A Roman Holiday for kids and Adults

In third grade, David Macaulay drew a fire engine. The teachers praised it and hung the drawing on the bulletin board. The kids gaped and said, wow, what a cool fire engine. Adulation: Macaulay loved it.

More or less consciously, he determined that applause and recognition were good lifetime goals. Having your name on something--a picture, a building, a book jacket--was also a worthwhile career aspiration, the young Macaulay decided.

“And if I’m going to be honest, I think that was my original motive. Seeing my name on a book was very appealing,” Macaulay said. “I thought, ‘This is great!’ ”

A dozen and a half titles--accounting for close to 3 million books in print--now bear his name, and the buzz has not faded. With the same pride he showed when the teachers lauded his fire engine, the 50-year-old author-illustrator is soaking up compliments for his latest endeavor, “Rome Antics” (Houghton Mifflin), a whimsical, affectionate journey through his favorite city on Earth. The story is told from the perspective of a carrier pigeon, allowing Macaulay to display Rome’s vantage from every conceivable vantage.

Thirty years ago, as an architecture student at the Rhode Island School of Design (where he now teaches), Macaulay studied in the Eternal City, leaving him with “attachments to Rome that go way beyond the city.” Macaulay regards Julius Caesar’s hometown as “the best example of recycling I’ve ever seen in my life. Nothing gets thrown away in Rome,” Macaulay said. “It just gets adapted. So therefore you’re always connected to the past. I think it’s kind of reassuring to know that people who came before you survived, did their stuff, and then life went on. I think when you’re disconnected from any remnant of the past, you have nothing to draw on.”

The Forum on the Palantine Hill is still standing, and the Ponte Fabricio still spans the Tiber. The Temple of Hercules has not tumbled, and the great columns of the Pantheon continue to support its mighty dome. All these landmarks show up in “Rome Antics,” but “it’s not even these specific examples” that Macaulay is talking about when he contemplates the city’s everlasting glory.

“It’s a sense of humanity having survived,” he said. When you think about a place like Rome enduring--flourishing--for so many centuries, “you don’t need to be so pessimistic,” he said. “Humanity always seems to get itself into these messes, and apparently, if you look at Rome, it survives.”

*

Pretty lofty philosophy for what is essentially a picture book. From “Cathedral” (1973) to “City” (1974) to “Pyramid” (1975) and onward, Macaulay’s books are distinguished by fine pen-and-ink illustrations. Elaborate details allow each page to swallow the reader, who soon joins Macaulay in visually celebrating the wonders of, say, a brick--or even, yes, a sewer.

His architecture-school training taught him to refine his drawings--not necessarily of sewers, but often of equally prosaic paraphernalia, such as toilets.

“It was wonderful training from a design standpoint, from a thinking point of view, from a problem-solving point-of-view,” he recalled.

But when it came time to work as an entry-level architect, Macaulay reconsidered his career path. For a year he taught high school art, and for a time he did interior design work. He became interested in illustrating children’s books because it sounded like more fun than making blueprints for school bathrooms. His first, notably unsuccessful, kids’ book idea concerned a beauty pageant for gargoyles.

“A great idea,” said the veteran children’s book editor Walter Lorraine, of Houghton Mifflin. “But get rid of the gargoyles.”

It was Lorraine, Macaulay’s longtime editor in spite of the gargoyle gambit, who suggested “Cathedral,” Macaulay’s first book. The publisher ventured a measly $1,000 advance, and Macaulay finished the book in a lightning-fast three months. “Cathedral” earned a Caldecott honor award, and Macaulay won a broad audience of adults as well as children. His simple, direct explanations of “The Way Things Work” (1988) sealed that reputation. Television adaptations of a number of Macaulay’s titles only increased public recognition of his distinctive technique.

Macaulay’s books succeed because “the information is simple enough for a child to follow, and yet there is enough sophistication to the art and complexity to the plot line that the adult who gets stuck with reading them 50 times never gets tired of them,” said Candace Lynch, the book department manager at San Marino Toy & Books. “There’s always something new to discover, and something to talk about with the child.”

*

Unlike many readers, or even critics, Macaulay can chart his literary and artistic growth by looking at his earlier works. He is unsparing in his view of his first book: “There’s no light in ‘Cathedral.’ There are no real shadows. It’s very tentative. It’s done with a scratchy pen, because in those days, I felt that making illustrations was also making fine art.”

He had no such illusions by the time he got around to doing “Rome Antics.” The book stumbled through several incarnations before emerging as the lighthearted tale of a homing pigeon bearing a message from somewhere in the Italian hills to central-city Rome. “Rome Antics” ended up in black and white, with just a ribbon of red. But in various versions, the whole book screamed out in color. The book had 13 titles before Macaulay’s eyes fell on a volume called “Romantic Art of the 19th-Century.” Once he was able to connect “Rome” with “antics,” he said, “the title helped me to generate the story.”

Still, Macaulay wishes the process hadn’t been quite so slow.

“From a business point of view, this is the most ridiculous thing to do, three years on a book that is 80 pages long,” he said.

The up side was that a book about Rome required frequent visits. Macaulay packed up his wife, Ruth, and their daughter Charlotte and settled into an apartment for the better part of two summers. They wandered and wandered until he felt he knew the path of his book. Last winter, before finally writing his text, he returned to walk the route one last time.

*

Once again, Macaulay has turned out a book that attracts children, parents and grandparents with equal enthusiasm. This crossover quality enables him to shake off the label of “children’s author.”

“I don’t take that very seriously,” he said. “I just make books. All along, I’ve honestly felt I was just making books, and whoever the audience turned out to be was fine.”

What he does take seriously is the responsibility to promote reading in families.

“It’s really important to me that parents read to their kids,” he said. “I like the fact that my books make parents smile, too.”

He is genuinely pleased when parents, or children, tell him they study his books together, lingering over the exquisite drawings.

“The picture book becomes a vehicle for communication at all sorts of levels,” he said. “And it saddens me that after a certain age, a kid might actually feel embarrassed about reading with his parents.”

Macaulay has recently joined forces with Lois Lowry, Katherine Patterson, Jon Scieszka and several other leading children’s authors to launch the National Children’s Book and Literacy Alliance. This fledgling effort to foster children’s “literacy through literature” will sponsor nationwide workshops for parents and educators, and will bring children’s authors to libraries and other locations.

Macaulay will next direct his own talents to a book to be titled “Journey,” and after that, to “Wonders of the Modern World,” a combined book and television project. After his three-year struggle to bring “Rome Antics” to completion, however, it will be a while before any other title displaces it as Macaulay’s personal favorite.

Of course he is pleased because once again, people are heaping praise on him: the old adulation routine. He still loves it. Except now he admits, “It’s sort of irrelevant unless it gets people to look at your books.”