Sing a Song for Sixpence: THE ENGLISH PICTURE-BOOK TRADITION AND RANDOLPH CALDECOTT by Brian Alderson (Cambridge University: $24.95; 112 pp., illustrated)

It is only 100 years ago that Randolph Caldecott, arguably the finest British illustrator, died in St. Augustine, Fla., at the young age of 39, after a wretched illness. And just 50 years ago, in 1937, the American Library Assn. commissioned the Caldecott Medal to be given annually for excellence in illustration.

To celebrate Caldecott and his tradition, Brian Alderson, critic and historian of children’s literature, has designed and prepared an exhibit for display at the British Library in London. And to accompany that exhibition, he has written this far-more-than-mere-catalogue, richly and sensibly illustrated with black and white, and a few colored, plates, all printed uncommonly and gratifyingly close to the texts that elegantly elucidate them.

It is satisfying to know that a good deal of the material was made available to Alderson at the Huntington Library, at UCLA, and in local, private collections, while he was teaching at UCLA.

As the preface explains, Alderson’s aim was “not to present a full coverage” of Caldecott’s achievement. More interestingly, he places Caldecott “within the tradition of narrative illustration . . . to show how he figures as primus inter pares in an essentially English style in the creation of children’s picture books.” And this English style, Alderson maintains, is the touchstone for judging all picture-book art.

Beginning with a generalized survey of printing techniques, the author takes us from the 15th-Century woodcuts that the printer Caxton commissioned for his illustrated Chaucer, through the evolution of ever-more-refined engravings and early lithography, up to relatively modern photo-mechanical techniques. En route, we are introduced to extraordinary craftsmen such as the 18th-Century Thomas Bewick, the Dalziel brothers in the mid-19th Century, and Edmund Evans, without whose expertise and painstaking dedication to refined color reproduction much of the effect even of Caldecott’s electrically vital line would have been lost.

The earliest woodcuts tended merely to restate redundantly what was written in the crude chapbooks that they illustrated. By the mid-18th Century, William Hogarth exemplified a lively and vigorous development toward the harmonious and dramatic interplay between images and words in the text. Soon after, in the singular case of William Blake, it is difficult to say where text leaves off and illustration begins--the two comprise a single experience. The tradition continues through Caldecott, the Cruikshank brothers, on to Beatrix Potter, and--in our own time--to Maurice Sendak, who, understandably, cannot seem to talk of Caldecott without bringing up music, counterpoint, syncopation. It is these illustrators who have made of the illustrated book a duet, a dance between text and image that is both rhythmic and melodious.

Today, advanced camera techniques have infinitely eased the task of the illustrators, but, in Alderson’s view, they also have contributed to flooding us with a lamentable surfeit of self-indulgent, fashionably illustrated children’s books. Rarely may one find now what Alderson calls “the decent reciprocation between word and picture.” “Under the stimulus of modish graphic styles, often drawn from commercial art, or of fanciful central European theories about ‘the education of the eye,’ ” we are inundated by self-absorbed illustrations heedless of their texts (e.g. Nicola Bayley’s “Book of Nursery Rhymes”), or contorted oddities such as Kit Williams’ “Masquerade,” which exemplify, finally, the near-total divorce of illustration from text. It is a sorry falling off from the harmonious contradance of text and image that this book so engagingly celebrates.

This authoritative, richly informative and readable book reaches our shores a bit later than planned, since the ship carrying the first order from England was forced to jettison its cargo during a winter storm in the North Atlantic. What an illustration that would have made!