays a respect for the way kids play. And they’re shot and edited in this way that feels unsentimental but beautiful and captures the vividness of childhood’s sounds, sights, and textures. The rushing faucet at the beginning brings me straight back to bath time, age four.

This next short captures a profound and underexplored playground phenomenon — kids teaching other kids, initiating the youngest among them into the culture of childhood. Like most of the old Sesame Street stuff, it doesn’t use professional child actors (thank heavens). And the whole thing is so wonderfully paced, and so captures the emotional rhythms of play.

Speaking of non-professionals, I love the unvarnished narration of kids’ voiceovers on the old Sesame Street shorts. Maybe my all-time favorite is this one about taking care of farm animals in the winter. What an opening line: “Uh, when, when winter comes and stuff, it’s hard for the cows and all the animals, so, um, the people on the ranch, they feed the cows so they won’t starve and die.”

And here’s a nice — with slightly more polished but still unaffected narration — one about spring. The pioneering electronic musician Beverly Glenn-Copeland scored a bunch of early Sesame Street stuff. Maybe I’m wrong, but I feel like this has to be one of his. (Now I’m feeling like the cows in winter might be Glenn-Copeland too.)

There are couple of features that were touchstones for us too. The Red Balloon, which Jon and I both saw as kids, a movie that really stuck with us.

It looks like the whole thing is on YouTube.

And Where Is the Friend’s House?, which we watched last year. Jon saw it first and then told me to watch it, and I feel like it dominated our conversations for a few weeks.

Here’s the trailer:

And it looks like it’s streaming on Criterion now, if you’ve got that subscription.

JON: As a little bonus, here are the three trailers for the Hat Trilogy books. The first two were animated and composited by my friend David O’Reilly, and the third by my other friend, Fran Krause.

The I Want My Hat Back trailer was initially cut to the Shostakovich waltz from “Eyes Wide Shut” (it worked very well), but of course those music rights were a little tricky, so a soundalike track was commissioned.

The same process for the music was used for This Is Not My Hat, but this time it had been cut to Bernard Herrmann’s opening credit score for “Psycho”, a big structural inspiration for the book itself (another post in there, someday), and again a soundalike score was used.

For the third book, it was friend-of-the-public-domain Burl Ives to the rescue again (initially we tried “Sweet Dreams” by Patsy Cline, it really does go with the book, but again, those pesky rights).

MAC: And, finally, here are two very different trailers for one book, The Future Book, by me and Shawn Harris. Both trailers were made by Lauren and Lindsay Kent. One is footage from a read-aloud in front of students in California. We wanted to show how the book worked with an audience.

And this one is more a conceptual “video from the future.” We put a smoke machine in Shawn’s living room.

JON: 😎

Here is a gift link to Mac’s review.

Below, Jon and Mac talk a bit more about Nordstrom (children’s literature’s #1 Ursula) and get into a story behind a single, crucial sentence in Where the Wild Things Are.

As usual, this conversation was conducted over text message.

MAC: Hi Jon.

JON: Hi Mac.

MAC: So one of the web headlines for this review is “Without Her, These Beloved Classics Might Never Have Been Published.” I was happy to see that. (Everybody might know this already but when you write a review for a newspaper you don’t write the headline).

JON: The few times I’ve written things for newspapers, I’ve forgotten the headline thing.

MAC: Wait, do you send it in with a headline???

JON: No, and I always am like “oh crap I made them do it cause I forgot!”
But it’s just policy. I guess.

MAC: Well this headline got to a question I was thinking about a lot while writing this piece but didn’t really end up discussing directly. There were all these huge forces in the middle of the last century that contributed to a “golden age” of great children’s books (and especially picture books). So, if Ursula Nordstrom had never existed, would the books she published simply haven been published by some other editor?

The answer I arrived at was no. Like, I don’t think we’d get Where the Wild Things Are without Ursula Nordstrom.

JON: Mac, for those who subscribe to this but may not have the DEPTH of knowledge that you (and I! I for sure also) have on Ursula Nordstrom, could we (together, with our knowledge) flash a short greatest hits list of the books she ushered into the world, editorially?

MAC: Well, to quote myself, in the review I just wrote:

“Ursula Nordstrom edited an astonishing share of the 20th century’s best and most beloved children’s books: Goodnight Moon, Where the Wild Things Are, Charlotte’s Web, Harriet the Spy, The Giving Tree, Harold and the Purple Crayon, and works by John Steptoe, Tomi Ungerer, Syd Hoff, Ruth Krauss and Gwendolyn Brooks.”

I’ll just add, especially for the Looking at Picture Books reader, that she published Donald Crews’s first book too.

JON: Sheesh. The range there is wild, too. It’s not just a certain kind of picture book. It’s not just picture books.

How does the same person get a useful long view of a piece of work like Goodnight Moon and also give constructive notes to E.B. White about his novel?

MAC: Maybe another way to ask that is, what made Ursula Nordstrom great at her job?

JON: Hahaha yes I suppose another way is.

MAC: Well…

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Mac has a new picture book, The Future Book, illustrated by (who just launched Make Some Art, a newsletter with art projects for teachers, librarians, and parents to share with kids).

If you want a signed copy of The Future Book, you can order it from Mac’s beloved local bookshop, East Bay Booksellers.

Today, Shawn joins Jon and Mac to talk about making a book that is funny to read out loud. As usual, this conversation took place over text message.

SHAWN: Hi Mac.

JON: Hi Mac.

MAC: Hi Jon and Shawn.

JON: Hi Shawn.

SHAWN: Hi Jon.

MAC: OK, now that’s out of the way.

JON: Happy Book Release Week you guys. For your book.
OK so I feel privileged because I got to see this book in many birthing stages.

MAC: Weird.

SHAWN: It’s natural, Mac.

JON: Yeah. You’re gross.

MAC: I don’t like this new group dynamic.

JON: I’m like the weird guy in the waiting room at the hospital who insisted on being there too. We all know that guy right?

SHAWN: “I think he’s, like, my second cousin?”

MAC: “Let me know if anyone forgot to bring cigars.”
“Because I have a bunch of cigars.”

JON: “I got names too.”
“And fonts.”
(I really did have fonts.)

MAC: SEGUE

SHAWN: Wow, so that’s how you guys do it.

JON: OK, I guess we start with Mac. Cause he started it.
Mac what is this book?

MAC: This book is called The Future Book. The premise is pretty simple: that the book is from the future—sent from the past to teach us all what life will be like.

Writing it, I was really thinking about constructing a read-aloud. I love reading picture books out loud, and I wanted to create, essentially, a portable comedy routine, something that would give adults that great feeling of getting laughs at storytime.

JON: Yeah, the book feels to me like something only a road warrior like you could’ve done. Every single page is designed to elicit an audible reaction from a group of kids. Even really rowdy back-of-the-gym kids.

MAC: The goal of the first few pages was to quickly establish the premise and then introduce the game of the book (and get laughs along the way).

So the first spread declares, “This book is from the future. Lots of things are different here in the future.”

(That “here” was important to me, rooting this book—and its point of view— in the future.)

The second spread introduces a rule: names of things have been swapped in the future. So you get a pair of opposites, or almost opposites.

The second spread reinforces this pattern.

We now think we have a grip on how the future works. And so the third spread invites the audience to use that understand to fill in the blank. (Kids will usually answer the question posed on the recto out loud, before you turn the page.)

And then, when you turn the page, the book surprises us. Our guess is wrong, our assumptions are unreliable, we have more rules to learn.

JON: Mac’s a jerk.

SHAWN: This guy loves rules.

JON: “Oh you think you learned how things are?”

MAC: I really hate this new group dynamic.

JON: The visual rules are eased into here too, in the same way. The first page is just black text on blank white paper. And then literally planet earth.

MAC: Right, that blank page with text introduces the big conceit of the book as simply as possible. It’s declarative. And then on the recto, we get a circle, the earth. The next spread has circles that are the same size, in the same place, the sun and the moon. And then the next spread has two scenes, landscapes, but they are vignetted, contained in (larger) circles. The next spread is a full bleed illustration—we are finally, comfortably, in this world.

SHAWN: Yeah, the circles are doing the visual equivalent of your text, lulling the reader into accepting the patterns and rules.

MAC: And when you turn the page again, it’s a black page with white text. It feels like hitting a wall, or a trapdoor opening, which is what the joke is doing too.

JON: The label-maker idea. Was that way of separating the punchline written in the text direction or Shawn was that you?

MAC: That was Shawn.

SHAWN: I got a vintage Dymo label maker on eBay to make those!

MAC: A Berkeley, Calif., company!

JON: No wayyyy the labels are practical?? Dedication, everyone.

SHAWN: The labelmaker is chrome, and heavy.

MAC: It’s so heavy!

SHAWN: It’s like a Lincoln Towncar that makes labels.

JON: I think Towncars actually did make labels.
If you got that package.

I like how the labels on the first two things are actually ON the objects they are naming, so you teach that, and then after that you don’t have to do that anymore.

SHAWN: I wanted a real recognizable, almost cozy or quotidian way to label the stuff Mac is defining. A bunch of my job in this book is to help lull you into comfort and rhythm so that when Mac jerks the wheel, you really didn’t see it coming.

JON: Yeah and the labels, in your head, or I imagine out loud, read differently. It’s great cause they are the funny word, but the treatment makes you read them flat, which makes them even funnier.

SHAWN: I get to play the straight man next to Mac, which is RARELY my role in our dynamic.

JON: Let me tell you. The water is fine.

MAC: I think the labels also give the ridiculous words some weight, too.
The name-swapping is arbitrary and capricious, but these labels feel authoritative.

JON: Yeah, right. If you start making up nonsense words, there’s a risk that some of the tension is out after a while cause the kid is just like “well now you’re just saying whatever,” but if it’s on a label maker. A DYMO label maker, no less.

SHAWN: When the jar says “SOAP” everyone knows you don’t put nothin’ else in there!

JON: I’ve never seen a jar of soap in my life but I trust this.

MAC: When Shawn finished the book, he immediately set to labeling all his soap jars.

JON: “No severed heads in those!”
“Nothin’ but soap in here boss.”
“DAMN”

MAC: “And here I thought we’d finally found the DYMO Killer.”
“Who uses the famously heavy DYMO (a Berkeley, Calif. company) Labelwriter as a murder weapon.”

JON: Was that the approach more or less for the illustrations generally? You’re playing it pretty straight right? In terms of facial expressions and stylistic things.

SHAWN: Yes. But! I used a medium I have never used before so everything is still loose without looking wacky or anything.

