My world will be made up of two main buildings - McLaurin Hall, where the Department of Design is housed and where my office is, and the Rutledge Building, which houses the museum and most classrooms.
#artswinthrop #designwinthrop
Winthrop University - First Day of School!
Today I begin my new life as Associate Professor of Illustration at Winthrop University! I have a week-full of meetings, orientations, training, and even a convocation for which I will be wearing formal academic robes - I can't wait!
To prepare, I've been moving into my new office, wandering the buildings to figure out where everything is, and walking around this beautiful campus.
My world will be made up of two main buildings - McLaurin Hall, where the Department of Design is housed and where my office is, and the Rutledge Building, which houses the museum and most classrooms.
#artswinthrop #designwinthrop
My world will be made up of two main buildings - McLaurin Hall, where the Department of Design is housed and where my office is, and the Rutledge Building, which houses the museum and most classrooms.
#artswinthrop #designwinthrop
The Talliston House
Have you heard of The Talliston House? It was a regular council house in Essex, England that was transformed by its resident into a maze of themed gardens and rooms based on various mystical cultures. It took 25 years to bring to fruition, and now John Trevillian, it's creator, writes books with adventures that take place in and around the property. It's a magical adventure of a residence and a life. Jeff was recently featured on the SCBWI-UK Words and Pictures Blog - READ HERE. And learn more about the property itself at:
Friday Links List - 9 August 2019
From Brain Pickings: Toni Morrison on the Power of Language: Her Spectacular Nobel Acceptance Speech After Becoming the First African American Woman Awarded the Accolade: “We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”
From Slate: Toni Morrison Was So Much More Than a Novelist: As a critic, teacher, and editor, she carved out the space for a whole new kind of black writing.
From News-Press: Cape Coral poet Lee Bennett Hopkins dies at age 81 after prolific career in children's literature
From Brightly: The Surprising (and Scientifically Proven) Benefit of Reading to Toddlers
From Muddy Colors: Lightbox Expo: This September will see the launch of a new convention centered around the art and creators within the fields of Concept Art, Illustration, Animation, and Gaming. Begun by Bobby Chiu, a character designer and founder of Schoolism, and Jim Demonakos, founder of Emerald City Comic Con.
From Verily: Young Adult Fiction Worth Reading at Any Age: YA is just for teens? Think again.
From PW: Elliott Completes Purchase of B&N I'm not exactly sure what this is going to mean for big box book stores - let's hope it's good.
Fro SLJ: In Plain Sight: Supporting Students Who Are Homeless
From SLJ: Having Hard Conversations with Students, One Year After Parkland
From Wired: The Radical Transformation of the Textbook: Digital-first. Open source. Subscription. The way textbooks are bought and sold is changing—with serious implications for higher education.
From ChronicleVitae: OK, I Admit It: Productivity Is Overrated
From The Bookseller: PRH Children’s acquires Vincent’s Fairy Tales for Millennials See? I keep telling you they're coming back!
From We Grow Media: The Truth About Book Launches
From The Bookseller: Pearson hackers access thousands of student accounts
From ABC News: ‘Literary Lots’ spreads joy of reading in Cleveland neighborhood (video)
Molly Ruttan's I AM A THIEF!
What is a lie? Are there degrees of lying? When is it okay to tell a lie, and what would be a whopper of a lie? Abigail Rayner wrote a picture book to help us address these questions with young readers called I AM A THIEF! illustrated by Molly Ruttan. Molly stops by today to tell us more about it.
Molly: First, I want to thank you so much for having me on your blog! This is a brand new experience for me, and it is all very exciting. Your blog is wonderful — so full of such great information! I love the idea of Julia Patton’s Style Bible that you recently wrote about— I can’t wait to start my own! And I also can’t wait to get my hands on a copy of Merbaby’s Lullaby!
e: Aw - thanks, Molly!
Molly: I approach book projects in a couple of different ways, depending on whether I’m illustrating a story written by someone else, or if I’m working on one one of my own stories. For I AM A THIEF! I began by “finding” the main character, Eliza, because Abigail Rayner had written the story from Eliza’s perspective, in the first person. I say finding, because I believe characters in stories are alive, and they often have to participate in revealing themselves to you. In Eliza’s case, I drew many little portraits in my sketchbook until one character stood out.
One of many pages in my sketchbook looking for Eliza.
Exploring Mom
e: What was your path to publication?
