August 05, 2006
The Earth is Your Spaceship
The Earth is Your Spaceship, by Julius Schwartz, pictures by Marc Simont, McGraw-Hill/Whittlesey House, 1963
Great cover, so-so inside illustrations, lousy text with lousy science. This book is really about the Earth, not space, but just barely- it touches on gravity, rotation and orbit, compostion of the earth, atmoshphere, but it's mostly pap.
Spaceship Earth is a merry-go-round- A merry-go-round in space That turns and turns And never stops. You can say, "Stop the earth I want to get off! But it won't And where would you go if it did? Round and round And never a stop. Round and round But your head doesn't spin. Merry-go-round Earth Takes a whole day- Twenty-four hours- For just one turn!
This book feels really 1963:
Here's some context for this cover that's meant to appeal the future space traveller in every little boy (and, not too likely, little girl):
"The first human spaceflight was Vostok 1 on April 12, 1961; Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin made one orbit around the earth...""Kennedy was eager for the United States to lead the way in the space race. Sergei Khrushchev says JFK approached his father twice about a "joint venture" in space exploration—in June 1961 and Autumn 1963. On the first occasion, Russia was far ahead of America in terms of space technology. JFK later made a speech at Rice University in September 1962, in which he said, "No nation which expects to be the leader of other nations can expect to stay behind in this race for space" and, "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard."[12]. On the second approach to Khrushchev, the Russian was persuaded that cost-sharing was beneficial and American space technology was forging ahead. The U.S. had launched a geo-stationary satellite and Kennedy had asked Congress to approve more than $22 billion for the Apollo Project, which had the goal of landing an American man on the moon before the end of the decade. Khrushchev agreed to a joint venture in Autumn 1963, but JFK died in November before the agreement could be formalized. In 1969, six years after Kennedy's death, the Project Apollo goal was finally realized when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first men to land on the moon."
A footnote to a very interesting article titled The Ecological Colonization of Space specifies, "The first published instance of "spaceship earth" is in a children's book by Julius Schwartz, The Earth Is Your Spaceship (New York: McGraw Hill, 1963), a book that probably was inspired by (Buckminster) Fuller."
I love how crudely the figure and the transition from light to dark on the earth is drawn. And speaking of crude, see how the shadow cuts diagonally across North America on the lower left up across the North Atlantic way above Scandinavia- is that even possible?
August 04, 2006
Lentil
Lentil by Robert McCloskey, published by, as it says on the title page, "The Viking Press, Inc. in May 1940." To the right, "A photo in The Columbus Citizen of McCloskey donating Lentil to the Ohioana Library in 1940. (Left to right: Mrs. J. E. Clark, Mrs. Clarence Wrum, Mr. McCloskey, Mrs. Depew Head, and Mrs. E. N. Manchester." 
" A boy named Lentil saves the day when a grumpy old man tries to ruin a small town's big celebration."
This book, by the great Robert McCloskey, author and illustrator of classics like Make Way for Ducklings and Blueberries For Sal, is fantastically illustrated. In a bit of a reversal of the trend developing in my first three book covers posts, which is that the book cover art is superior to the actual book illustrations, the drawings inside Lentil are rich, complex, and dynamic, very lively and appealing- McCloskey has a great sense of energetic line and form, and he appropriately uses just enough of the formal, academic side of drawing- persepctive, naturalistic light sources, rendering that shows lots of life drawing. Perhaps I should scan a page and show it here since I can't find images other than the cover on the web.
I'd guess that the earliest reader for this book is a very proficient second grader, but the illustrations probably cannot be fully experienced by anything less than a more cognitively-developed fourth grader. That's my guess, but there's lots of variation there depending on many factors regarding the reader.
(Incidentally, there are lots of great resources for assessing reading levels and lists of books rated by levels. Not surprisingly, much of this is targeted at home schoolers. Reading Levels of Children's Books: How Can You Tell? has a very comprehensive list of rating methods, and "Leveled Book Lists" has tons of leveled titles by grade and title; they agree with me about Lentil, rating it at 2.75, which means a grade level second grade reader three quarters of the way through that school year. Grade level reading proficiency, when demonstrated, can actually seem quite high these days if one spends a lot of time in urban school districts where many students who are second language learners are struggling with fluency. My experience as a teacher was an eye opener regarding how much of a struggle it is for students from low-literacy background to learn to read with genuine understanding and pleasure.)
But let's talk about this cover. Orange and green is a favorite color combination of mine. This scan is a little dark, but in-person the green strokes on Lentil's shirt really pop. This is a pretty simple cover that I find really relaxed and pleasing. The illustrations inside are drawn with some kind of crayon, which makes for a kind of grainy quality, while the cover seems almost painted. The line quality is solid and flowing, rather than the stop-and-start quality of drawn line. The green inside Lentil's shirt feels like four quick strokes, and the black surrounding him are a bunch of relaxed flat strokes pulling up from the sharp diagonal line over which his arms reach.
The curled shape in front of Lentil is pretty obviously the corner of a page furling back towards the reader; in terms of knowledge about the world, you can take the image literally- see it, got it, done. But visually, if you just let go of that knowledge, and let seeing take it's own path (do you know what I'm saying here- that seeing can have it's own knowledge and logic which can be completely detached from knowledge attached to language, letting seeing something become an experience of openness and possiblity and flexibilty and iterative process rather than an experience with a single finite answer), but there are two things that can plausibly deny this reading.
First, the top left corner and the fold at the right of this "page" don't extend out to the edges of the cover- the page is inset from the edges, meaning that it isn't even a complete illusionary depiction of a page. The logic isn't complete, so I can see this foldover as some other kind of shape. This is the image aspect of the cover that as the reader I can choose to go with or not.
