A Family of Readers

by Roger Sutton

  At one preschool story hour at my public library, there was a baby, not quite a year old, being held by her mother. The story hour was for the baby’s older sibling; the baby was merely along for the ride. But as I read Baby Says to the children, the baby started echoing back the text as I was reading it. “Uh, oh.” “Uh, oh.” Everyone — the parents, day-care teachers, and other children — all began to listen, waiting for the baby to speak each line after I said it. The baby had suddenly become the book in an odd little play in which the boundary between literature and life had completely disappeared for everyone in the room.

  Design is an essential part of any picture book. It is the first aspect of a book that a reader judges. It is the framework for the text and illustration. It is the subtle weave of words and pictures that allows both to tell one seamless tale.

  And because good design is, by its very nature, nearly invisible in the final product, most people have no idea what design contributes to a picture book.

  My idea of what design contributes to a picture book pretty much starts and ends with my first sentence. So I asked Molly Leach (designer of The Stinky Cheese Man and Math Curse) and Lane Smith (illustrator of The Stinky Cheese Man and Math Curse) exactly what it is that design contributes to a picture book.

  The job of a designer, in its most basic form, is to pick the style, size, and color of type, maybe pick the kind of paper and size of the book, and arrange how the type and illustrations are to be displayed on the pages available. But Molly does so much more than that in our books. When she’s done, the design tells as much of the story as the text and illustrations do.

  Molly designs all kinds of things, from magazines to books to CD covers. She is asked to do elegant, bold, hip, or striking design (to name just a few styles). But the most important thing she does is to find the design appropriate for the piece. Business Week’s Mutual Fund Report is not the place for “zany.” The Stinky Cheese Man was not the place for “stuffy” or “quiet” design.

  When I wrote the stories in The Stinky Cheese Man, I wrote them with an ear for how they would sound when read aloud. My finished version of “The Really Ugly Duckling” looked like this:

  THE REALLY UGLY DUCKLING

  Once upon a time there was a mother duck and a father duck who had seven baby ducklings. Six of them were regular-looking ducklings. The seventh was a really ugly duckling.

  Everyone used to say, “What a nice-looking bunch of ducklings — all except that one. Boy, he’s really ugly.”

  The really ugly duckling heard these people, but he didn’t care. He knew that one day he would probably grow up to be a swan and be bigger and look better than anything in the pond.

  Well, as it turned out, he was just a really ugly duckling.

  And he grew up to be just a really ugly duck.

  The End.

  Which might explain why it got rejected by so many publishers. The final line, “And he grew up to be just a really ugly duck” looks a little harsh in its bare typewritten form.

  Lane illustrated a goofy little duck. He and Molly designed a page turn so the duckling grows into a bigger, goofier duck on the next page (working almost like a flip book). And then it was Molly who came up with the idea to have whatever words were on the text page expand to fill the space. The final punch-line sentence of the story, the transformation of the illustration, the turn of the page, and the blown-up type — text, illustration, and design — all combine to create one hilarious ending:

  Some people have described our books as “wacky” and “zany” and “anything goes.” I wouldn’t want to say they’re wrong, but I would like to suggest that they’re not exactly right. In order to create the humor and illusion of wacky/zany/anything goes, there has to be a reason for everything that goes. And this Law of Reasoned Zaniness applies just as inflexibly to design as it does to writing and illustrating.

  In The Stinky Cheese Man, Molly chose, for the entire book, a classic font (Bodoni) and used it in unusual ways (expanding, shrinking, melting) to emphasize the fact that these were classic fairy tales told in an unconventional way.

  The flexible font size also made it easier for Molly to break the text at any given point to give the punch lines of the tales more punch.

  The expanding text pushing the boundaries of the page says the book is bursting with stories.

  The Red Hen speaks in red type throughout (no other character speaks in color) to visually accentuate her annoying voice.

  I thought it would be funny if Jack’s never-ending tale in “Jack’s Story” ran right off the page.

  Molly showed me it would look funnier and more like Jack’s voice fading into the distance if the words got smaller and smaller:

  The type and edge of the Stinky Cheese Man illustration melts because he smells so bad:

  And every tale’s “Once upon a time” and “The End” are in color to highlight the fact that these are stock parts of a fairy tale. None of these details is specified by the text. They are design decisions that enhance and amplify each Fairly Stupid Tale.

  Don’t you suddenly feel like you’re reading a wedding announcement? You may not consciously know it, but when you pick up a book, you are reading its layout and typeface and color palette for clues about the story.

  Modern kids are even more demanding readers of these design clues than most adults. They have been raised since birth in the ever-more visually intense world of TV, movies, and video. They are more visually literate than generations before them — quicker and better able to read what design has to tell them. They deserve good design.

  Math Curse was an entirely different design challenge.

  I thought it would be funny to write about a kid’s day in which everything turns into a math problem. Lane thought it would be funny to paint the kid actually inside the nightmarish grip of the curse.

