The Charm of the Picture Book

It may be my imagination -- or my delusion -- but picture books for children (or intelligent adults) seem more often well-written, well-designed, and perfectly charming than today's fiction for grownups. I'd like to wave the flag for a few of my favorites. Head over to Border's, buy yourself a Starbuck's with a shot of vanilla, and plop yourself Indian-style on the floor in the children's book section for awhile. It's a real stress-buster.

Alternating between simple color schemes and yellow and white with black outlining, Madeline's Rescue, by Ludwig Bemelmans, creates juxtaposing moods of straight-laced order and ebullient chaos. Charming scenes of Parisian cobblestoned streets and busy markets, in which the young girls march behind their headmistress (Miss Clavel), in rank and file, contrast with much simpler ink lines in pictures depicting unrest or disorder: for example, a visually "messy" pillow fight and an anxiety-ridden Miss Clavel, who "for a second time that night turned on her light." Here the outline becomes shaky and rapid, and the black and yellow filler is applied boldly. Worth noting, too, is the use of linear perspective: greater size in the foreground receding to a single point. My own favorite scenes are the marvelous illustrations of Miss Clavel running along the hall, her body nearly parallel to the floor, and the stiff upper-lip of Lord Cucuface.

Arrow to the Sun, by Gerald McDermott, is a glorious evocation of the geometric shapes of Pueblo pottery, basketry, and weaving. The colors are southwestern: black, yellow, and shades of ocher, red, and orange, which are especially appropriate to this tale of "the Lord of the Sun." Figures and dwellings are represented with highly stylized and exotic patterns. A vivid surprise is the sudden use of fluorescent pink, blue, and green for the lord and his four chambers of ceremony and the Dance of Life. A beautiful book.

Marcia Brown, in Once a Mouse. . . , uses carved blocks of wood as stamps, dipped in auburn, red, and olive-green, and applied to the paper, sometimes superimposing one image upon another, to create vibrant scenes of jungle life. Her method gives the snakes in the grass and the twigs in the shrubs a transparency; we can see right through the snake and into the tiger's belly! Speaking of the tiger, it is a joyous rendering: The beast is given enormous personality in its frowning, grumpy face and the cat-like twist of its tail and haunches.

Lynd Ward's work in The Biggest Bear contains some of the most humorous depictions of animal naughtiness in any picture book. The famous succession of images in the middle of the story -- first, a small boy feeding an even smaller bear cub, followed by four scenes of mischief (but no bear!), and culminating in a huge fanged and clawed grizzly in the maple syrup -- is deservedly celebrated. Other classic images: the bear's grinning, not-too-bright face above those of the hogs, and the wooden rowboat holding the boy in one end and this enormous but well-behaved shaggy beast in the other, slowly sinking.

Maurice Sendak's Outside Over There is, I believe, the hugely popular illustrator's finest visual achievement, aside from his longer Nutcracker. These splendid water-and-pastel works of art resemble sixteenth century Mannerist painting (note the spectral cloak which Ida is wrapped in, like a figure in El Greco). Sendak's illustrations here are adapted in style to fit the tale, which, like Nutcracker, is filled with much of the weird, shadowy tone and style of the great German Romantic storyteller and critic, E. T. A. Hoffmann. Sendak's other idol, Mozart, is represented also; we see his bust atop the pianoforte in a little cottage on the banks of a brook. Ida's baby sister, who is being carried home from her odd adventure, gazes over her sister's shoulder at the smiling, august plaster head.