Molly: My career as an illustrator got jump-started in 2015 when I won the Illustration Mentorship at the SCBWI Annual Summer Conference. Two years later I met my agent, Rachel Orr from Prospect Agency, at a local SCBWI event. At the time I was working on a book dummy that I had written and illustrated myself. I had started it in a class taught by Marla Frazee — a class I discovered while talking to friends at yet another local SCBWI event. Rachel Orr sold that book (THE STRAY, 2020) ridiculously quickly to Nancy Paulsen Books/Penguin Random House. Meanwhile, NorthSouth saw a postcard that I had illustrated as part of a Prospect Agency promotion, and inquired about I AM A THIEF. So, needless to say I have SCBWI to thank for providing the fertile ground from which I have been so fortunate to have sprung. I also wouldn’t be here without the support of my agent, my family, my friends, my writing group, my picture book club, my amazing critique group. And of course the people at NorthSouth and Nancy Paulsen Books for taking a chance with me!
e: Is there a unique or funny story behind the creation of this story?
Molly: Every time I work on a story -- especially when I get to the stage where I’m up to my eyeballs drawing it out -- the world around me starts to reflect the story. When I was drawing out a story that involved parrots, a huge flock of big tropical parrots flew in and landed in the tree outside my studio window one day. Another time when I was working on a book with bunnies, I went to a local garden and saw baby rabbits running around everywhere. I don’t even want to talk about what happened when I was drawing out a story that involved a UFO! :) In the case of I AM A THIEF, everywhere I went for many weeks, I saw people wearing black & white stripes, everywhere. Life seems to imitate art every time, and every time it amazes me.
e: What do you think makes an illustration magical, what I call "Heart Art” - the sort that makes a reader want to come back to look again and again?
Molly: Heart Art for me is art that has a WOW factor. Whether it be the technique, the message, the emotion, the medium, how it interplays with words, the composition, etc… any time I see art that stops me with a WOW, I feel like I am in a magical moment, and I want to go back and feel that again and again.
e: How do you advertise yourself?
Molly: I have a website, and I’m on social media. Prospect Agency (prospectagency.com) has several promotions a year, and my critique group “The Mulberries” (@hellomulberries) has just started a similar promotional schedule. For my upcoming author/illustrator book I’ve joined a social media debut group (#perfect2020PBs). I also pound the pavement with my portfolio any time I can get to New York.
e: What is your favorite or most challenging part of being a creator?
Molly: My favorite thing about creating books is also the most challenging thing for me. I LOVE figuring out how the story is going to flow over the pages— it’s like a puzzle, and I often become obsessed until I figure it out. It’s a mental challenge, and I love it. I also LOVE creating the characters; filling up my notebook with sketches & notes. One thing that surprised me the most about illustrating someone else’s story was how much I fell so deeply in love with the characters, as if I had birthed them myself! Finally, I LOVE creating the art. I spend long hours alone at my drawing table and at the computer. It’s a physical challenge. So, creating books is full of love, and also full of challenges, and I enjoy every step.
e: Is there something in particular about this story you hope readers will take away with them, perhaps something that isn’t immediately obvious?
Molly: One of the things I love about this story that may not be immediately obvious, is the truth that how you see yourself is really important and can really affect the kind of day you’re going to have, to put it mildly! When Eliza takes the stone, no one sees her do it. No one calls her a thief— she labels herself, and now she has to manage her way through her own identity crisis. I think in addition to talking about stealing, which is the obvious jumping point for this book, you could take away from this book a lesson on labeling yourself. I love how Abigail chose a stone to be the thing Eliza steals, so that her journey could go from a singular label, to realizing that she had many facets, like the stone.
e: What are you working on next or what would be your dream project?
Molly: I feel like I’m already working on my dream projects! Illustrating I AM A THIEF! was an incredible adventure, I learned so much and the people at NorthSouth are a joy to work with. My author/illustrator debut, which I mentioned earlier, is coming out in May of 2020 with Nancy Paulsen Books. It’s called THE STRAY, and I am so excited about it! I want to keep illustrating all kinds of books. I love illustrating picture books, and I’d also love to illustrate chapter book series. I have many ideas for my own books as well, and I’m looking forward to bringing those into the world. All of these will be dream projects for me! I feel very grateful to be doing what I love.
@mollyillo
#molly_ruttan
Molly: First, I want to thank you so much for having me on your blog! This is a brand new experience for me, and it is all very exciting. Your blog is wonderful — so full of such great information! I love the idea of Julia Patton’s Style Bible that you recently wrote about— I can’t wait to start my own! And I also can’t wait to get my hands on a copy of Merbaby’s Lullaby!
e: Aw - thanks, Molly!
