Illustration

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Allingham, William, Walter De la Mare, and Matthew Arnold. The Fairy Shoemaker, and Other Fairy Poems. Illustrated by Boris Artzybasheff. Macmillan Co., 1928.

Illustration is one of the defining attributes of literature for young people. Today, we are so bombarded with digital technologies and visual media that it is virtually impossible to imagine a time when pictures did not swirl around us. We might ask if this visual glut is an improvement where young people are concerned. Regardless of the answer, the salient point for children’s poetry centers on imagination. A poem does not need a picture any more than a well-told story.

Reflecting on his drawings in A Learical Lexicon, Caldecott honor artist Joseph Low describes the relationship between the words and pictures this way: “A man among strangers longs to hear and to speak his own language. Many times I have taken one of Lear’s books from the shelf, opened it anywhere, and settled down for a chat. That is what these drawings are: not an imitation of his speech but a conversation between friends.”

The reciprocity between art and text that Low describes finds particular expression in poetry. Meaning and vocabulary can be elusive; art functions to explain metaphor and wordplay. In nonsense and parody, the juxtaposition of artwork and text may be contradictory – respecting the reader’s acumen. Conversely, a concrete poem is the illustration, with the words being written in a shape. A poem on a page, surrounded by blank space, invites participation by the artist. Emotional responses can be confirmed, aroused, or soothed with shape and color. Most importantly, illustration invites us to linger. We may look at the picture and then the poem, or first the poem and secondly the art, and then the poem again.

We know that the earliest books for children were handwritten and hand drawn. After the coming of printing, woodcuts were the technique of choice for illustrated texts. This relatively cheap illustration process was considered good enough for children. Small pictures were black-inked and often framed with rough lines, and were only rarely colored (many children, however, could not resist adding color to the images themselves). Another early illustration technique was engraving. Using a burin, lines were incised onto the surface of a copper (or later steel) plate. This technique, often referred to as intaglio, was preferred for its crisp, linear quality, and unlike wood, the metal plate did not warp or crack over time. Since letter printing is a raised process and engraving is the reverse, text and image could not be printed simultaneously. Engravings were therefore printed separately from the text and rarely on the same page. This raised the cost of books with engravings, and though that did not prevent this technique from being used to illustrate children’s books, such books would have been intended for a more affluent audience.

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Peter Piper’s Alphabet; Peter Piper’s Practical Principles of Plain and Perfect Pronunciation. Various Illustrators. Mergenthaler Linotype Co., 1936.

A third technology used for book illustration was lithography. This planographic process is based on the principle that oil and water do not mix. The artist would draw a picture on a flat, polished piece of limestone with a wax crayon. Then the stone was soaked with water and a roller with printer’s ink passed over it. The oil-based ink would only adhere where the crayon had marked the stone. A sheet of paper, under heavy pressure, was placed on the surface and the illustration would print off. Lithography gave artists greater expressive freedom because they could draw on the lithographic stones directly, eliminating the extra step of transferring the original image to its printed form.

In the 1800s publishers began marketing books for children more intentionally, and illustrations of exceptional beauty eventually made their way into books for young people. Up to that time, if woodcuts, engravings, and lithographs had color, the color was added by hand, a time-consuming process. Chromolithography offered a practical and affordable method for color illustration in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, ushering in the first mass-produced, color-illustrated books. The Prelutsky Collection includes examples of works by numerous artists from the Golden Age of Illustration including Arthur Rackham, Walter Crane, Beatrix Potter, John Tenniel, Jessie Willcox Smith, Howard Pyle, and Kate Greenaway. Though chromolithography, with its bright and even garish colors, fell out of use in the twentieth century, another nineteenth-century innovation, photography, captured the imaginations of book publishers more than ever.

Twentieth-century developments in book illustration are legion. Artistic styles, together with new approaches in book construction, paper composition, graphic design, and eventually international printing, all made their mark on children’s books. The Prelutsky Collection offers endless rabbit holes, twisty avenues, and spaces for exploring the intersection of art and poetry.