Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast

Welcome to 7-Imp’s 7 Kicks, a weekly meeting ground for taking some time to reflect on Seven(ish) Exceptionally Fabulous, Beautiful, Interesting, Hilarious, or Otherwise Positive Noteworthy Things from the past week, whether book-related or not, that happened to you.

When I want those picture books in which gentleness reigns, I like to turn to Jim LaMarche. His illustrations for Albert, written by Donna Jo Napoli in 2001, are some of my favorites. (And I have Eisha to thank for my copy of that title.) And LaMarche has illustrated a whole slew of other widely-acclaimed titles, as well. In fact, at this time of year, there’s always Bear’s First Christmas by Robert Kinerk, which I posted about here in 2007, but I digress.

In Lost and Found (Chronicle Books, July 2009), which he both wrote and illustrated, LaMarche brings us three dog stories. In the first, Molly, the beautiful golden retriever of a little girl named Anna, manages to lead the way home when the girl runs away after a spat with her mother and gets lost:

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Welcome, dear readers, to an interview I very much enjoyed formatting. I’m not only a long-time fan of Barry Moser’s printwork and watercolors, but I also particularly enjoyed reading his honest and insightful responses to my questions. Though you will read below his perfectly understand-
able reasons for expatriating from the South, a part of Moser still feels affinity towards it; he, in fact, grew up in East Tennessee (born in Chattanooga, to be exact, in 1940), where I also lived for quite some time. And, speaking of the South, his response to the Pivot pearly-gates question is my New Favorite Ever.

Moser is not only an accomplished and renowned illustrator (in both painting and print-making); he is also a printer, typographer, calligraphy artist, designer, lecturer, author, essayist, and teacher. And a “booksmith,” as he told Anna Olswanger in this 1999 interview, adding “{m}y skin goes a little rankly on ‘children’s book illustrator.’ That’s an artificial subdivision. You’re either a book illustrator, or you’re not.” As the owner of the private Pennyroyal Press, his own imprint, Moser strives “to do…as beautiful a book as I can possibly do” (source here); he has illustrated and/or designed over three hundred titles for both children and adults.

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A quick spotlight today on one of my favorite picture books from ’09 — and one of the funniest. Red Ted and the Lost Things (Candlewick, November 2009) comes to us from the wise and prolific and award-winning Michael Rosen, the former British Children’s Laureate, who wrapped up his term in June of this year. It’s illustrated by one Joel Stewart, who is, tragically, new to me. I instantly fell in love with his graphic picture-book style, his soft-focus velvety touch, and I MUST learn more about him and his previously-illustrated titles.

The book tells the story of a bear, named Ted, who is separated from the little girl who loves him, Stevie, and left on the seat of a train. As you can see here below, he ends up on a high shelf in the Place for Lost Things — or so the forsaken Crocodile, all too familiar with the Place for Lost Things, tells him. “I’ve been here a very long time, and no one has ever come to get me,” Crocodile tells him in one arrestingly lonely spread, depicting the many shelves in the crowded Place for Lost Things with Red Ted and Crocodile as the only flashes of color in the top right corner. In fact, Crocodile’s been there so long, he’s forgotten his name. {Note: To make it easier to see, I’ve separated the following spread into two details. Please click on each image to see the entire spread from which the details come.}

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This is author/illustrator Cynthia von Buhler’s self-portrait-slash-doll. I invited Cynthia to 7-Imp this morning to share some art from her latest title, the downright luxurious But Who Will Bell the Cats? (Houghton Mifflin Books for Children; September 2009). This title has been met with such lavish reviews as: “Dark, complicated mixed-media illustrations bring a humorously creepy feel to the tale…this story of an indefatigable mouse should find a welcome place on the shelves of any castle…or library” (Horn Book); “Children will find a lot to discover in the details, even after repeated readings” (School Library Journal); “Beautiful and haunting with the kinds of images kids will pore over, there ain’t nothing like it out there today. A new fable in an all-new style” (Betsy Bird at A Fuse #8 Production); “Young readers will pore over this one again and again” (Kirkus)…Oh, I could go on.

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Welcome to 7-Imp’s 7 Kicks, a weekly meeting ground for taking some time to reflect on Seven(ish) Exceptionally Fabulous, Beautiful, Interesting, Hilarious, or Otherwise Positive Noteworthy Things from the past week, whether book-related or not, that happened to you.

I think it’s been a while since I’ve showcased comics or graphic-novel art here at 7-Imp, so today I’m checking in with Neil Numberman and Aaron Reynolds, who have created Creepy Crawly Crime (Henry Holt, April 2009), the first title in a new series, called Joey Fly (Private Eye), which Kirkus calls an “auspicious series kick-off” and Publishers Weekly called in their starred review “a wowser of a debut.” Pictured here is Joey, about to begin his work-day. You can click on the image to enlarge and read the text.

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First things first: This item above—a watercolor by Sendak of a Wild Thing Balloon for Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, dated 1998—will be for sale at the Bloomsbury Auctions in New York on December 9. This would be the moment in time in which I wished that a) I lived in New York, at least for the length of time during which this auction takes place and b) I was filthy rich. Here’s more information. (There are also two pencil sketches and one more watercolor study of the balloon. See here. Swoon.)

This preliminary jacket design below for William Steig’s Shrek! will also be auctioned off, along with lots of other great stuff, so go see.

Okay, as for my List ‘O’ Random Things…

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I’m going to keep it simple this Poetry Friday with a brief excerpt from, of all the things, “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear,” a poem and Christmas carol written mid-nineteenth-century by Edmund Sears, pastor of a Unitarian Church in Weston, Massachusetts.

I’ve been listening to some holiday tunes lately, as perhaps many of you are. As one of 7-Imp’s esteemed readers—who regularly runs after his hat “with the manliest ardour and the most sacred joy”—told me in an off-blog conversation, “Christmas music seems pretty much unambiguously glorious to me. It’s like good songwriters and hymnalists lose all the artifice and bombast and sentimentality they’re prone to the rest of the year.” To that, I say—rather uneloquently—word. He nailed it.

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Author and illustrator Jackie Morris visited 7-Imp about this time last year, but she’s here this morning for a more detailed interview. Jackie, who trained as an illustrator at the Bath Academy of Art in England, now lives here in Wales and has won international acclaim for the many books she has written and illustrated. As I said last year, I struggle to find the words to describe her art work without sounding…well, totally trite, and I ended up deciding to go with words of praise from School Library Journal about her illustrations, since they nail it: “The undeniable beauty of the delicate watercolor illustrations, with their dramatic use of line, coupled with soft, earthy tones, lend the characters and landscapes dignity and timelessness.” So, we’ll just go with their words again. Yeah, what they said. Or, in the words of the New York Times, Jackie is capable of bringing us gorgeous fantasies.

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Anyone remember how for a while now I’ve been checking in with author/illustrators who have been previously featured here at the blog? Those of the male persuasion, that is. I’ll try to get to those ladies next. (Anyone kept up with me this long? Here was Part One with David Ezra Stein and Lane Smith; here was Part Two with Sean Qualls; and here was Part Three with Adam Rex and Mac Barnett.) Well, I’m wrapping that up today. Better late than never.

The breakfast-y illustration above comes from Amy Krouse Rosenthal’s Spoon (Hyperion, March 2009), illustrated by Scott Magoon. But I’ll get to that later, as I’m simply going to line these guys—Matthew Cordell, Steve Jenkins, and Scott Magoon—up in alphabetical order this morning before breakfast.

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