JON: Man, loose without wacky is the holy grail.

SHAWN: I was really trying to paint a crowd. I just am not a master gouache/watercolor artist like, say, .

JON: I think she uses gouache to make the rest of us mad. She probably doesn’t even like it.

But the interesting thing is that Mac is also playing it straight. His tone is just reporting, right?

MAC: Yeah, the narrator from the future thinks this stuff is all normal—and that we, the readers, are the weird ones.

JON: Besides teaching how the book is meant to be read, and how the joke initially works, the other thing those first few pages do is teach how similar a lot still is in the future. Seeing planet earth you’re like “OK phew, still there I guess.”

SHAWN: Yeah, we’re just interested in words, really.

MAC: Yeah, that’s the Big Underlying Joke of the book, but also maybe the hopeful and profound thing too: in the future, language has changed, and etiquette has changed, but people still shop and thank each other and eat together.

SHAWN: Not apples though.

JON: Maybe it’s because I see you guys in front of crowds of kids so often that I feel this way about this book, but it does feel like watching a really great tightrope walk. Like you take these first steps so carefully, and then you start to dance up there, you’re pulling tricks, and the pacing gets riskier and riskier, you could fall on your face at any moment, but of course you don’t, of course it actually kind of flies into outer space instead. Of course it’s great.

MAC: We really wanted to take good care of both the audience and the adult reading this book out loud.

JON: Yeah whoever gets to read it out loud is gonna feel very smart and funny.

SHAWN: I’m glad it feels like we flew into outer space, because, really, the wildest thing that happened was us putting a fish where it usually is not.

Our post about the different published versions of Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? last week got us thinking about books we’ve done and how we would change them given the chance, and it brought to mind a book that we made and drastically changed pretty late in the process (though before it was published.) Sam & Dave Dig A Hole came out in 2014. It is the second book we made together, following up on 2012’s Extra Yarn. Sam & Dave, as it was originally conceived, had some very different things going on under the surface than its final version. Even though the text stayed more or less the same, Mac’s visual direction and Jon’s illustration work was quite different until pretty late into the making of it.

For example, here is the final, published version of this page:

And this is the same page from the other, earlier version:

It went on from there, into some pretty wild territory. We present the complete alternate version, along with a chat about it, and why we changed our minds, below.

As usual Mac and Jon had this discussion over text.

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Last week, Mac visited the Library of Congress and got to spend some time exploring their expansive picture book collection. Lucky for us, he took some classically Looking at Picture Books shots while there.

Here’s what he saw.

MAC: Hi Jon.

JON: Hi Mac.

MAC: Where are you right now, Jon?

JON: I’m sitting on a folding chair in the middle of a parking lot in Glassell Park, Los Angeles.

Where are you?

MAC: I am at Reagan National Airport in a lounge affiliated with a credit card company I will not name, because Looking at Picture Books is INDEPENDENT MEDIA.

JON: YEAH.

MAC: But yesterday I was at the Library of Congress.

JON: Right. And what did you see?

MAC: Well here is the thing, Jon. Earlier this week we were talking about Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? by Bill Martin Jr. and Eric Carle.

Because we had seen some people posting about the fact that there were two different editions, with two different sets of illustrations by Carle.

JON: Yeah. This had been making the rounds a bit, and there was much discussion about which one was seen as “better,” just in terms of the art itself.

MAC: Well, a perk of being the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature (💪) is that I get some opportunities to explore the collection of the Library of Congress and talk to all the experts who work there.

And weeks ago, I’d asked if I could see a copy of Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? the next time I visited (which was yesterday). And get this: Hannah Freece, as if she was listening into our phone conversations, which to be clear I do not think that she was, or even has the ability to do, pulled multiple editions of the book.

Not two.

But four!

Each one of them different!

JON: In both the writing AND the art!

MAC: Hannah pulled an edition from 1967, 1970, 1983, and 2010.

And yeah, the art and text work differently in each one. And in interesting ways.

Can we talk about the words first?

FOR ONCE?????

JON: I guess, since you took all the pictures and everything.

MAC: OK, so let’s look at the 1967 edition.

There are these italicized attributions in the text, or possibly instructions:

The children say:
“Brown Bear,
Brown Bear,
What do you see?”

The teacher replies:
“I see a redbird looking at me.”

The 1970 version drops the italicized attributions and the quotes.

Now let’s stipulate that there are many people who know more about the history of this book, and that some of them even read this Substack, so please tell us if we are wrong.

(We will definitely be wrong.)

But nevertheless it’s an interesting exercise to theorize about this change, even if we are wrong.

(Did I cover our tails?)

JON: (Only one way to find out.)

MAC: I will say that it really feels to me that in the 1967 version we are seeing how Bill Martin Jr. imagined this text being read out loud, with instructions to kids and teachers.

And that three years later, we are seeing a revision based on how the book was actually being used.

JON: Right. It’s kind of funny to picture the book being out, and him doing like a class visit with it, and then everyone reading everything out loud, including the instructions and he’s like “No...no wait...you’re sposta...right, though, I can see where you would think that you had to....crap. I have to make a phone call.”

MAC: Adults reading the italicized instructions out loud even though it disrupts the rhythm, kids not knowing their parts (the first sentence of the book for goodness sake!), even “ideal” readings being prefaced by lengthy explanatory sessions (”Listen up kids, you gotta memorize some stuff, FAST.”)

JON: (”This book has RULES. Fun right?”)

MAC: Yeah, so the 1970 version feels road tested to me.

There’s another big change, too.

Let’s look at the second spread of each. The 1967 redbird:

And the 1970 redbird:

The page turns work differently!

In 1967 we get the question on the verso and the answer of the recto.

So we know the duck is coming before we turn the page.

In 1970, we get the question on the recto and have to turn the page to find out what the animal sees.

The suspense of the unanswered question propels the page turn.

JON: There is still suspense in the 1967 one, but the suspense is left to the illustration. When the red bird says: “I see a yellow duck looking at me,” the suspense is: “Man, I cannot wait to see this yellow duck.”

And then there he is.

Yellow as all get-out.

Which is satisfying.

MAC: Yes that’s a good point.

Do you like either pagination better?

JON: Ummm, predictably I’m interested in the illustration paying off the suspense I guess. Cause the other way, when you’re finding out both things on the new page, it’s kind of a double beat, right?

MAC: I prefer the 1970.

JON: If you didn’t know what animal was coming next, you’d turn the page, SEE a yellow duck, and then read “I see a yellow duck” and by then you’re like, “Yeah I know.”

“I saw him.”

MAC: So you like the 1967?

You prefer: “Wait for it, there’s going to be a yellow duck.”

PAGE TURN.

JON: Yeah.

MAC: “Wow that duck is yellow.”

All right should we look at two ducks next to each other?

A question I know you’re always ready to say yes to.

No matter the context.

JON: Bring on the ducks.

My epitaph.

JON: The other reason the 1967 works better for me is that we’re asking the duck a question on his page and he is answering.

The other way, we’re still listening to the animal from the previous page.

Which, I guess, has it’s own kind of interest.

But I want to talk to the duck!

MAC: I like the voice of the redbird being carried in the wind to me from the previous page.

“Ah yes, the redbird, I hear him back there. I remember him.”

JON: Yeah. It does work. It’s neatly laid out that, left to right we haven’t “hit” the duck yet.

We’re about to hit it.

MAC: “He was my friend.”

“My best friend.”

“At least until I met this duck.”

JON: It is, undoubtedly, an upgrade.

MAC: It’s wild that both these ways work.

Because they are two completely different games.

I would argue two completely different books.

JON: On this newsletter and it’s weird obsessive way of looking at these things, yes.

MAC: Yeah only on this newsletter.

If I was talking to a guy in a bar about this I wouldn’t say that.

Because he would have already started looking at his phone 15 minutes ago.

JON:

But none of this means we wouldn’t love to hear about what Bill Martin Jr. really was going through here.

Cause he was going through something.

MAC: Do you want to compare the ducks?

JON: Well yeah, that’s the other thing. Carle is ALSO going through it.

In between these two editions, we have found out, was The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

Carle had found the way of generating his artwork that would stay with him, more or less, for the rest of his life.

And he (obviously) liked it better than what he’d been doing before.

MAC: We found that out using the deep research technique of “looking at years.”

JON: “Comparing year numbers,” I like to say.

MAC: Deep.

So the 1967 animals are B.C.

(Before Caterpillar.)

JON: (Yes.)

(Trying to make “A.D” work but I’m sitting in a parking lot and it’s distracting.)

MAC: (I was also trying to do that.)

(Did you come up with anything you decided not to type?)

(Because I did.)

JON: (Oh yeah a bunch.)

What’s interesting to do, though, is compare these two looks of Carle’s and try to stay objective. A lot of people I’ve talked to about this prefer the B.C look.

And I kind of do, too.

But BUT—

It’s very hard to do this with perspective. Cause the later look — the A.D. look — is so ubiquitous, that of course it’s exciting to see the older one. Besides being so good at texture, Carle was INSANELY good at laying out a page, and those are two different skills. The more opaque 1967 style shows that second skill off so much. All of his use of positive and negative space is on display in those ones, with no texture to pull attention from it.

MAC: Also, the 1970 edition has a couple of new animals, animals that then get removed from later editions.

The mouse:

and the pink elephant:

The pink elephant, I think, steps on the blue horse story beat and I see why he gets axed later.

That mouse is really something though.

JON: Yeah. It is sad to see him go.

Another thing to wonder about all this: was one of them, either Carle or Martin Jr., the one prompting these updates? Did Bill do the afore-envisioned class visit and call Eric Carle from a school payphone and say, “We’re gonna go back in and change some stuff FYI,” and Carle said, “Oh sweet, I just changed my whole style so while we’re in there let me redo the pictures too?” Or was it the other way around, where the Caterpillar book just took off so fast, Carle liked how that art went so much that he called Bill and Bill was like, “Oh, sweet, that’s great news cause everyone’s out here reading the text the wrong way anyway.”

“Also I’ve developed a need for a mouse. Please add one in.”

MAC: “School payphone.”

Bill Martin bursts into the office, sweating.

“I’ve solved it! Madam, may I use your phone?”

The school secretary frowns and looks meaningfully at the payphone mounted to the wall.

JON: Bill looks at the payphone, then back at her and says, evenly, “You know, someday I’m going to be a big deal.”

MAC: “I’m sure, Mr. Martin Junior.”

JON: “It takes quarters, your highness.”

MAC: “Your highness junior.”

JON: They get married a year later.