Molly: I approach book projects in a couple of different ways, depending on whether I’m illustrating a story written by someone else, or if I’m working on one one of my own stories. For I AM A THIEF! I began by “finding” the main character, Eliza, because Abigail Rayner had written the story from Eliza’s perspective, in the first person. I say finding, because I believe characters in stories are alive, and they often have to participate in revealing themselves to you. In Eliza’s case, I drew many little portraits in my sketchbook until one character stood out.
One of many pages in my sketchbook looking for Eliza.
Exploring Mom
e: What was your path to publication?
Molly: My career as an illustrator got jump-started in 2015 when I won the Illustration Mentorship at the SCBWI Annual Summer Conference. Two years later I met my agent, Rachel Orr from Prospect Agency, at a local SCBWI event. At the time I was working on a book dummy that I had written and illustrated myself. I had started it in a class taught by Marla Frazee — a class I discovered while talking to friends at yet another local SCBWI event. Rachel Orr sold that book (THE STRAY, 2020) ridiculously quickly to Nancy Paulsen Books/Penguin Random House. Meanwhile, NorthSouth saw a postcard that I had illustrated as part of a Prospect Agency promotion, and inquired about I AM A THIEF. So, needless to say I have SCBWI to thank for providing the fertile ground from which I have been so fortunate to have sprung. I also wouldn’t be here without the support of my agent, my family, my friends, my writing group, my picture book club, my amazing critique group. And of course the people at NorthSouth and Nancy Paulsen Books for taking a chance with me!
e: Is there a unique or funny story behind the creation of this story?
Molly: Every time I work on a story -- especially when I get to the stage where I’m up to my eyeballs drawing it out -- the world around me starts to reflect the story. When I was drawing out a story that involved parrots, a huge flock of big tropical parrots flew in and landed in the tree outside my studio window one day. Another time when I was working on a book with bunnies, I went to a local garden and saw baby rabbits running around everywhere. I don’t even want to talk about what happened when I was drawing out a story that involved a UFO! :) In the case of I AM A THIEF, everywhere I went for many weeks, I saw people wearing black & white stripes, everywhere. Life seems to imitate art every time, and every time it amazes me.
e: What do you think makes an illustration magical, what I call "Heart Art” - the sort that makes a reader want to come back to look again and again?Molly: Heart Art for me is art that has a WOW factor. Whether it be the technique, the message, the emotion, the medium, how it interplays with words, the composition, etc… any time I see art that stops me with a WOW, I feel like I am in a magical moment, and I want to go back and feel that again and again.
e: How do you advertise yourself?
Molly: I have a website, and I’m on social media. Prospect Agency (prospectagency.com) has several promotions a year, and my critique group “The Mulberries” (@hellomulberries) has just started a similar promotional schedule. For my upcoming author/illustrator book I’ve joined a social media debut group (#perfect2020PBs). I also pound the pavement with my portfolio any time I can get to New York.
e: What is your favorite or most challenging part of being a creator?
Molly: My favorite thing about creating books is also the most challenging thing for me. I LOVE figuring out how the story is going to flow over the pages— it’s like a puzzle, and I often become obsessed until I figure it out. It’s a mental challenge, and I love it. I also LOVE creating the characters; filling up my notebook with sketches & notes. One thing that surprised me the most about illustrating someone else’s story was how much I fell so deeply in love with the characters, as if I had birthed them myself! Finally, I LOVE creating the art. I spend long hours alone at my drawing table and at the computer. It’s a physical challenge. So, creating books is full of love, and also full of challenges, and I enjoy every step.
e: Is there something in particular about this story you hope readers will take away with them, perhaps something that isn’t immediately obvious?
Molly: One of the things I love about this story that may not be immediately obvious, is the truth that how you see yourself is really important and can really affect the kind of day you’re going to have, to put it mildly! When Eliza takes the stone, no one sees her do it. No one calls her a thief— she labels herself, and now she has to manage her way through her own identity crisis. I think in addition to talking about stealing, which is the obvious jumping point for this book, you could take away from this book a lesson on labeling yourself. I love how Abigail chose a stone to be the thing Eliza steals, so that her journey could go from a singular label, to realizing that she had many facets, like the stone.
e: What are you working on next or what would be your dream project?
