Six Bunny Books
"I am going to become the most rascally rabbit anyone has ever seen."
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