MAC: Again, correct us in the comments if we have any of the details wrong.

JON: She probably subscribes.

MAC: OK, but get this!

The 1983 edition reverts to the 1967 art!

JON: Man, what was going on.

MAC: But now the mouse and pink elephant are gone.

JON: Maybe the first edition art sold real well and then the second edition not as much, at first, so the publisher blinked?

MAC: And it also reverts to the 1967 page turns.

But loses the italicized instructions.

But puts everything in quotes.

JON: I wonder, and, again, veterans sound off, if tweaks and changes like this WERE more common back then, it’s just that this is an especially conspicuous example? Were authors and illustrators just tweaking away back then?

MAC: There’s another big change.

The adult woman who wears glasses, previously a teacher, is, in this edition, a mother.

I wonder if this reflects a shift in the market toward retail, and away from schools and libraries, after Nixon axed Johnsonian school library funding.

I say to the man next to me at the bar, who hasn’t made eye contact with me for the last two hours.

JON:

Besides the two styles we have here, the more solid (1967 and 1983) and the more textural (1970), there is a third one, where the art is more opaque, but he’s doing like a shaded scribbly thing on it.

MAC: WAIT IS THERE A FOURTH ONE

JON:

MAC: HOW MANY ARE THERE?

JON:

I count four, there.

MAC: AAAAAAAAAAAH.

EVEN THE MAN AT THE BAR IS STARTING TO GET INTERESTED!

JON: Are there more??

MAC: That’s 4!

JON: I want that italicized one pretty bad.

MAC: Well I saw three yesterday at the library. The 1967, the 1970, 1983, and then the 2010, which I believe has been the standard for all editions since, though now we’re up to four and I’m starting to feel like Fox Mulder.

JON: This is the week for feeling like him for sure.

MAC: Here is a question for you, Jon.

Have you ever been tempted to change one of your books after it came out?

JON: Absolutely.

MAC: Me too.

JON: it’s very cathartic to see these guys getting to do it like this.

MAC: Yeah, I’m gonna do it now.

JON: Not even because I think it’s necessarily an improvement every time. I just like that they get to try things out.

There’s a rigor to these iterations that I admire a lot.

MAC: And a pride and confidence in the basic proposition of the book.

JON: Yeah, and it’s thrilling to watch them work. They know they’re onto something, and the basics are so boiled down, it must’ve been so fun to see what would happen when they changed it.

MAC: Is Brown Bear, Brown Bear the picture book equivalent of Leaves of Grass?

JON:

Special thanks to Hannah Freece, Jackie Colburn, Cait Miller, Mark Manivong, Peter Armenti, Anya Creightney, and Sasha Dowdy at the Library of Congress for making this visit possible.

This week, (by popular demand) Jon & Mac recommend six dinosaur books, including a paean to paleontology, a field guid by an unexpected picture book duo, and a comic classic with a heartbreaking last page.

Dinosaur Valley by Mitsuhiro Kurokawa

In Dinosaur Valley, you’ll find a lot of the famous dinosaurs doing their thing — roaring, fighting, chomping. But the book employs a clever device: It follows a family of Orodromeus, nobody’s favorite dinosaur. (Orodromeus fans, see you in the comments). A mother Orodromeus shepherds her hatchlings through the prehistoric world. Given that everybody wants to eat them, our main characters mostly hide and watch:

There’s a remarkable sequence near the end. First, a spread that shows the babies heading off to fend for themselves: “She taught them which dinosaurs were friendly and how to flee from those who weren’t. When they were old enough, the young dinosaurs left their mother to go off into the valley on their own.”

Turn the page, and there is a stunning two page wordless spread of a pterosaur gliding over the valley. And then: the same valley at night, viewed from the ground, millions of years later. The dinosaurs are long gone. There’s a huge triceratops skull in the foreground. It’s a home for rats.

—MAC

Read more

Make Believe comes out on May 5. If you’d like a signed copy, you can preorder from East Bay Booksellers.

Make believe. What a wonderful phrase for the active commitment we make to fiction. It’s most commonly used to describe the way kids play. A kind of wholehearted pretending in which a new world is simply spoken into existence: “Let’s play house. I’ll be the mom and you be the dad and Jeff is our dog. The table is our house and that rug is our giant swimming pool. We run a hot dog stand. These forks are hot dogs.” And just like that, it’s true. Identities change. Objects transform. The room rearranges. Reality is altered simply because everyone agrees to make themselves believe it is so.

Fiction is a kind of game, and reading is a way of playing. Each story comes with its own set of rules. Some of those rules are inherited from genre or the novelistic tradition. Others are local to the story. “In this story, animals can talk but no one can do magic.” “In this story, people do magic but animals can’t talk.” “In this story, aliens live undetected among us.” “In this story, the French Revolution never happened.” “In this story, everything that happens is something that could happen in the real world, but you have access to the main character’s thoughts.” “This story is told in unattributed dialogue — the whole thing is people talking, and to understand what’s going on, you have to figure out who’s saying what.” The reader must learn the rules and agree to them in order to play the game.

When we read, we make believe. We aren’t duped or ensorcelled. Deep down we decide. We make ourselves believe. We know the characters in stories aren’t real, but our feelings for them are. We know the things in the stories never happened, but we can’t wait to learn what happens next. It’s make-believe when adults take a photo in front of 221B Baker Street, the London address of Sherlock Holmes, which is marked by a plaque, installed in 1990, between 237 and 241. These people don’t care that Sherlock Holmes is a fake detective or that (and I’ve double-checked my math on this) 221 is not a number between 237 and 241. They’re making believe. So are the people who travel to Dublin on June 16 to follow the path through the city that Leopold Bloom takes in Ulysses. So is the reader who says, about the characters in a favorite series, “I feel like these people are my friends,” or the one who finishes a long novel and keeps saying sadly, “I’m just going to miss living in that world.”

So when adults read, we make believe too. It’s just kids are much better at it. For one thing, they’re more adept at learning new rules — and not just because it’s the way they play. It’s the way kids live. When you’re a child, every room you enter and every encounter you have is governed by a new and unspoken system of protocols that you must quickly divine. Mess up, and the results are disastrous: a tongue-lashing from Mom, or no dessert, or a week without video games. Dinner at home runs on one set of rules, dinner at a restaurant runs on another, and dinner at home with your mom’s new boyfriend runs on a different set altogether. You’ll be telling a story that would be perfectly fine to tell in the first two circumstances when you notice that your mother is glaring at you, horrified and furious: “We don’t tell that story in front of Kevin!” And in that moment you learn how to have dinner with Kevin — and a little bit about your mom and that story too. That’s what literary fiction is: It’s dinner with Kevin.

Children are perceptive, flexible, and open-minded. They have to be. Childhood is a long series of experiments — testing out hypotheses and making adjustments. It seems only right that so much of the best children’s literature is experimental too. Kids read without tightly held notions of what a story can or should be. An unconventional structure or new approach bothers them not a whit. It’s an adult who is much more likely to be bothered. Adults, when we come into contact with something we don’t understand, tend to push it away. Difficult art can make us feel stupid. Literature can be a challenge to our dearly prized sense of mastery, the stability intrinsic to the very concept of being a grown-up. “Grown,” past participle: We have grown up. We are finished growing. But kids are proudly unfinished.

And when they encounter a story that makes demands of the reader — a story that requires thought and feeling and imagination in order to be fully understood — kids do what they do so well, so many times each day: They bravely work to comprehend the new.

Some new (and old) links to comprehend:

• Mac is on tour for his new book, Rumpelstiltskin, with his friend . On Monday in Los Angeles they will be joined by Jon (Klassen.)

• The aforementioned Jon Klassen talked about his new board book last week on NPR’s All Things Considered, prompting some reflection on the power of children’s literature from host Andrew Limbong.

• Mac’s conversation with Jennifer Garner at the 92nd Street Y, with a surprise appearance from Jon Klassen, is now available to watch on Youtube.

• Deep dives on great picture books are here.

• We recommend picture books here.

• Read posts about the craft of making picture books here.

• The Looking at Picture Books Shop is here.

• If you’d like a signed copy of Rumpelstiltskin, you can order from Oakland’s own East Bay Booksellers, and Mac will sign it. Personalize it too, if you want. And if you order early enough, Carson Ellis will also sign it, when she rolls through town next week (while supplies last, etc.)

• Carson and Mac are on tour for their new book. Lots of the events are adults only, and in Los Angeles they will be joined by Jon (Klassen) (from Looking at Picture Books).

• Deep dives on great picture books are here.

• We recommend picture books here.

• Read posts about the craft of making picture books here.

• The Looking at Picture Books Shop is here.

This week, Jon sat down and interviewed Mac and , who has her own Substack, , about their upcoming picture book, Rumpelstiltskin. It’s the second release in Mac’s fairy tale retelling series with Scholastic. Jon did the first one, The Three Billy Goats Gruff.

The following conversation was had over (group) text.

JON: Hi Mac.

Hi Carson.

CARSON: Hi Jonny.

JON: MAC?

CARSON: HI MAC.

JON: This is what I have to deal with.

(This is actually more what Mac has to deal with.)

MAC: Hi Jon! Hi Carsie!

CARSON: Oh, he finally shows up.

JON: Next I’ll say congrats, truly, sincerely on this book. This book is an incredible book.

CARSON: Thanks! It was a joy to make.

JON: I admire the hell out of it.

CARSON: You know that means a lot coming from you, Jonny.

But tell us more!

JON: You know what’s cool is that probably our two books will sit next to each other, if they shelve them that way.

The goat book and this one.

CARSON: I know. I like that.
Friends forever.

MAC: Oh that’s true! Yeah, I like that too.
I guess maybe we should say that we three are friends, individually, but also, like, “as a trio,” and that we talk about picture books all the time.

CARSON: Yes, let’s say that.

JON: Wait do you want me to say it, as the host?
Or can we use that you said it.
Did we do it.

MAC: We did it.
I did it.

JON: RUMPELSTILSKIN

JON: Mac.

MAC: Yes, Jon.

JON: You were charged, initially, with writing, in your way, a number of fairy tales. Yours to choose.

Was this on the list from the start?

MAC: Yes! I was asked to write three fairy tales, and pretty quickly settled on this one.

JON: Was this a big story for you? Little you?

MAC: Yeah, it was always a favorite. It’s a really weird one. And full of evil and danger. It’s mysterious and funny and scary. There’s magic and life-and-death challenges and riddles and tricks. All little-me’s favorite fairy-tale stuff.

Carson said the other day that the story is full of villains, and I think that’s a great point.

