Children's Literature

Image and Maker, edited by Harold Darling and Peter Neumeyer, was recently stacked next to an annual of American illustrations in a New York City bookstore. Many styles, artists, and subjects from editorial and advertising illustration were packed into the annual, itself only one of a jostling crowd of such overviews. Image and Maker, by contrast, made its point by selectivity. Describing itself on the flyleaf as an annual "that dedicates itself to an eclectic consideration of the fine art of book illustration," it fulfilled this aim with a diverse and thoughtful collection of five articles that discussed children's book illustration and reproduced selected illustrations, tipped in.

The articles are simply written, with the most theoretical at the beginning. The first article, "How Picture Books Work" by Perry Nodelman, discusses what an effective illustrated book is and should be. Nodelman presents his opinion by comparing two versions of the fairy tale Snow White, one illustrated by Nancy Ekholm Burkert and the other by Trina Shart Hyman. Nodelman contends that the two books actually present quite different stories because of the illustrative style and the text/illustration relationship. His reference to Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are points out that this text/illustration relationship, or symbolic transformation, works well there since Sendak is both the author and the illustrator; he conceives and produces the book as a whole, not as a separate story and illustrations joined together.

The next article, "What Manner of Beast?" by Stephen Canham, essentially agrees with Nodelman's premise that different illustrative styles can determine the tone and believability of a fairy tale. Canham deals with the specific character representation of the Beast in Beauty and the Beast. Fourteen versions of the Beast are shown in [End Page 201] illustrations depicting various scenes of the fairy tale, and Canham is comprehensive in comparing varying aspects of the Beast's character in different versions. He feels that the more explicit the text description is of the Beast's characteristics, the less powerful is any visual depiction. There is less for the reader/viewer to imagine and less for the illustrator to envision.

"Luther Daniels Bradley: Guide to the Great Somewhere-or-Other," by Helen Borgens, is appropriately placed third as it addresses some of the questions raised by the first two articles. Bradley, an editorial cartoonist for the Chicago Daily News in the early 1900s, also illustrated and wrote two children's picture books which are discussed here. Borgens's article presents a biographical framework which helps to explain the context of Bradley's only two children's books. Like Sendak's, Bradley's books show a unique blend between words and pictures. The verbal descriptions are not overdone; they are enhanced by visually detailed pictures which fill in the gaps, so that there is a give-and-take between these two elements. Bradley has furthered this working relationship by lettering the text in his own refined calligraphic style.

There are no other illustrated versions of Bradley's books for comparison, for his books are not old familiar fairy tales but new stories dealing with real-life characters. These characters were his niece and nephews, and Bradley made up the stories from their dreams and imaginings, thus establishing a working literary relationship between real life and fantasy. The characters and animals are believable, but, as in a fairy tale, the situations playfully combine usually unrelated phenomena that make sense in a dream context.

Borgens feels that Bradley's books, as well as the individual illustrations, are well-conceived and composed. The dreamlike pictures are "matted" by transitional pictures both before and after. The transitional pictures are further "framed" by pictures of reality. These sequential images, reality-to-fantasy-to-reality, give the books a beginning, middle, and end. This is evident in the three pages of tipped-in color plates of Bradley's book, Our Indians. According to Borgens, each of Bradley's books is "essentially a 'picture' book in that one can glean...