  We both thought it would be funny to ask Molly to make (8 pages of text and problems) + (19 paintings) + (1 copyright page) + (1 dedication page) = one 32-page book that looked kind of like a math book but not so much like a math book that it would be ugly and scare people away.

  Here is what a couple of problematical math text pages could have looked like:

  Here is a finished spread from Math Curse designed by Molly:

  A. The first design looks ugly.

  B. In the second design, Molly boxed problems and broke the text into sections like every ugly math book does, but she used a bold (Franklin Gothic) type clustered in funny tangencies (shifting blocks of copy) to enhance the frantic feel of the illustration.

  C. Molly also used bold colors and background tints in geometric shapes to give an overall playful feel.

  D. All of the above.

  If you answered “D,” multiply your Designer SAT score by your shoe size and continue on to the next section.

  When Molly, Lane, and I work on a book, I usually write the text and polish it with my editor first. Lane draws preliminary sketches. We decide what to keep, what to cut, how to order things. Then Lane and Molly fiddle with the design and illustration. With the three of us working in close collaboration, Molly, Lane, and I take the opportunity to play off one another’s ideas throughout the process. Words can be changed to accommodate design. Design can be juggled to allow a new illustration. Illustrations can be altered to fit a new story twist. We also get to use every last part of the book — price, flap copy, dedication, and copyright — to tell the story.

  In conclusion, I would just like to say the only thing that can be said, what you know I’m going to say, what I can’t help but say: design is an essential part of any picture book.

  ROGER SUTTON: How does it feel to realize that your work — Where the Wild Things Are in particular — is so much a part of popular culture?

  MAURICE SENDAK: I see that book almost entirely in personal terms: I think about what I was like at that time; I think about Ursula [Nordstrom, see here]. I do realize that Wild Things has permitted me to do all kinds of books that I pro
bably never would have done had it not been so popular. I think I took good advantage of that popularity to illustrate books that I passionately wanted to do without having to worry if they were commercial or not.

  RS: Do you ever feel like it gets in the way?

  MS: I know that when In the Night Kitchen came out, it was a disappointment to people because it had nothing to do with Wild Things. Why couldn’t I have just stayed put? The style was different; everything about it was different. The cartoons, the nakedness, everything seemed to be a rebuff of what I had “accomplished.” But I had Ursula, who would never have let me do another Wild Things. Never. Never. She never suggested it, to her immense credit. And then the other books were notorious in one way or another, but they’ve all finally settled in nicely, couched on top of Wild Things. When I first discussed Wild Things, Night Kitchen, and Outside Over There as a “triumvirate,” people said, “What’s he talking about?” But I always knew there’d be three. It was a triumvirate.

  RS: It seems as if those three books, in lots of different ways, are a kind of lens people can look through to understand you, your work as a whole.

  MS: Everything about me is in those three books. Over the longevity of a man’s life and work you get a sense of where his mind is, where his heart is, where his humor is, where his dread is. It’s the best thing you could ask, that this kind of understanding of an artist doesn’t happen posthumously. What more can you ask?

  RS: What was it like, then, at midlife, to have published Outside Over There, which you acknowledge as your capstone achievement?

  MS: Outside Over There was the most painful experience of my creative life. It was so hard, it caused me to have a breakdown. I didn’t think I could finish it. But at that point in my still-young life, I felt I had to solve this book; I had to plummet as far down deep into myself as I could. Herman Melville (my patron saint) called it excavation work. Wild Things was excavation work, but I got up and out in time, like a miner getting out just before the blast occurs. But I did not anticipate the horror of Outside Over There. It is my best work, Outside Over There. But I can take no pleasure in it.

  RS: What do you think happened?

  MS: I went in over my head. I fell off the ladder that goes down deep into the unconscious. Melville called it diving. You dive deep, and God help you. You might hit your head on something and never come up and nobody would even know you were missing. Or you will find some nugget that was worth the pain in your chest, the blindness, everything, and you’ll come up with it and that will be what you went down for. In other words, you either risk it or you sell out. I believe in the nth degree. I believe in going all the way and being ferociously honest, because otherwise it doesn’t work; it’s contaminated. Why would you bother?

  RS: Do you ever question yourself — “Can I go this far? Should I go this far?”

  MS: No. I see myself as a fairly weak person. I’ve gotten better with age. Age has really done well by me. It’s calmed the volcanoes down considerably. Age is a form of kindness we do ourselves. But I don’t feel like I’ve been misunderstood. Honestly, I don’t feel like my work is that important. I have no brilliant conceptual gift for drawing or any really exceptional gift for writing. My gift is a kind of intuitive sense that I think you would find in a musician — knowing what the music should sound like, knowing where to put your fingers. My talent is in knowing how to make a picture book. Knowing how to pace it, knowing how to time it.