CARSON: So many villains for one story!

MAC: It’s named after the villain!

Someone asked us over the weekend if we could think of any other stories named after the villain, and Carson and I were kind of flummoxed in the moment and couldn’t really come up with anything.

CARSON: I still can’t.

MAC: On the flight home I realized that it’s common in horror and monster stories.

JON: Oh yeah. Jaws.
The shark’s name was Jaws right.

CARSON: The Thing.

JON: Jaws the shark.

CARSON: The Blob.

MAC: The Babadook.

CARSON: Creature from the Black Lagoon. Or whatever that one is called.

JON: It’s also neat that its named after him but he doesn’t show up for a little while.

CARSON: Yeah, and you don’t know that’s his name until the very end.

JON: Right. First-time read must be wild.

CARSON: Like, WHAT IS A RUMPELSTILTSKIN?

JON: WHY IS THIS CALLED THAT IT SHOULD BE CALLED “THIS POOR GIRL.”

MAC: The Three Billy Goats Gruff has such a tidy structure. It’s lean.
You and I talked about it as, essentially, a joke.

JON: Yeah. A set piece. One bridge, two hills.
Rumpelstiltskin is so much harder.

MAC: There are many movements to it, and, I think in our version particularly, many moods.

CARSON: Yes, it’s what I loved about the manuscript. It’s funny, somber, scary.

MAC: Should we outline the sections maybe first?

CARSON: Sure, do it.

JON: Yeah I wanna see you do that.

MAC: There is the first bit, where the girl’s father sets in motion a dangerous set of challenges: his daughter must go to court and weave straw into gold.

This bit has a very classic fairy tale rule of three structure, where the girl is placed, over three nights, into three increasingly large rooms, with increasingly large piles of straw.

Like The Three Billy Goats Gruff, there’s this great visual premise, small, medium, and large.

And like The Three Billy Goats Gruff, the sequence culminates with something gigantic. Although in the goat book, we exaggerate the third goat’s size for laughs. The huge haystack, though, is a somber moment. It emphasizes the enormity of the girl’s predicament.

After the haystacks, there is a reprieve, a false ending. The ordeal is over, the girl has won.

Soon, though, Rumpelstiltskin returns to collect on his bargain, to take away the queen’s son. And, in a kind of mysterious moment, he relents, slightly, and agrees to a new bargain, which sets in motion a new game. The queen must guess his name.

JON: I thought you did a great carpentry job there.

The queen is crying because he’s back for her son.

Crying a lot.

And he’s like, annoyed that she’s crying so much.

CARSON: I think he’s annoyed that she is tugging on his heartstrings.

JON: He kind of agrees to it maybe out of a tiny bit of sympathy for a crying lady and also to just kind of make her stop crying in the moment.

CARSON: Like, he doesn’t want to feel bad but he does in spite of himself, and that’s annoying.

MAC: Yeah, and the deal he makes with her is wild: If he wins — if she is unable to guess his name — he doesn’t get anything that he hasn’t already won.

Feels like he should have gone double-or-nothing. Go for the second born.

CARSON: Maybe he’s a gambling addict.

MAC:

You know, a lot of times people describe the characters in fairy tales as psychologically flat, but that’s so often not true.

CARSON: Rumpelstiltskin has dimensions. More, ostensibly, than the protagonist.

MAC: These characters do strange things, and the story provides no interiority, so we are left to divine why they do these things. Which is actually psychologically quite rich.

JON: That is something you have both really pulled off here. Stylistically you both found an amazing balance between formal and informal, that allows all this emotional stuff to show, while looking and feeling like something much less expressive.

CARSON: Thanks, Jonny. If it feels formal it’s probably because I was thinking a lot about illustrations for 19th century fairy tales that I love by people like Edmund Dulac and Ivan Bilibin.

I like the way so many fairy tales are set in the Middle Ages, but they’re set in Middle Ages as imagined by Victorian people. The medieval world that we were introduced to as kids — that’s still swimming around in our heads — with princesses in those cone shaped headdresses with veils and turreted castles — is the really specific 19th century version of that time.

So I was conjuring that, like everyone has been since the 1800s.

It was hard to figure out a visual language that made sense for both the funny scenes, the scary scenes, and the really sad ones. There are a few really sad moments.

JON: Were there any outliers there? Like where you’d found a look that suited almost all the moments you wanted to show but some were trickier to fit?

Or did you even find yourself choosing moments that fit the look after a while? Like “that would be great to show but it wouldn’t fit what I want the overall book to do.”

CARSON: Yes, the name-guessing scenes — which are hilarious. I wasn’t sure if this serious, laborious way I was approaching the art made sense for those.

As for the second question, whether I find myself choosing moments that fit the look I’m going for — I am always doing that. It’s how I illustrate books.

JON: Hahaha cheers to that last thing.

CARSON: High five, Jonny.

MAC: Ooh, let me ask you this, Carson.

CARSON: Yessss.

MAC: So broadly, you’re illustrating in two modes here: there are full-color painted pieces and black-and-white drawings.

CARSON: Yup.

MAC: Talk about why you do that.

CARSON: I knew I wanted the art to be painted in color. I wanted it to look a little like the renaissance portraits and landscapes and tapestries that I love. I wanted to do a lot of research, to look at a lot of books — and then to funnel all that admiration and excitement into this book. My vision from the get go was laborious paintings.

JON: Hahaha two Carsons talking to each other about the book: “What if it’s like…a lot of work.” “Oooh yeah!” “Like, a LOT of work.” “YEAH.”

CARSON: But there were moments in the book where I just wanted a vignette to tell a smaller story that wouldn’t compete with the paintings. Something on a facing page. Initially these were also in color but they felt too heavy on the page.

I liked them a lot better as ink drawings. And I felt like I could be funnier in ink?

And this mix of black and white and paintings seemed fitting to me. Kind of classic.

JON: One of the moments you did it is my favorite spread in the book, both on the text and the illustration side.

But it’s not a funny one.

MAC: I know which one it’s going to be.

CARSON: I think I do too.

JON: It’s the one where she’s showing her baby around the woods and she finds her dad’s house.

MAC: Knew it.

CARSON: Me too.

JON: Look, I never promised to be unpredictable.

CARSON: You know that’s the moment in the story that made me want to illustrate the book.

JON: You both nailed it extremely hard.

It’s so full of restraint, from both of you, and just absolutely heartbreaking.

CARSON: I think it’s so beautiful. The way the story swings from funny to despondent to this super poignant moment.

MAC: Yeah, maybe we should walk through this section a little bit, and some of the choices here.

CARSON: Let’s do it.

JON: I had a thought, when you were talking about the sections.

MAC: OK.

JON: That this section is kind of the fourth one.

Or maybe the fifth?

But it’s after the false ending, and after the names.

CARSON: It’s like a weird somber moment out of time.

MAC: Right, we wrap up the names.
Two spreads of exhaustive name-guessing.

JON: If our brains are used to three tidy acts, we’re out at sea by now.

MAC: And the queen reaches this hopeless moment — she’s out of names.

JON: She’s hopeless, we’re hopeless.

MAC: She has three nights to guess his name, and at the end of night two, she has exhausted every name in the world.

It’s a desperate moment.

JON: Then it’s like a nocturnal dream.

CARSON: It is.

MAC: This next section is the one big thing I added, story-wise.

JON: Was there a particular thing you thought you wanted to enhance with it? Was it the dad in the window or did that take you by surprise in the writing of the section?

MAC: In the “original” version set down by the Grimms, the queen gets a report from one of her guards, who she has sent out to collect names, and who overhears Rumpelstiltskin singing in the forest.

But I wanted to send the queen into the forest herself.

CARSON: Because in the beginning you establish that she is a forest person. She loves the woods.

JON: Yeah. it shows, devastatingly, what a great mom she would be, and we’re reminded, even though she’s all fancy now, of who we met in that (second-favorite) spread where the dad is describing her to the king and Carson shows her ecstatically catching a frog.

MAC: I think the initial impulse was, this is her last night with her son.

CARSON: So sad.

JON: Right.

MAC: She wants to show him where she came from, and by extension where he comes from, hoping that he’ll remember when he is taken away from her.

And Jonny, you’re right. That moment outside her cottage was something I found in the writing.

JON: It feels found. In the best way.

MAC: I knew she would visit her house. That she would want to leave this huge castle and say look, this cottage is my home.

And then I was just thinking of her father, this man who completely failed her, who has ruined her life, and now has ruined her son’s life.

She would say, here is your grandfather.

But she would not let her grandfather meet her son.

JON: Like she would find the cottage on this walk, and then you as the writer are like, “Wait. No way. That guy doesn’t get to see them.”

CARSON: And he doesn’t. Which is satisfying. But anyone with a parent also understands the sorrow of that.

MAC: And it seemed important to me that we show him working away in there at the mill, alone.

JON: Yeah. This is what he’s got.

Nothin.

MAC: We had to see him punished, by which I mean living with the inevitable consequences of his actions.

Carson, you drew this scene three ways.

We might even be able to find those…

CARSON: Yeah, I have them here.

I first painted the miller’s cottage, and I didn’t like it because it felt like it drew too much attention from this somber moment in the forest.

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Last week, we recommended some picture books about transformation in preparation for this week’s deep dive on perhaps the most well-known kids’ book on metamorphosis.

If you’re interested in reading even more about the life and practice of Eric Carle, The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art has some great resources online.

As usual, Mac and Jon had this conversation over text.

MAC: Hi Jon.

JON: Hi Mac.

MAC: Today we’re looking at The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

JON: We are lucky guys.

MAC: Here is the cover:

JON: Still slaps.

MAC: Look at that caterpillar.
He’s a star.

OK, here is Carle’s first cover concept for the book that eventually became The Very Hungry Caterpillar: A Week with Willi Worm.

JON: Gotta say, I love this cover, too. With all my heart.

MAC: Yeah, before we get into anything else it’s important to say that this cover absolutely rips. Like when you hear, “Did you know Where the Wild Things Are used to be Where the Wild Horses Are?”

JON: Yeah but that was like a 2x12 trim and it really did sound kind of insane.

MAC: You’re like, “OK, Sendak was on his way somewhere.”

JON: “You gotta shake the dust off etc.”

MAC: And then you see this Willi and it’s like, “Can you believe that one of the most iconic picture book covers almost never existed, and could have been this cover, which would have also been an absolute hall-of-famer?”

JON: Yeah. I remember seeing it and then reading how it never was used and it’s like a diamond lying in the street that everyone just talks about. “You see that diamond lying on the sidewalk on 3rd? Been there for years. Anyway...”