Molly: I feel like I’m already working on my dream projects! Illustrating I AM A THIEF! was an incredible adventure, I learned so much and the people at NorthSouth are a joy to work with. My author/illustrator debut, which I mentioned earlier, is coming out in May of 2020 with Nancy Paulsen Books. It’s called THE STRAY, and I am so excited about it! I want to keep illustrating all kinds of books. I love illustrating picture books, and I’d also love to illustrate chapter book series. I have many ideas for my own books as well, and I’m looking forward to bringing those into the world. All of these will be dream projects for me! I feel very grateful to be doing what I love.
@mollyillo
#molly_ruttan
The Art of Breakfast
As I'm working to wrap my head around the courses I'll be teaching this fall at Winthrop University, I'm meeting with current Professors and learning about all sorts of new-to-me resources. Case in point, Tom Garner turned me on to this awesome video about drawing from life - "The Art of Breakfast" a film about Danny Gregory." You don't have to be a fantastic artist to have fun with your daily life like this. Just grab a sketchbook, some pens and a watercolor kit and recreate the world that surrounds you! Click the image to watch on Youtube:
#artswinthrop #designwinthrop
#artswinthrop #designwinthrop
Coloring Page Tuesday - Stars!
If you use my coloring pages often, please...
Just love this one image? Consider a one-time donation...
CLICK HERE to sign up to receive alerts when a new coloring page is posted each week.
I create my coloring pages to draw your attention to my books! For instance...
my latest picture book, Crow Not Crow - written by New York Times Best-selling author Jane Yolen and Adam Stemple.
Kirkus calls it "a solid choice for introducing the hobby [birdwatching] to younger readers."
Also, A Bird on Water Street is now available in Chinese!
Rock Hill's Glencairn Garden
One of the things that sold me on moving to Rock Hill to teach at Winthrop University is the gorgeous Glencairn Garden. 
Can you see Stan all cooled off in this photo?
Can you see Stan all cooled off in this photo?
Civil Rights in Rock Hill
Rock Hill is famous for the Friendship Nine.
Meanwhile, the town is making a point to honor those who have had a positive impact on the town with a list of women and men, black and white, on the sidewalk called 'Freedom Walkway.' Happily, there's plenty of room for lots more names.
Downtown Rock Hill is obviously in the hands of some very forward-thinking people. It's one of the reasons I was interested in moving here. Not only is 'Old Town' - Main Street - adorable, there are bits of poetry scattered about...
Meanwhile, the town is making a point to honor those who have had a positive impact on the town with a list of women and men, black and white, on the sidewalk called 'Freedom Walkway.' Happily, there's plenty of room for lots more names.
Downtown Rock Hill is obviously in the hands of some very forward-thinking people. It's one of the reasons I was interested in moving here. Not only is 'Old Town' - Main Street - adorable, there are bits of poetry scattered about...
Lovely Rock Hill - Our New Home!
Stan pointed out that in Edinburgh, we lived in 'New Town' because it was built in the 1700s, while in Rock Hill, we live in 'Old Town' because it was built in the late 1800s. HA! I love the irony. No matter. We are so enjoying exploring our new home in South Carolina! To keep our footprint small, we live right on Main Street, overlooking sculptures made by Winthrop students...
Here's Stan with the fountain doing it's thing...
and the ampitheater itself. (I'm having to make myself spell theater instead of theatre - HA!)
Here's Stan with the fountain doing it's thing...
and the ampitheater itself. (I'm having to make myself spell theater instead of theatre - HA!)
Friday Links List - 2 August 2019
From Terri Windling's Myth and Moor: On the care and feeding of daemons
From The Guardian: Neil Gaiman and Chris Riddell on why we need libraries – an essay in pictures
For SCBWI Members: The last Bulletin is now available
From SLJs 100 Scope Notes: Books on Film: Dav Pilkey on Today
From Kidlit Artists: Children's Book Portfolio: Flow
From The Good News Network: New Research Says That Art Therapy Reduces Stress-Related Headaches By Up to 40% for Teenage Girls
From Chronicle Vitae: How To Make Your Teaching More Inclusive
From Chronicle Vitae: 3 Questions That Can Improve Your Teaching
From Tech Crunch: https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/01/this-free-ugly-font-is-made-from-hideously-gerrymandered-districts/
From Book Riot: What I Learned From Tracking My Toddler's Reading
From Book Riot: 50 Beautiful Sentences from Young Adult Books
From PW: The Most Anticipated Children's and YA Books of Fall 2019
From Brightly: The Best Children’s and YA Books of July 2019
From PW: Spring 2020 Children’s Sneak Previews
From SLJ: Tell Us Your Story: Have You Experienced Bigotry?