  My work is miraculous in that it has kept me alive and kept me employed — constantly, since I’ve been about fifteen. I have to work; that’s who I am. I do it for me — it keeps me living, and it’s gotten me over the worst of my personal life into a period of time in which I look around carefully and can say, “It’s not so bad now.”

  I am fortunate in that I still have the privilege of spending so much time in the world of creating picture books, where I need to be. I don’t know why I need to be there, but that’s the joy of all this. The real mystery is, Why does this make me so happy? Why does this free me of every inhibition? Why does this allow me to be normal?

  RS: So the absorption in the creating is the actual reward.

  MS: Totally. In that period of time, I am stirred to the top of my last brain cell because I’m working. I am stirred into life by my labor.

  Despite frequent adult fears to the contrary, picture books featuring dark and dire monsters can indeed please small children. True, such books can seem frightening, and they often contain alarming images, disquieting texts, and threatening concepts. In Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, pointy-toothed monsters pack together and challenge a small boy one-third their size. Their abundant teeth and claws, combined with their roars, bespeak an ability to do harm; they even threaten to eat him up. In Ed Emberley’s Go Away, Big Green Monster!, a beast of repellent aspect stares out at the young viewer as its lurid features — most notably “a big red mouth with sharp white teeth” — cumulatively appear out of the inky blackness. Both of these books, each in its own way, portray the alarming.

  What effects do such books have? Scary books may occasionally frighten some young readers. Many adults can recall a picture or a book that caused them real distress as children. Sendak tells of a woman whose child screamed, apparently not with delight, every time Wild Things was read to her. It is quite possible for some young readers or listeners to be moved to alarm by a book, just as they can be moved to joy or excitement or boredom.

  But most scary picture books don’t attempt, indiscriminately, to terrify youngsters. They also include elements that offer children tools to control fear.

  Appropriately enough for the genre, picture books most often demonstrate this control not through their texts but through their pictures. Children hear the words of picture books through an adult mediator; picture-book illustrations, on the other hand, they can decode for themselves. The use of visuals often stabilizes an experience for young children, fixes it, secures it, putting boundaries around the playing field of dangerous excitement in a way that makes it acceptable to them.

  Look at what the monsters in Wild Things do and, more important, how Max reacts. The wild things are fierce in physiognomy, but they never harm anyone: the wild thing on the cover, usually the first one a reader sees, dozes peacefully, and the ones on the title page quail before a fierce and confident Max. While Max’s facial expression is somewhat unsure as he sails past the first sea monster, on the next double-page spread he looks on displeased and uncowed as the wild things are at their most ferocious. Sendak’s trademark crosshatching, the muted tones of the blues and grays, and the shifts in picture size from page to page emphasize the restraints upon the wildness of boy and thing. The illustrations make it continually clear that this child is more than a match for these wild things. Fierce as those creatures may look, most young viewers have little trouble understanding that Max is not in danger.

  Emberley’s Big Green Monster is an excellent example of the control a picture book can exercise over the emotions it excites. The monster is certainly spiky and alien, but it first appears on the cover of its book in what seems to be a quiet homage to Kilroy — the top half of its head, with eyes, ears, hair, and nose, peeks out over a yellow block that forms the background for the title lettering. The yellow block masks the monster’s most fearsome characteristics and gives it a slightly silly air that would probably tide an unsure child past the darker early pages of the book.

  The master stroke of Emberley’s book, however, lies in its physical structure, which hands the control over to the young picture-book reader. This monster carries with it the seeds of its own undoing; the reader creates the monster, page by page, accumulating new features as the die-cut pages allow pieces of the monster’s face to appear out of the darkness. But no sooner does it appear than it starts to disappear, each successive page turning a bold new color and reducing the monster, characteristic by characteristic, until it vanishes. As a four-year-old of my acquaintance pointed out when expla
ining why the book did not frighten her, “He’s not eating any guys.” For all its sharp teeth, the monster does nothing but is instead always being done to, responding to the beck and call of any child who encounters it.

  The most pervasive fear of protective adults seems to be fear itself. (One contemporaneous review of Wild Things observed, “We should not like to have it left about where a sensitive child might find it to pore over in the twilight.”) Yet learning to manage fear is a necessary step forward in any child’s life. Parents should decide how much their child is ready for, and when, but so-called scary picture books might be less frightening — and more helpful — than they first seem.

  Trying to figure out what makes a good alphabet book is like trying to determine what makes a good meal for a child. It’s a matter of taste as well as developmental maturity. A baby may be partial to mashed peas, a toddler to plain pasta, and a six-year-old might prefer the textural complexity of a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. The child who is still learning to recognize and name letters doesn’t want to be overwhelmed, while one who has mastered this trick is looking for a little more action and maybe even a bit of a challenge. Fortunately, there are alphabet books for every age and taste — hundreds, in fact, from the simplest name-the-letter books to those that present puzzles and challenges for older children and even adults. Alphabet books stopped being just for preschoolers and beginning readers long ago.