MAC: Anyway, his editor, Ann Beneduce, nudged him toward making it about a caterpillar instead, which was clearly a good call.

JON: Her issue was the “worm” part right? That people don’t like them? Or that it’s an unappealing word?

MAC: Right.

MAC: “Worms aren’t selling.”

MAC: But it’s interesting to see what Carle changed and what he kept.
Look at Willi’s face:

JON: I love him so much.

I want more than a week with Willi.

MAC: For the cover of A Very Hungry Caterpillar, he loses the Willi.

JON: He loses naming him at all!
Steps have been taken already to distance the caterpillar from us.
And yet, what a guy, still.

MAC: Wait, hold on. Are you saying as a character design?

JON: Yes. Mainly the eyes.

MAC: Because this is a big thing I wanted to talk to you about!
Yes. The face.
The caterpillar has a bug face. Face-wise, he’s kind of remote.

JON: Yeah! Unreadable!

MAC: A movie executive would chomp on a cigar and say, “give him googly eyes.”

I am thinking of a particular movie executive, who told us if we wanted to make a show about the Shapes books, you had to make Circle pink.

JON: I remember.
We’d probably be typing this from our respective yachts if we’d done that.

MAC: But this caterpillar is one of the most beloved characters in children’s literature.

So why are we so attached to him? Some of it is what he does. His appetites.
But why is the character design so successful?
Because we don’t know about his appetites on the cover.

JON: Well we kind of do, because the title tells us about them.

MAC: Good point.
I forgot to read the words.

JON: Pretty clearly.

MAC: OK OK.

JON: With an emphasis, even.
A whole line just for “very.”

MAC: Well, I’ll say — and this is mostly just ass-covering — there’s a difference between being hungry and the kind of eating this caterpillar is about to do.

My theory is that our emotional connection to the caterpillar is based on color and shape, and not face.

JON: Yes. I think that was maybe a large part of Carle’s thesis actually. Or at least his preference. This cover is exuberant. It is the most explosively happy thing you’ve ever seen. It can barely contain itself against its constraints.
Carle is stoked.

MAC: Literally — he barely fits on the page.

JON: Yes.

JON: And the cover, or at least the title, does present a problem. He’s hungry — very hungry — so let’s see what happens there. But I think that emotionally capable eyes, or a face that you could read like Willi’s, would actually get in the way of what we’re feeling here. It would complicate it. The blankness of the eyes tells us that we’re actually not going to be hit too hard by this guy, emotionally. This book is going to be gentle that way.

MAC: OK, can I ask a possibly stupid question?

JON: I would say there are no stupid questions but that’s not true.

MAC: Is that his nose or his mouth?

JON: Oh I always thought nose. Doesn’t his mouth show up somewhere?
It’s like a snowman nose.

MAC: But what if it’s an open mouth, like he’s ’bout to chomp?
There is mouth inside, but I don’t think there’s nose inside.

JON: Hmmm.

MAC: I think the face is “cuter” if it’s a nose. But I’m leaning mouth!
Sound off in the comments, etc.

I like his little hairs.

JON: The hairs I think are really important!! They are crayon, or at least what looks like crayon. Kind of rough and waxy. Kids recognize those hairs. Carle was so generous like that. You recognize all of these things — the paper, the colors, the lines. It’s all stuff you’ve touched and made yourself by the time you’re old enough to see this book.

MAC: Which is not very old.
Carle explicitly thought of himself as a bookmaker for very young children.

JON: Carle was always zeroing in on how young kids made things. He used materials they would recognize, and even to a certain extent limited his way of using them to things they could do. Ripping paper, cutting kind of rough shapes.

It’s important to remember that he was mainly, before children’s books, a designer. I still think he’s one of the best designers in history. And a designer, at least the way I think about it, is often an “arranger” rather than someone who generates things from nothing.

Carle’s work is like: what if you use only what kids use to make a book, but you put that through one of the best designers to ever do it.

The tension between a hastily torn piece of paper against some super expert typesetting and planning is the excitement in so much of this, right from the cover, and all the way through. The spontaneous joy of when you first made anything put against the precision machinery of book production. Carle is what happens when you’re insanely good at both.

MAC: Speaking of which, before we move on from the cover, can we look at this bit?

That C overlapping with hairs. (Is it tangenting???)

JON: So badass.
Also the antenna just about to hit “by.”

MAC: In this book and in so much of Carle’s work there’s this tension between extremely fastidious, dare I say German, layouts and his exuberant and improvisational picture-making process.

JON: I think that was, all of it, kind of the point. Carle knew the value of all of that rigorous design. He’d studied and understood it, and also knows that a lot of it comes from the requirement to be clear and legible, both things that books for young readers ought to have. But once he’s done with that part he is also angry enough at all of it to throw some caterpillar hairs over top of it.

MAC: Let’s open the book.

JON: I guess.

MAC: The endpapers introduce hole-punching, which is both this book’s big formal innovation and also most of the plot.

JON: Right, but importantly, this is abstract. These shapes he’s punching holes in aren’t representative of anything literal.

MAC: And then the title page:

It’s all the holes! Arranged to make a solid ground plane.

JON: And what’s interesting is that this is still abstract. He’s having fun with the holes he’s just punched, but he’s kind of teaching here. This is how you’d run an art lesson. You start with messily painting a bunch of papers, no stakes, just having fun. Then you say, “ok now we get to punch holes in everything we did” — again, anyone can do it, super fun.
Then you say, “now what can we do with the holes we punched?” “Let’s put them into rows!”
And then once the dust has settled on all this, you would say, “ok, so now we know how to make shapes and punch holes out of them. What’s a story you can tell with that?”

He’s an amazing teacher.

MAC: Here’s the dedication page.

MAC: A smiling sun. It’s notable that this sun is the first character we meet on the interior because 1) we meet the sun before the caterpillar, 2) the sun has an expressive, anthropomorphic smiley face, the exact kind of friendly visage that Carle actually took away from his hero, and 3) when we turn the page and actually start the book...

It’s nighttime.

And we still haven’t met the caterpillar by the way! There’s just a little egg on a leaf.

ART PROCESS QUESTION FOR YOU, JON!

JON: I AM READY.

MAC: Is the egg a piece of white paper laid on top of the leaf, or is the white an absence where the light table is shining through.
What I’m getting at is, does the caterpillar also start as a hole in a piece of paper?

JON: It’s a good question.

MAC: Thank you.
I thought so, too.

JON: There are at least two things going on, I think. (If anyone familiar with Carle’s methods follows us on here, please sound off as much as you’re legally able.)
There is an overlap on a lot of the pages that suggests a backlit surface. Meaning, the paper pieces he’s using are somewhat translucent but the best way to show that is by backlighting them once they are arranged. I do this too sometimes, and it is such a fun effect.

What that means is that the lighter something appears in the final illustration, the fewer layers there are on it, and a hole in everything would read as white, which is, I think, what’s going on with the egg here.

However.

It appears that the moon is not achieved this way, that he or she is painted on with white paint.

That’s trickier than it sounds, because it would be hard to photograph both a backlit white hole and white painted moon at once. White paint on a backlit piece of paper wouldn’t read as white in a photograph.
So again, if anyone has info, inquiring Substackers would love to know.

MAC: I mean that’s cool but I am more interested in the egg.

JON: Sigh.

MAC: I just think it’s so great that in this book where the main visual motif is holes in paper, with a main character whose whole thing is putting holes in paper, that pushed at the outer boundaries of late ’60s industrial printers’ abilities to punch die-cut holes in paper, our hero begins as a hole in paper.
Probably.
Could be paint.
Doesn’t look like it though.
Looks like a lil cigarette burn.

JON: That’s probably what it is.
It was a different time.

MAC: OK the caterpillar finally showed up.
I’ll say another reason we get emotionally attached to this guy: there’s such an appealing sense of movement in his design.

JON: Yeah he’s not just a tube. He’s movin along.
I would’ve done tube for sure, to my detriment.

MAC: And the detriment of children all over the world.

JON: Those are the stakes.

MAC: The text supports the sense of this little guy on the move: “the warm sun came up and — pop! — out of the egg came a tiny and very hungry caterpillar.”
He pops right into the story.

Also interesting that he’s created by the sun.
We start with the moon, but that first spread is very still. The moon is looking on benevolently, but that whole spread feels like the moment before the moment.
And then the sun rises — an absolutely massive sun, whose rays cross the gutter, and the story begins.
The sky, rendered blue at night, is now just white space.

And look at the sun’s face.
Here it was on the title page:

JON: Little window-drawing happy face.

MAC: And now look at it:

JON: Yeah he’s got a lot more going on here.

MAC: And look at the caterpillar’s face:

JON: Impenetrable.

MAC: And yet I am already in love with this little guy!
From a distance.

JON: I mean, he doesn’t have a lot of room for emotion or range, but that’s a choice too.
He made him too small for any facial detail and his methods are too rough to allow for it, also. Everything’s too chunky for that kind of detail, so you don’t really go looking for it, as the viewer.
He’s just kind of down there all little and that’s enough.

MAC: No, I regret zooming in!

JON: Yeah you’re not sposta.

MAC: The storytelling is so efficient.
There’s that Vonnegut rule of writing: “Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.”
✅

All the caterpillar is is want.

JON: It’s a useful rule! It’s the kind of rule I used to go “phhh” at and then after eight drafts of a story that weren’t working I’d try it and go “oh.”

MAC: Spoken like a man who titled his first book I Want My Hat Back.
✅

JON: Look there’s a slight chance Kurt Vonnegut was on to something is all I’m saying.

MAC: We’ll be keeping an eye on his career!

JON: Kid’s got promise!
Can I talk about Eric Carle and the sun.

MAC: OK.

JON: OK.

In so many of his interviews, he is preoccupied with warmth. It seems to be mainly what he wanted to create. It almost feels like stories and characters and lessons were secondary to it, or maybe “in service of warmth’s creation” is a better way to put it.

When he was very young, his family moved from the US to Germany, where his mother was from. It was a hard move, and he got sent to school in a pretty harsh system. Whether he knew it when he started making books or whether it clarified later, a lot of what he wanted to do was simply make that time easier for kids.

There’s a quote of his from an interview where he says, “All my books are aimed at four-to-six year olds. That period when you leave home and go to school. Sometimes I feel I can nail it down to one day, that day when you leave the warmth and protection of home and go into the unknown. I just want to make that day a little bit easier.”

MAC: Well.