From SLJ: A Parent Says No to 'Malala' | Scales on Censorship
From SLJ: We Need Diverse Books Celebrates 5th Anniversary, Sets Agenda for Next Five Years
From Electric Lit: These Middle-Grade Novels Are Some of the Most Formally Innovative Works of Our Time
From EW: First look at Hulu's Looking For Alaska shows Miles and Alaska's first connection
From Lithub: On Breaking Down the Barrier Between YA and Adult Fiction What Makes a Novel "For Grown-Ups" Anyway?
Leonard Marcus' THE ABC OF IT: WHY CHILDREN'S BOOKS MATTER
Leonard Marcus is one of the leading commentors on children's literature and the children's book industry today, so I'm thrilled to have him visit once again (he's visited before) to talk about his lates accomplishment, the very important THE ABC OF IT: WHY CHILDREN'S BOOKS MATTER. He is kind enough to let me share the Introduction of the book for the very first time - so enjoy!
INTRODUCTION/The ABC of It
For 14 months starting in June of 2013, more than half a million visitors streamed through the main gallery of the New York Public Library to view an exhibition about the role that children's books play in world culture and our lives. A favorite childhood book will often leave a deep and lasting personal impression, but as adults we tend to shelve such memories alongside countless others as we go about the business of living. As the curator of The ABC of It: Why Children's Books Matter, my goal was to entice exhibition goers to look again at our first books as part of a larger and perhaps less familiar story: to consider children's books across time and national borders as reflections of the adult world's changing ideas about childhood; as carriers of a culture's hopes and dreams; and as expressions of a vibrant art form that is rarely as simple as it seems.
The realization that childhood literacy is a key to a better life is one of the modern world's signal achievements. Children's books have flourished wherever a rising middle class sought to provide for its children's future, and it is no great surprise that the West's first epicenter of children's-book publishing activity was the dynamic eighteenth-century city of London. (Less well known to Westerners is the comparable trade in illustrated books for young readers that developed independently, and at almost the same time, half way around the world in Edo, Japan--the sprawling commercial city now called Tokyo.) English philosopher John Locke helped set the stage when, in Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), his broadly influential guide to all aspects of child rearing, he detailed his plan for the ideal book for young readers. Locke's idea--that a children's book should be attractively illustrated, not over-long, and a pleasure rather than a chore to read--laid the groundwork for the literature we now take for granted. Within few decades' time, another visionary Londoner, John Newbery, had put Locke's template to the test as a pioneering publisher and bookseller in the commercial trade in children's books that has since grown into a global enterprise.
The story of children's literature's origins and coming of age is itself a tale with memorable characters and plot turns. There were the writers from Hans Christian Andersen and Lewis Carroll to E.B. White and Madeleine L'Engle who safeguarded a place for wonder in a world increasingly dominated by mechanistic styles of thought, and artists like Beatrix Potter and Maurice Sendak who devoted their extraordinary talents to revealing to children not only the exhilarating beauty of life but also its bracing intensity. There were philosophers like Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Johann Comenius, and John Dewey who as path-finding interpreters of the phenomenon of childhood inspired major strands of book-making and storytelling for the young. There were the librarians who devised rigorous standards for evaluating children's books and effective ways of putting good books into children's hands, and educators who proposed radically different ideas about what those good books should be like. There were the publishers who came to embrace juvenile publishing as a core activity after first having approached it, often warily, as a marginal obligation. And then too there were pioneering collectors of children's-book art, manuscripts, correspondence, and ephemera--the University of Minnesota's Dr. Irvin Kerlan being a superb example--without whose foresight and persistence much of this story would have been lost forever.
I am deeply grateful to the Kerlan Collection of the University of Minnesota's Andersen Library for giving renewed life to The ABC of It by merging the curatorial plan and gallery text I created for the New York Public Library with the university's own fabled collections. To cite just one of numerous illustrations of this alchemical collaboration, it is wonderful this time around to be able to demonstrate the shape-shifting influence of American progressive educators on the invention of books for children of the youngest ages by exhibiting original art from two of the seminal contributions to that genre: Goodnight Moon and A Hole Is to Dig.
