Monday, November 26, 2007

Vintage Children's Book Illustration Slide Show...

My co-worker Rachel (editor of Novel & Short Story Writer's Market) sent me a link to an interesting and wonderful little slide show on Slate featuring illustrations from the late-1800s up through the mid-20th century (including a Maurice Sendak illustration for The Hobbit). (You have to watch an ad if you're not a Slate subscriber, but it's kind of amusing.)

The illustrations featured (and I think the copy on the history of children's books as well) were culled from Timothy G. Young's Drawn to Enchant. The art in Young's book is from the collection of Betsy Beinecke Shirley. She left her extensive collection of books, original illustrations, manuscripts, and ephemera to the Library of Yale University. Young is the curator of the Betsy Beinecke Shirley Collection of American Children’s Literature.

3 comments:

Hope Vestergaard said...

I saw this slideshow, too. Loved it, but didn't love the use of Steve Martin as a venerable example of the tradition of rhyming alphabet books. His has been out for, what, five minutes? Shameless celebrity fawning alert! Since it's a slideshow about illustration, they could have just mentioned the illustrator, Roz Chast.

SCBWI said...

At least it wasn't Billy Crystal!

elizabeth said...

Thanks for sharing the slideshow, Alice! The early Wild Things drawing was especially interesting-- it's easy to think that a perfect book like that just fell from the artist's imagination straight onto the printed page, but turns out it went through stages of imperfection like any other creative work.

Have you seen the exhibit at the downtown Cincinnati library featuring original work by children's illustrators with local ties? (Loren Long, Will Hillenbrand, Jon J. Muth, Annie Ruth and a bunch more). It's fantastic-- you should check it out if you haven't yet!