What do you think?
Rate this book
American Picturebooks from Noah's Ark to the Beast Within
A full-scale survey of children's picturebooks of this century, examining and evaluating numerous notable books and the work of notable illustrators, from E. Boyd Smith and Wanda Gag to Maurice Sendak and Margot Zemach.
- GenresChildrens
615 pages, Hardcover
First published May 28, 1976
4 people are currently reading
79 people want to read
About the author
Barbara Bader
16 books3 followersBader is a former editor of Kirkus Reviews and writes frequently on children's literature.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
Read
September 13, 2022I read this as research for my podcast. All in all it was a very interesting look at about 75 years of picturebooks, with a little bit from earlier. I'm not sure you will find a more comprehensive source for this kind of information even if it's not exhaustive.
The things I took issue with were her writing style. It could be really dense with parentheticals and asides and long sentences made up of a lot of relative clauses (I think I'm using the correct term here?) and it made for some slogging.
She also name drops artists and printers and people in the publishing industry in a way that isn't exactly pretentious, but it's distracting and confusing. These names may have been more familiar to librarians and publishers back in the mid 70s when this was written. But 50 years later it's not nearly as obvious who she's talking about. Bader also assumes a lot of familiarity with the printing process and its development over the years which maybe her contemporary librarians would have known, but isn't widely known now.
I also found she does what a lot of librarians do, namely assumes her subjective opinions and preferences for art (both the writing and the illustrations) are objective ideals. She often makes some good points about books and their quality, but what appeals to one person may not to another and there were quite a few books she said were excellent that I remember reading and disliking as a child (and as an adult).
Lastly, she spends a lot of time describing pictures that are not included and not enough time making connections with the ones she has included. I think if she had to spend more than a couple sentences describing the illustration then it should have been in there so the reader could see it. And if she would not have spent more than two sentences describing the illustration, even if it was reprinted in the book, it wasn't necessary to have it in there.
I wish there was a book of similar detail that covered where this book leaves off and up until now. Children's literature in some ways has not changed a lot, but I would be curious to hear more about the authors and illustrators that came later and have enjoyed long careers. Eric Carle is missing, the Dillons, and plenty more. Not that I would expect a book to be able to cover all picturebooks, but plenty of authors and illustrators have come onto the scene since the mid seventies when this book was published. I would also be curious about the trends that came after this book.
The things I took issue with were her writing style. It could be really dense with parentheticals and asides and long sentences made up of a lot of relative clauses (I think I'm using the correct term here?) and it made for some slogging.
She also name drops artists and printers and people in the publishing industry in a way that isn't exactly pretentious, but it's distracting and confusing. These names may have been more familiar to librarians and publishers back in the mid 70s when this was written. But 50 years later it's not nearly as obvious who she's talking about. Bader also assumes a lot of familiarity with the printing process and its development over the years which maybe her contemporary librarians would have known, but isn't widely known now.
I also found she does what a lot of librarians do, namely assumes her subjective opinions and preferences for art (both the writing and the illustrations) are objective ideals. She often makes some good points about books and their quality, but what appeals to one person may not to another and there were quite a few books she said were excellent that I remember reading and disliking as a child (and as an adult).
Lastly, she spends a lot of time describing pictures that are not included and not enough time making connections with the ones she has included. I think if she had to spend more than a couple sentences describing the illustration then it should have been in there so the reader could see it. And if she would not have spent more than two sentences describing the illustration, even if it was reprinted in the book, it wasn't necessary to have it in there.
I wish there was a book of similar detail that covered where this book leaves off and up until now. Children's literature in some ways has not changed a lot, but I would be curious to hear more about the authors and illustrators that came later and have enjoyed long careers. Eric Carle is missing, the Dillons, and plenty more. Not that I would expect a book to be able to cover all picturebooks, but plenty of authors and illustrators have come onto the scene since the mid seventies when this book was published. I would also be curious about the trends that came after this book.
Displaying 1 of 1 review