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Article Excerpt
Beatrix Potter had her watercolors at hand. But first came the words. And the way words and pictures dovetailed made picture book history.
Once upon a time there were four little Rabbits, and their names were--
Flopsy, Mopsy, Cotton-tail, and Peter. They lived with their Mother in a sand-bank, underneath the root of a very big fir-tree.
And there, in the picture opposite, are the sand-bank and the base of the fir tree. There are the four little rabbits, scampering in and out among the roots. There in front is Mrs. Rabbit, properly plump and prepossessing.
"Now, my dears," said old Mrs. Rabbit one morning, "you may go into the fields or down the lane, but don't go into Mr. McGregor's garden. Your Father had an accident there; he was put in a pie by Mrs. McGregor."
Motherly injunctions: a grave and graphic warning. How is the scene pictured, that passing moment with no apparent action? Solicitous Mother Rabbit is handing out buckets to Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cotton-tail, demure in their pink capes. But Peter has his back turned to Mother Rabbit; and though his ears are perked up, he has a stubborn look on his face. Even his blue jacket turns up pertly, or impertinently. Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cotton-tail may be good little bunnies, but Peter is unmistakably--in the telltale pictures--a boy who doesn't do as he's told.
There's no more perfect example, still, of what a picture book can mean to a small child. The little watercolors are marvels of expressive economy. Who will ever forget the comforting image of Mother Rabbit or Peter's terrified flight from Mr. McGregor or his dismay when he finds the door in the wall locked? But neither will a child forget the book's final, precise, ringing words. Naughty Peter, you'll remember, has been put to bed with camomile tea; "But Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cotton-tail had bread and milk and blackberries for supper."
I WROTE THE FOREGOING observations on The Tale of Peter Rabbit, along with other comments on Mike Mulligan, Curious George, and the like, almost thirty years ago. They were designed to be spoken on a tape produced by the Children's Book Council in a series, called "Prelude," on various aspects of children's books. In the same group of tapes as mine were talks by Paul Heins on translation and Betsy Hearne on reviewing.
My stated topic was the flip side of picture books, the written words that usually reach children as spoken words. The words that spring to mind when we think of certain--a good many--older books. Were such a series of talks to be planned today, however, it's doubtful that anyone would think to commission a separate talk on the verbal aspect of picture books, the words without the pictures. But what stands out particularly is the title given to the talk-- "Picture Books: A World of Literature for Small Children." Is there, in fact, a body of work that constitutes a picture book literature? A body of fresh, imaginative, memorably written work? And is it the written word that makes it so?
In 1976, there was no question. The evidence was on the shelves of the nation's libraries where the great storytellers of the thirties and forties, Virginia Lee Burton and H. A. Rey, Ludwig Bememans and Robert McCloskey et al., had been joined by three decades of innovators, people with the imagination to blow picture books apart. Some of these were professional artists, as heretofore. But it was no longer necessary to wield your own pen or brush. Edward Ardizzone, who had illustrated the picture books of others as well as his own, claimed that only artist-illustrators could understand picture book techniques--how to make suspenseful page-turns, how to be sparing of words. But Margaret Wise Brown and Ruth Krauss and their cohorts mastered the techniques and moved on, breaking with the linear narrative in the process. There was only what worked and what didn't.
At William R. Scott, Inc., birthplace of the concept book, Brown teamed up with the illustrator Leonard Weisgard to make The Noisy Book, where word patterns and visual images intermingle on the open pages as the blindfolded dog Muffin tries to identify sounds. There is no story line as such, and no separation between text and pictures.
At Harper, where Ursula Nordstrom's editorial acumen was soon to be...
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