That word, warmth, feels like a skeleton key to so much of Carle’s work and this book in particular. Not just in the prominence of the sun, but in his use of color, the playful formal innovations, the joyful pictures of food, this bumbling and bouncing caterpillar.
It’s all very warm.

JON: Even that method we mentioned earlier, photographing paper over a light table. The effect is warm. You almost expect the pages to feel warm when you go to touch them.

MAC: Like a lot of great children’s writers, he’s got such a direct line to his own childhood. He says — “Sometimes I feel I can nail it down to one day, that day when you leave the warmth and protection of home and go into the unknown” — but you get the sense that really he means “I.”

(I said “you get the sense” but I guess I meant “I get the sense.”)

But yeah, Carle is clearly remembering a day, or at least a feeling, that he had when he was four.
And his impulse is to comfort the child in the unknown, to beam some warmth.

JON: Yeah. And he’s not doing this because he doesn’t have the capacity for darkness. He landed in Germany as the Nazis were coming to power. He was conscripted as a kid and forced to dig ditches for the army and saw Russian prisoners working alongside him executed. His dad was a German soldier captured and sent to a Soviet work camp and came back irreparably broken. This isn’t a guy who is like, “everything is sunshine so I’m going to paint sunshine.”
He’s seen the bottom.

And his move is to spend as much time as he can generating light. It’s worth noting that this came out in 1969. Where the Wild Things Are came out in 1963. Picture books were getting dark and complicated, at least in some areas, and had been for a while. It just wasn’t what Carle wanted to do with it. At least not that way.

There’s a really humbling honesty to it, I think. It acknowledges, somehow, the amount of time and space these books actually have in a kid’s day. He wants to make a gentle moment. He’s not out to change their lives, he knows the books don’t take very long to read. But as long as you’re in one of his books, he wants you to feel warm.

Anyway, this caterpillar is super hungry.

MAC: So here comes the big spread:

So this one spread is almost half the book. The story of The Very Hungry Caterpillar is told in 11 spreads, and five of those spreads are actually this one spread, which was at the time and I think still remains, a marvel of bookmaking.

I am going to try to explain the mechanics of how this works clearly and simply.
And almost certainly fail.

JON: Yeah good luck this thing is crazy.

MAC: Basically what we’re seeing here aren’t flaps. It is four successive pages trimmed short. Arranged this way, each trimmed page reveals a portion of the next page.

There are die-cuts: actual holes punched into the book.

The text teaches you that the hole is a place where the caterpillar has eaten through a piece of fruit. “On Monday he ate through one apple.” And then it beautifully prompts a page turn: “But he was still hungry.”

And then, and this really does feel like magic, what seemed to be one pear is two pears.
Each with holes.

On that narrow verso, the caterpillar emerges from apple.
And then by the time your eye crosses the gutter he’s already made it through two pears.
Then three plums, and so on.

This was an incredibly complex feat of bookmaking. The first run was printed in Japan because American printers couldn’t handle it.

Someone should do a dissertation about how the picture book has pushed innovations in industrial printing processes. Wanda Gág and typesetting, Carle’s caterpillar. Just be sure to thank Looking at Picture Books. And toss a QR code in that bibliography.

JON: We mentioned this a little before too, but worth reiterating that the contrast here is so effective. This is book production at an insanely complex level, and the design of everything that isn’t an illustrated element is done with elegance and precision. The typesetting is gorgeous, the hole die-cuts are perfect and round. Everything is machined and exact, and then on top of that is like, an orange that was done with a giant paintbrush and cut out with an X-Acto knife.

There’s both a reverence and an irreverence to it. There’s an irreverence to books generally here, I feel like. He’s cutting up and punching holes in a book. He’s not coming at picture books as hallowed ground.

MAC: It is also incredible that something so complicated to make is so elegant and intuitive to read.

JON: Yeah. This should be a mess, and yet every kid of every age gets it.

MAC: A lot of the time, playful formal stuff — flaps, gatefolds, moments when you turn a picture book sideways — can end up feeling intrusive or confusing to the reader.

You open up a big gatefold for some stunning climactic moment, and then before you move on and turn the page, you basically have to fold a map with a library full of kindergarteners looking on.

JON: “DON’T TOUCH IT. You’ll rip it. I have to do it.”

MAC: You get the feeling that the people making the book are having more fun than the people reading it.
Not the case here!

The kids’ book scholar Leonard Marcus has an interview where he asks Carle about this:

Q: You have also talked about wanting to make books that are also toys.

A: That impulse comes from the observation that up to a point a child is more tactile than verbal: holding hands, holding his or her bottle or rattle, and being held is what matters to them at first. School comes later, and with school comes sitting still and focusing on the words in books. So I thought there should be something between the warmth of being held and of holding on to a toy, and the more abstract experience of book learning. There should be a bridge between — and that is what I’ve tried to create in the form of a book with holes in it, for example, a book that is partly also a toy.

It is a toy you can read, and a book you can touch.

JON: The way a good toy teaches you how to play with it, what it’s supposed to do, that’s more the way this book progresses than a classical story. There is a story, it got off to a two-page start, but then it turns into a toy for a while.
It’s like a toy with story pathos.

MAC: Yeah. Carle is such a precise designer, and when he talks about making his books he tends to focus on process and form, but you can see in his answer up there (and in the books) that design and emotion are inextricable for him.

The publishing term for stuff like these holes and trimmed pages is “novelty.” A “novelty book.” But for Carle it is a way to impart “warmth of being held.”
Warmth again.
And this is a different interview from your warmth quote.

JON: Right.

MAC: And then we have the end.

JON: As he tells it, when his editor suggested “caterpillar” he immediately said “butterfly!”

It could be that, as a storyteller, he might not have had an ending on the Willi version that he loved. Like he might’ve had the cover, and the holes and the progression and everything, but maybe not an ending. Maybe Willi the worm just slept it off.

MAC: But the caterpillar transforms.
There’s a funny thing in one of the interviews about the cocoon.

JON: Yeah, I guess caterpillars technically go into a chrysalis?
Not a cocoon?

MAC: Yeah, and some people got mad about this. Unsurprisingly.
This kind of thing happens a lot in kids’ books. People have these hobbyhorses and they get really mad when they show up in a picture book.

The Chrysalis People.

JON: Here’s the quote: “When I was a small boy, my father would say ‘Eric, come out of your cocoon.’ He meant I should open up and be receptive to the world around me. For me, it would not sound right to say ‘Come out of your chrysalis,’ and so poetry won over science.”

Take that, Chrysalis People.

MAC: And we go from that cocoon to the final spread, an absolute smash of a two-pager:

Again, there’s so much emotion here, but most of it is coming from color and shape and even the butterfly’s placement on the page.

JON: It’s really great that this is the last page. No final spread with him flying away, smaller on the page. I’d have been tempted to do that. This is just this huge crescendo. Using all the colors of all the fruits and things that he ate. They are all mixed in and are all used here in this huge thing he’s become.

MAC: Can I say something though?
Something that’s probably stupid?

JON: I suspect you will regardless.

MAC: This was absolutely the right move. It is a spectacular ending, in the truest definitional sense of “spectacular.”

But — and this was also true when I was a kid — I miss the little caterpillar.

JON: It is extremely sad, which is complicated right, because you’re looking at this euphoric image.

MAC: Yeah, maybe Eric “Mr. Warmth” Carle would disagree, and this is just what happens when two guys like us read a book like this, but I think that this exuberant ending is also suffused with not a small amount of melancholy.
I suspect Carle felt it too, though.

He knew that he had a big, capacious, multivalent book, something whose meaning couldn’t be pinned down. There a quote from a great Guardian profile, where Carle recalls a librarian who told him what his book means:

Right after the Wall fell, I was signing books in the former East Germany and was invited by a group of young librarians to have lunch with them. One said the caterpillar is capitalist, he eats into every food one little bit and then the food rots away. Wasteful capitalist. Interesting. I think that if you’re indoctrinated, that’s how you will see it.

A good warning to all us readers, who are indoctrinated in our various ways.

JON: Yeah, it’s kind of what we love about the simplicity this audience and form can encourage. The actual message, to people who are inclined to look for one, is murky.

On the one hand we have this colorful, light-filled thing told in the gentlest tones and quotes from the man himself about how all he wants to do is make things a little easier for his audience on that first scary day. But this period he’s talking about, that hard, hard first day when you leave home, even if it goes as well as it can, is still a sad day. It’s the end of something. You won’t go back to that early special tender time.

I guess the moral is: don’t eat anything.
And never go to school.

We decided to list some books about changing, it being the new year, sort of. The feeling seemed timely. SO timely that our next deep dive post will be on a book that is glaringly absent on this list — Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar. So buckle up for that one, coming soon. Next week.

Anyway, here’s six picture books about transformation, including a stunningly designed object with wildly expensive production values, a book with a one-eyed knife-wielding cat, and a story by the picture book author who’s most influenced Mac’s work.

The Wonderful Egg by Dahlov Ipcar

Gosh these books are pretty. I’m so glad they’re getting published and printed so well, they really are amazing pieces of bookmaking. Ipcar was a multifacted artist who tackled a lot of different mediums and disciplines, but her picture book work is done with such deep knowledge of printing techniques and color separation and graphic design.

The hook here is great, too. It introduces us to dinosaur times generally, and then to the titular egg, but the question of the book is: What species is in there?

It then goes on to speculate and teach about the potential dinosaurs that might be in there.

It does this with a full range of dinosaurs, and by the end you’ve covered the hits but still haven’t found out what’s in the egg.

And then a nice twist:

After the story concludes, there’s two pages of extra dinosaur information. Mac has been pretty open about his disdain for back-matter, but man, when it looks this good maybe it’s not so bad.

—JON

Read more

This week, Mac and Jon discuss the craft of the board book series. They had the following conversation over text.

MAC: Hi Jon.

JON: Hi Mac

MAC: Jon, you have a new book out this week.

I don’t know why I’m telling you that.

JON: Given what you know of me, I’d say it’s actually not totally out of line to tell me that.

MAC: I did see that your “publication day” Instagram post was a day late.

JON: I was in the car with my whole family driving from YOUR town to my town on the day it came out.

MAC: Well your aggressive CAPS LOCKING is a great segue.
Because the new book is Your Truck, a board book that is a follow-up to the Your Places series. Your Island, Your Forest, Your Farm. Which I’m now hearing as YOUR Island, etc.

JON: “YOU have it, kid.”
“This island is nothin but trouble.”

MAC: I want to get into how you made this book, in a way that might be helpful for writers and anyone else who is interested in how board books are constructed, but first do you want me to do the hard sell?