The wish to provide children with books capable of inspiring a life-long love of reading is felt more keenly around the world today than at any time in the past. The value of regarding that literature in its totality, as both a rich repository of collective memory and powerful engine of cultural change, has accordingly never been greater either. These books have so much to say. Reading The ABC of It catalog, you may well catch yourself being unaccountably drawn back to pictures and words you thought you had outgrown long ago, only to realize, as Lloyd Alexander wisely observed: "On the level of high art, in their common efforts to express human truths, relationships, attitudes, and personal visions, children's literature and adult literature meet and sometimes merge, and we wonder then whether a given work is truly for children or truly for grown-ups. The answer, of course, is: for both."
--Leonard S. Marcus
For 14 months starting in June of 2013, more than half a million visitors streamed through the main gallery of the New York Public Library to view an exhibition about the role that children's books play in world culture and our lives. A favorite childhood book will often leave a deep and lasting personal impression, but as adults we tend to shelve such memories alongside countless others as we go about the business of living. As the curator of The ABC of It: Why Children's Books Matter, my goal was to entice exhibition goers to look again at our first books as part of a larger and perhaps less familiar story: to consider children's books across time and national borders as reflections of the adult world's changing ideas about childhood; as carriers of a culture's hopes and dreams; and as expressions of a vibrant art form that is rarely as simple as it seems.
The realization that childhood literacy is a key to a better life is one of the modern world's signal achievements. Children's books have flourished wherever a rising middle class sought to provide for its children's future, and it is no great surprise that the West's first epicenter of children's-book publishing activity was the dynamic eighteenth-century city of London. (Less well known to Westerners is the comparable trade in illustrated books for young readers that developed independently, and at almost the same time, half way around the world in Edo, Japan--the sprawling commercial city now called Tokyo.) English philosopher John Locke helped set the stage when, in Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), his broadly influential guide to all aspects of child rearing, he detailed his plan for the ideal book for young readers. Locke's idea--that a children's book should be attractively illustrated, not over-long, and a pleasure rather than a chore to read--laid the groundwork for the literature we now take for granted. Within few decades' time, another visionary Londoner, John Newbery, had put Locke's template to the test as a pioneering publisher and bookseller in the commercial trade in children's books that has since grown into a global enterprise.
The story of children's literature's origins and coming of age is itself a tale with memorable characters and plot turns. There were the writers from Hans Christian Andersen and Lewis Carroll to E.B. White and Madeleine L'Engle who safeguarded a place for wonder in a world increasingly dominated by mechanistic styles of thought, and artists like Beatrix Potter and Maurice Sendak who devoted their extraordinary talents to revealing to children not only the exhilarating beauty of life but also its bracing intensity. There were philosophers like Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Johann Comenius, and John Dewey who as path-finding interpreters of the phenomenon of childhood inspired major strands of book-making and storytelling for the young. There were the librarians who devised rigorous standards for evaluating children's books and effective ways of putting good books into children's hands, and educators who proposed radically different ideas about what those good books should be like. There were the publishers who came to embrace juvenile publishing as a core activity after first having approached it, often warily, as a marginal obligation. And then too there were pioneering collectors of children's-book art, manuscripts, correspondence, and ephemera--the University of Minnesota's Dr. Irvin Kerlan being a superb example--without whose foresight and persistence much of this story would have been lost forever.
I am deeply grateful to the Kerlan Collection of the University of Minnesota's Andersen Library for giving renewed life to The ABC of It by merging the curatorial plan and gallery text I created for the New York Public Library with the university's own fabled collections. To cite just one of numerous illustrations of this alchemical collaboration, it is wonderful this time around to be able to demonstrate the shape-shifting influence of American progressive educators on the invention of books for children of the youngest ages by exhibiting original art from two of the seminal contributions to that genre: Goodnight Moon and A Hole Is to Dig.
The wish to provide children with books capable of inspiring a life-long love of reading is felt more keenly around the world today than at any time in the past. The value of regarding that literature in its totality, as both a rich repository of collective memory and powerful engine of cultural change, has accordingly never been greater either. These books have so much to say. Reading The ABC of It catalog, you may well catch yourself being unaccountably drawn back to pictures and words you thought you had outgrown long ago, only to realize, as Lloyd Alexander wisely observed: "On the level of high art, in their common efforts to express human truths, relationships, attitudes, and personal visions, children's literature and adult literature meet and sometimes merge, and we wonder then whether a given work is truly for children or truly for grown-ups. The answer, of course, is: for both."
--Leonard S. Marcus
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