Worth a Thousand Words

The picture book is such a prominent feature of the landscape of American children’s literature that we sometimes forget that it did not begin here but in Victorian England. And further, that if we are presently enjoying a Golden Age of illustration here, the picture book continues to flourish abroad, too. Consider these current examples:

From England we have So Much (Candlewick Press: $14.95; ages 3 and up) by Trish Cooke, whose alternative careers as actress and playwright have influenced both the jaunty, rhythmic tone of her narrative voice and the scenic construction of her charming cumulative story about a baby whose many relatives love him so much ! Illustrator Helen Oxenbury’s marvelously energetic pictures reinforce this notion of theater: Family members alternately arrive to visit in lively bursts of color and busy, loving-the-baby activity, then quietly wait for the doorbell’s ring to cue the next arrivals. Interestingly, these interludes are rendered in muted tones of tan and taupe, suggesting that the stage lights have gone down until the curtain rises on the next explosion of exuberant activity.

The Bear (Random House: $20; 3 and up) by Raymond Riggs, another British master of the picture book, evokes not theater but film and the funnies instead through the strip panel design of its pages and its use of speech balloons and dialogue to advance its story of a little girl named Tilly who adopts a polar bear. And if Tilly’s parents can’t see the bear looming over them--well, that says something about the large differences between the imaginative lives of adults and their offspring! And speaking of large: Thanks to the book’s unusually sizable format--it measures 12 inches by 15 inches--the bear is drawn as big as the Arctic . . . or a little girl’s imagination.

Another book employing dialogue and strip panel art is from Holland. The Princess in the Kitchen Garden (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $16; ages 5-9) by Annemie and Margriet Heymans tells what happens when Hannah and Matthew’s mother dies. Like Riggs, the author-illustrators employ an arresting textual mix of fantasy and reality along with an unusual visual combination of small pencil sketch art and full-page or double-page color illustrations. The result is complex and text-rich by American standards, but endlessly intriguing.

More traditional in design is a new edition of Dwarf Nose (North-South Books: $17.95; 5-10), a 19th-Century German tale of transformation by William Hauff. Illustrations are by the acclaimed Austrian artist Lisbeth Zwerger, who proves herself once again to be a master of subtle coloration and visual imagination bold enough to match the fantastic elements of the story. Zwerger won the 1990 Hans Christian Andersen Medal (the Nobel Prize of children’s literature); the body of her work is celebrated in the beautifully designed and generously illustrated The Art of Lisbeth Zwerger (North-South Books: $39.95).

Andersen himself is celebrated in Twelve Tales: Hans Christian Andersen (McElderry Books: $18.95), a new collection selected, translated and illustrated by the great Danish artist Erik Blegvad. A master of line and detail, Blegvad has produced dozens of exquisitely rendered miniatures and integrated them artfully into the text of these timeless tales.