I can do the hard sell for you.

JON: Given what you know of me, I think you’d better do the hard sell.

MAC: You can buy Your Truck wherever fine board books are sold, but we always recommend supporting your local independent bookshop, or even my local independent bookshop, East Bay Booksellers. They ship!

JON: Oh I could’ve done that.
I thought you meant like, say nice things about it.

MAC: Oh well that maybe will come up naturally.

JON: We can try.

MAC: All right, I want to talk about making a series.

You are somebody who likes things that come in sets, but I think that your excitement about sets comes first from a design perspective. Is that fair to say?

JON: Ummmm yes.
Or at least that’s the part that’s clearest first.

MAC: I’ve heard you many times get excited about how a series works as designed objects — the physical book.

You talk about how “your little guys” will look next to each other on a shelf.

JON: Yes.
That is what they are.

MAC: “This book may be called Your Truck, but it will always be my little guy.”

JON: And, if we’re honest, how they look on a shelf together will be most of their life in the house, right? You will read them, sometimes, but the pie chart of time “being read” and “looking handsome on the shelf” is pretty clear.

It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take the interior and the story and all that seriously, but we’re kind of in the business of story and furniture design.

I have this two-book series of mystery stories that S&S did a million years ago. I bought it before I even started doing books, I think. But I remember it knocking me out that they did it so both books would go together on the shelf.

You want to put them together so bad, and keep them there. Whenever we get a box set of board books for the kids, they just love assembling the set in its box. Little guys.

MAC: It’s satisfying to see the pattern, how they look next to each other in uniform.

And I’ve heard you start talking about trim size and covers and spine layouts very early in your writing process. My sense is that sometimes the narratives of later books in the series will still be sort of nebulous for you but the design will be clear. Yeah?

JON: Yeah, they will even prompt them.

I think writing in sets is actually a way for me to try and prompt more spontaneity than I come by naturally. Like, I’ll maybe have the first installment of a series fairly clear in my head, but only the general idea of the rest of them, but by then I’ll have some kind of structure that the first piece established, and within that I can feel a little freer to move around and get surprised. I find that really hard to do with a blank slate.

That’s how it was for the hat books. I Want My Hat Back wasn’t conceived of as the first in a set, but once the second one, This Is Not My Hat, looked like it was going to relate to it, a lot of the decisions were done in reaction to that first book. The value structure is flipped, the trim size is the same as the first, just turned on its side, the font is the same, etc. etc., and then the third book, We Found a Hat, was always a gradient cover in my head because we’d hit both extremes with the first two books. It was the only thing left to do, visually.

And that’s where you want to get to, so that you almost feel cornered into a decision by what’s come before, and you have to make it work.

MAC: So this is the great gift of a series — it creates a bunch of signifiers or rules. There are decisions you don’t have to make.

But it also gets to at least my anxiety about series —

Which is, when these patterns start exerting force on the actual mechanics of how the stories work, how do you make sure you’re not writing the same book over and over again???

JON: Right.

MAC: We’ve all seen this. Books that feel like they’re just being put through their paces.

There’s a hit book about a vacuum cleaner with a heart of gold.

JON: I’m in.

MAC: And then next year the sequel comes out, and it’s the same book but the vacuum cleaner is wearing a Santa hat.

JON: Easy on the Santa books, now.
But yeah.

Here’s a weird thing I’ve got with that.
I kind of like the risk of it. I have a suspicion that the worth of the thing isn’t in those beats that might be similar or even sometimes identical, book to book. I don’t know what the worth is exactly, but the fun part is, in a series — at least in this series — to see how many things you can repeat, book to book, and still make what, to you, seems like a worthwhile new thing that, by the way, would work if it’s the only one of the series the reader runs into.

Lotta commas in that one huh.

MAC: Well one way of writing any picture book story is to create a pattern, and then find ways to embellish or subvert that pattern once or twice — to surprise the reader without breaking the pattern.

Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? is a good example of this.
The blue horse in the middle, the kids at the end.

These things don’t break the rules of the book, but they change our understanding of what the rules of the book are.

And a series provides a similar opportunity to do that kind of repetition and variation across multiple books.

JON: I think with these, with the audience being much younger, it felt like I had more permission to repeat a pattern.

MAC: You alluded to this in your tardy Instagram post:
“[The Your Things books] do look similar and are even paced similarly as the Places books, but because these are centered around a singular object, they got more sentimental.”

So tell me how the Your Places books work, how they’re paced.

JON: Each book is a collection of guys, elements in a scene — rocks, trees, houses, etc. — introduced on the spread one at a time, and collected in a group, and when the grouping feels complete, the sun goes down and they all close their eyes and go to sleep and that’s the end.

MAC: Yeah, the Your Places books begin with accumulation. On each spread, a new object is introduced. There is some calibration — the objects are rearranged or complicated in some way. There’s a completion — the place has been ordered correctly. And then the sun sets and all the objects go to sleep.

That is a structure or rhythm that you’d inherited when you sat down to write Your Truck.

JON: Yes.

MAC: And you did some of that here, right?

MAC: You introduced readers to their truck.

MAC: They got to see some different trim options —
The same truck in blue or green.
The premium audio system, weather coating.

JON: That was a thing for sure. I remember when I was a kid, going to the Toronto Auto Show downtown, and seeing a Mazda Miata for the first time. I got a complimentary brochure and all the way home assembled my ideal Miata.

It was British Racing Green with a tan genuine leather interior.
Still my favorite color combo for a car.

MAC: And I will say, it’s a shame the timid attorneys over at Candlewick Legal nixed Your Miata.

JON: I think it had something to do with the tariffs.

MAC: The truck accumulates a bunch of cargo — too much cargo.

MAC: And then we get to the spreads that feel most particular to this book —

You talk about a specific aspect of the truck’s nature — it can go fast.

And then these spreads, the one that I imagine has people talking about crying in the comments of that Instagram post, the one you were a day late on:

MAC: These spreads are so moving. And they’re new to the Your Things books. These quiddity spreads, where you focus on the essential thingness of your subject.

JON: It’s kind of what you hope for in a series setup. I don’t really have any place else to go here. I have looked at colors, other guys he can carry. I’m out of options and I have like four pages left, if it’s going to be the same thickness as the other Places books.

But the Places books, in their better pages, feel like an adult talking to a child that they love, so once all my ways of avoiding emotion were used up, we get to have an emotion, in the text at least.

MAC: You mean, inherently there is emotion there, in the Places books? Because the voice is that of an adult creating or giving a world to a child?

JON: Yeah, I guess? Those books are about talking in the language of promises you are making, even imaginary ones. “Here is water, you’ll always have it. Here is a house, you can live in there.”

MAC: And, in these quiddity spreads, the Things books get more explicitly emotional, right?

JON: I think the symbolic stuff got harder to avoid when it was just one object. Why does my kid love cars and trucks? Those things take you places. They take you away. Don’t go away. Not yet anyway.

MAC: Right. Although of course you’re not just talking about what trucks do, you’re also talking about a kid going “far away from here,” which is pretty heavily freighted stuff, especially in a book that will often be read by parents to a new child.

And I will say too, Jon, you did a beautiful job calibrating the writing to be capacious enough to hold a lot of different kids’ (and adults’) feelings about going far away.

And stuff like “When you are ready to go” and “as you want” are very generous to young readers (and their sobbing parents), without feeling mechanical or mealy-mouthed.

The dog helps too.

JON: Well there’s who you want to be and are hoping to be as a parent, right. The kind that is like, “Off you go into the world! I trust you! Can’t wait to see what you do while I stay here!” And then there’s the thing you’re already feeling with an infant and can only assume gets bigger where it’s just “DON’T EVER LEAVE.”

MAC: Plus also, of course, “We’re just talking about a truck.”
“Why does Daddy cry when he watches the Bills play?”

JON: Hahaha yes, it’s important to do both things, hopefully. Dad is a mess on the rug and the kid is still thinking, “I wish the truck had stayed green.”

MAC: It’s a little miracle of a book, Jon. A little miracle anyone can own, and for under ten bucks.

JON: Thank you Mac. <3

• Emmet Otter’s Jug Band Christmas, the Jim Henson adaptation of Russell and Lillian Hoban’s (second-best) Christmas picture book, is up on YouTube — in 4:3, with Kermit the Frog’s intro and outro, important stuff to a certain kind of Muppet nut.

• Speaking of intros, here is David Bowie claiming he actually was the little boy in Raymond Briggs’s The Snowman. Explains a lot, actually!

• Need a delightful gift for a picture book lover or a devious prank gift for someone who hates picture books? Why not a gift subscription to Looking at Picture Books!

  Give a gift subscription

• In the latest issue of Mother Tongue Magazine, the illustrator Joana Avillez has a conversation with her mother, the artist Gwenn Thomas, about her great-grandmother Michael Strange’s long and complicated love affair with Margaret Wise Brown. There’s an excerpt on Instagram.

• Christian Robinson describes his process of starting a picture book, including storyboarding on post-it notes.

• In National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, when Rusty watches It’s a Wonderful Life on the couch, we can see a Where the Wild Things Are poster on the wall of the Griswold home.

  

  
  

In our book “How Does Santa Go Down The Chimney?”, the illustrations’ relationship to the text is somewhat fluid. Santa’s ability to hear the written text, his attitude towards it, and even whether the illustrations are meant to be showing a “real” or “hypothetical” thing happening, changes and evolves over the course of the book. This kind of maneuvering can be helpful in joke and just general storytelling, and we thought it would be fun and seasonally-appropriate to do a discussion (over text, as per usual) about it here.

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As usual, Jon and Mac had this conversation over text.

MAC: Hi Jon.

JON: Hi Mac.

MAC: So. I will ask you, Jon, a question that I want everyone reading to answer for themselves:

How big would you say the Grinch is?

Like how tall is he? Don’t overthink it. First impression.

JON: I would sayyyyy the size of a man.
Not a tall man or anything.

MAC: So, a man-sized Grinch.

JON: Yes.

MAC: I would’ve also said man-sized.
Like 5’8”.
Is what I would say.

JON: Yeah. 38 jacket. Size 9 shoes.

MAC: Roughly.

JON: It’s worth noting, he does live like a yeti.
Yetis are usually a lot bigger than men.

MAC: Right, there is an argument for a huge Grinch.

JON: Yeah.

MAC: Also he was played in a movie by Jim Carrey, who strikes me as tall.
I don’t know if he is tall, but he gives me that impression.

JON: Yeah but I don’t like to think about how the Grinch looked in that movie.

MAC: Google says Jim Carrey is 6’2”.

JON: Does it say what size jacket.
Google says Jim Carrey is probably a 42.

MAC: I was just reading that too.
Wow, Google has some pretty specific measurements for Jim Carrey.
Regardless.
I, again, like you, would’ve said man-sized.
That is, I would’ve said that, before I started thinking about it a bunch yesterday.

So. How the Grinch Stole Christmas, of course, is about the Grinch ruining Christmas for all the Whos in Whoville.

Or trying to ruin it.

Spoiler alert, he doesn’t.

JON: He learns.
Not to.

MAC: He learns, but I will say — and this is tangential to the main question, the question about how big is the Grinch — that Dr. Seuss does a really good job making sure the Grinch’s lesson-learning doesn’t seem simplistic or mawkish.

JON: Can I say something.

MAC: Is it about Grinch size or lesson-learning?

JON: Just about all of this.

MAC: OK.

JON: I don’t know if Dr. Seuss was the mastermind here that you are suggesting he is, vis-à-vis how big is the Grinch.

MAC: Hold on hold on hold on.

JON: Like, I don’t know if he was thinking about it.

MAC: HOLD ON.

Let me talk about the lesson learning real quick.

Here is the Grinch’s epiphany:

The “maybes” are so nice there. They really cut the sweetness.
The “perhaps” and “little bit” too.

JON: Right.

MAC: Also it should be noted that the next thing he does is bring back the presents. So Christmas is definitely partly about the presents.

The Whos, down in the corner, seem pretty stoked that the presents are returning.
And their food.

JON: Right. They were singing and stuff, but they were also looking around like, “I hope there are still presents.”
“And food.”

MAC: Well speaking of Whos, one question we can answer right now is:
How big is the Grinch compared to a Who?

And the answer is… pretty big!

JON: He’s like a man to a child, right?

MAC: Bigger, I’d say:

JON: Oh well that’s Cindy Lou, though. She’s like, notably small, in town.

MAC: Yeah, she’s famously “two.”
But here he is next to an adult Who.

JON: Right.
Right.

MAC: He’s giant. This goes to your yeti theory.

JON: Yeah! This is about yeti difference, right? Or Bigfoot, at least.

MAC: Yes.
But.
How big is a Who?

JON: Right.
Smaller than a man.

MAC: Jon.
Way smaller than a man.
To find out how big a Who is, we have to look at a book that came out in 1954, three years before How the Grinch Stole Christmas: Horton Hears a Who.

The Whos in Horton Hears a Who live on a speck of dust.

JON: !

MAC: They are invisible to the naked eye.

JON: Oh.
The same Whos?
Wait, they all live on that thing he’s looking at there?

MAC: Yes!
The book actually does something really funny.

This is how Horton initially imagines the Who he hears on the speck of dust.

But then a few pages later Horton thinks the guy might have a family, and he has to adjust his mental picture.

But a few pages later, the Who is like, “By the way, I’m the mayor of a city.”

JON: Oh man.

MAC: This is all on the speck!

So.

JON: Right.

MAC: The Grinch.

JON: Right.

MAC: He’s microscopic!

JON: I love how, this week, you have an “out of office” email auto-response because you’re too busy, and you’re just on your lawn, one-battle-after-anothering about this.

MAC: JON THE GRINCH IS LIKE GERM-SIZED.

JON:

MAC: My robe has stripes and it was made in Italy.
But I do wear it to the grocery store sometimes.

JON: I’d like to… rebut.

MAC: Oh, here we go.
Sure, go ahead and try.

JON: There are a few things.

MAC: Great.

JON: There are, in the drawings, trees.
Now.
I’ll be the first to admit that if you go north, the trees do get smaller.
They kind of look like miniature trees.
So maybe those are the trees we are seeing.
And the mountains and hills.
Maybe those too, to a man with a 38 chest size and size 9 shoes (sounds pretty handsome to me), would be small.

MAC: Invisible.
Microscopic.

JON: Right.
But also there’s Max.
The dog.

MAC: Well this is what freaks me out the most.
I’ve had to readjust my mental picture of the Grinch.
Like, reimagine what it would look like to chill with the Grinch.
And I’ve gotten there.
But realizing Max was maybe the size of a tardigrade?
That I could never pet Max?
That really rocked my world.
I had trouble with it, emotionally.

JON: Yeah. He’s already got kind of a bad deal.
At least up until the end of the book.

MAC: But, Jon, that’s not a rebuttal.
I’d just encourage you to sit with your discomfort.
I acknowledge that I’ve had a 24-hour head start getting used to this new reality.

JON: Yeah, you’re pretty far out into it.
I just cleared my search of “what jacket size is Jim Carrey” to ask “how many Dr. Seuss books are there Whos in?” which I think used up some extra water over at the data center to make sense of.

MAC: Worth it.

JON: For sure.
But it did say that it’s only those two books!
That’s all we have.

MAC: I have two rebuttals — one you haven’t thought of and one you’ve already mentioned but forgot about.
I’d like to air them, and then destroy them.

JON: Rebuttals to yourself or to me?

MAC: Rebuttals to myself.

JON:

Go off.

MAC: OK, earlier you asked, about the Horton Whos, “Are these the same Whos?”

And while no, they are not necessarily the same Whos, the morphological variation among Whos that would allow for a man-sized Grinch is biologically impossible, even in the topsy-turvy world of Dr. Seuss.

JON: I’d like to insert a hypothetical-but-believable image of him here saying, “You don’t know how crazy I can get, man.”

MAC: Another rebuttal (and this one I take more seriously than the ridiculous thing that you just said): Mt. Crumpit, where the Grinch takes all the toys and food, is three-thousand feet tall.

So at first it seems like the Whos and the Grinch are on the Imperial system.
But my rebuttal to this rebuttal is:
That’s Who-feet.

JON: Well also (I don’t know how you got me arguing your side here) this image could be like, on a plateau area. We aren’t seeing the full mountain.

MAC: Yeah, but if it was 3,000 human feet tall, think about how long it would take a germ-sized Grinch to climb it.

JON: Or poor Max to pull the sled!

MAC: Right. It’s completely implausible, Jon.
Try to take this seriously.

JON: I had a thought about Max.

MAC: I can’t stop thinking about Max.

JON: So in the Horton illustrations there’s like a Who-town, right?
In this book too.
There’s little things. Flags and typewriters. There are small Who things.

He didn’t draw one, but I would’ve been fine with a Who-sized dog in there.
Maybe he would’ve made a small addition to signal that he’s a Who-dog.
Some little antennae of his own.

If Max had had antennae (which would complicate his eventual reindeer horn visually, so that would’ve been stressful), would you be OK with that?

MAC: Well, technically he’s a Grinch-dog, Jon.
He doesn’t live with the Whos.
Max is of the Grinches.

JON: He might’ve been with the Whos, at one point. I always kind of thought the Grinch stole him.

MAC:

JON: Max is too nice!!
A Grinch-dog would be like a spiritual sidekick.
They would both be looking down the mountain, sneering.
Max knows, deep down, somehow, for reasons he has forgotten, that the Whos are correct.
He’s a Who.

MAC: My favorite part of the animated special is when the Grinch is describing how awful the Whos’ singing is, and it cuts back to Max and he’s just wistfully smiling. He loves Who-song.

JON: See??
Chuck Jones knew too.
Me and Chuck.

MAC: Well, since I’ve proved my point, I just want to say one more thing — something that tells us how little we really know about the Grinch.

JON: Hahahaha.
“Well I think my work here is done. This is all pretty airtight.”

MAC: Jon. Are you ready?
The Grinch is not even green!
Not in the book!

JON: He’s just see-through.
Or white!
Yeti white!!

MAC: The Grinch is not transparent, Jon.

JON: I corrected myself.

MAC: And although the book is printed in two colors, black and red, there is green on the cover, and Seuss didn’t use it to color in the Grinch.
You know who made the Grinch green?
Chuck Jones.

Almost ten years later, for the animated special.
He says he based it on the color of his rental car when he went to La Jolla to hang out with Dr. Seuss.

JON: Incredible.

Well. I think it’s safe to say nobody else was thinking about this today.
But that’s what we do here.

I think, if we’re stretching, there is something in this that points to what we do to stories, and how we think about them, and why details matter — or are important.

MAC: I don’t really understand why you’re trying to make this more profound than it already is.

What lesson did we maybe, maybe learn today, Jon?

JON: You’re right, we should just let this be its own thing.

MAC: Tiny Grinch.

JON: I’m tired.

Last year we recommended some Christmas books. It was fun, and it seemed to go well! So here are six more. Mac was complaining that, last year, Jon didn’t choose any actual Christmas books, just books that had snow in them, which made Mac look like a Dickensian caroler by contrast. But to be fair, one of Jon’s books last year WAS partially about The Nutcracker, and Mac’s idea of himself at Christmas IS a Dickensian Caroler. So this year Jon only chose one snow book and his other two are actually about the holiday at hand.

Let’s start with Mac’s first choice, a literal Christmas carol.

A Partridge in a Pear Tree by Ben Shahn

Published as a softcover in 1949 and reissued in the 60s by the Museum of Modern Art, A Partridge in a Pear Tree is a pretty straight-ahead adaptation of the carol, “The Twelve Days of Christmas.” Both the original printing and the MoMa edition are very pretty pieces of bookmaking, and the carol’s cumulative structure works well as a picture book.

But the main attraction is the art. Ben Shahn draws various kinds of birds. Ben Shahn draws many milkmaids. He draws leaping lords. That’s the pitch. It worked on me! Also, the hand-lettering is gorgeous. (Are you a “gold rings” or a “golden rings” person? I go “golden” and I’m glad Shahn agrees.)

I guess a lot of people find this carol annoying. I love it! In the last few years, it’s moved into my top five. But yeah, a caveat: if you hate this song, maybe don’t track down a copy of this book. Contrariwise, I’ve found it’s way more fun to sing “The Twelve Days of Christmas” than to listen to it, so maybe reading this book aloud will be a turning point for you. Plus Ben Shahn draws twelve ladies dancing...

—MAC

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And as always,

• Deep dives on great picture books are here.

• We recommend picture books here.

• *New Tag Alert* We explore the craft of picture books here.

• Mac will be in conversation with Jennifer Garner at the 92nd Street Y this Friday, 12/5, in New York. They’ll be talking about — you guessed it — picture books. This is an event for adults. If you can’t make it, you can buy a ticket to watch the livestream. Tickets here.

• The Looking at Picture Books Shop is here.