Second, this is a cover, with a fabric background, and it's hardcover, so my seeing of these details denies that I am seeing a page. This is the object aspect of the book. My prior knowledge of what a book is informs what I know about how a book works, but it is actually my seeing that confirms this is a cover.
These may seem like small points, but it is these small points that are part of the looking experience. This is part of how I look at a painting.
Now, I know this is the curled edge of a page, but I don't have to see it that way. Two other ways I keep seeing this shape under Lentil's arms are as one side of a folded paper airplane, and also as the cover of a bed or sleeping bag folded over, which means Lentil would be laying it bed playing the harmonica. That's not McCloskey's intention, but I enjoy the possibility that I can read this image in at least three ways.
Another version of the cover (right), however, confirms more certainly what McCloskey had in mind, I think, and this version completely discards the ambiguity which I enjoy so much. This version is red, black, and white rather than orange and green, and shows off McCloskey's drawing style. I prefer my orange and green version.
Three other final things I think are worth pointing out.
The diagonal line under Lentil's arms separates two qualities: on top, there is a great variety of line- the choppiness of the black strokes' edges, the tight green in the shirt, the angualarity of the hands, the folds in the shirt. And below it's all smooth edged lines and shapes, right into the lettering. It doesn't hit you over the head, but it's a nice contrast.
The shadow under the fold is really nice- see where it's nice and fat on the right and follow it over to the left as it approaches the corner of the page and really becomes narrow- it's that little bit of thinness of the shadow that stands out and makes the page hover- that little moment is really nice, and when you broaden your vision and take in the cover as a whole that narrow little slice, postioned very near the middle of compostion, does its job without you really knowing how much power it exerts.
Finally, there's a strong triangle form present here: [1] beginning at the top left corner, trace your eyes down the straight line of the fold under Lentil's arms diagonally to the right where the shadow ends; [2] turn direction left and follow the tops of the title lettering in a straight line all the way over the spine of the book; [3] run your eyes right up the spine back to the fine point where the left and top of the depicted page join. That triangle is a central area of energy in the compositon; once you trace it it's really strong. The slight curving line of the folded over page bisects this triangle in half from apex to base. The line has a lot of presence, dividing the triangle into empty space on the left side, and the form of the curled page on the right. Inside both halves of this triangle are the projected musical notes out of Lentil's harmonica, floating over half the page and the empty space. This is the most abstract space of the image- those notes denote sound, something happening in air that we can't see, and yet visually here they are, making the most spatial, atmospheric space in the entire image. Perhap's this is why this is the area in which some kid couldn't resist drawing some stars- that's the place where something less pictorial but more energetic is happening.
One last thing: this book, like many of the others I'm showing here, is an artifact of mid-twentieth century America showing an absolute ideal white middle-America equal to your best Frank Capra effort. There is a tendency for books like this to be discarded from many school and public libraries in order to make room for a selection of books with greater ethnic, racial, and cultural diversity. Making libraries more diverse is a good thing, but it's unfortunate that a wonderfully illustrated book like McCloskey's may be set aside simply because of the era it depicted.
August 03, 2006
Hotel Steinberger, Frankfurt
Hotel Steinberger, Frankfurt, 20060803, HTML, 504 x 462 pixels
The background image is a JPEG converted to an HTML tabel with Don Relyea's Reductionizer.
A Tiger in the Cherry Tree
A Tiger in the Cherry Tree by Glen Dines, The MacMillan Company, 1958.
This book is inscribed on the title page, "to Melrose School, Glen Dines." I have no idea if the author really signed this book, but I'm going to trust that it was. Melrose School is the school where I taught in Oakland, CA. I wish Mr. Dines had included the date.
Just look at this image. It's incredible. There's that big dominant orb shape, the flowing twisting banner on the left, and different patterns in the clothing of the four figures. The palette is unusal- there's a common blue-gray cloth cover, and a typical use of black, but most of the color real estate goes to the pale creamy peachy orange. This scan makes the cover a little bluer and the pale orange a little redder and more intense than it really is, but only slightly. The orange just pops off the cover, but there are many aspects to the composition here that contain that orange and make this image really hold to the confines of the cover.
First off, note that in a graphic medium- two or three colors only- where line is really important, that the central orange oval, a giant lantern, has no outline. It is the only orange shape in the whole composition that is not outlined (except for the tiniest bit of a headcover on the partial figure in the upper right quadrant overlooking the lanter), whereas everywhere else the orange is sharply contained by black. I think this lack of outline, combined with the merest curving edges of the black lantern cap and the black lantern base, is what allows the lantern to read as round, because very little else suggests this- the lettering of the title on the lantern doesn't suggest sphericity. Imagine a black outline around the edges of the lantern, try visualizing it- were it there I think visually it would it would be much harder to see the lantern as spherical. It's a small thing, and many artists would've continued their process and just outlined everything, but here is an instance of a little restraint that is enormously significant.
I wrote yesterday about seeing the cloth cover's color as both a color used in the image and as a hole that my eye falls into. This is the image/object duality, and something painters are often after. In the case of this cover my eye keeps following the flow of front banner on the left and falling into the hole of the banner. I actually get a really good feeling from looking at this part repeatedly, of letting my eye flow with the banner and then drop into the color of the book's cover. A painter will look at a painting as an image but they also look at the paint- what does the paint, it's qualities, the way's it's applied, tell you? It's about forest and trees, not forest or trees. Go to a museum and watch people look at paintings and you'll see that most people never go up to the painting to look at the paint; they're content with standing back and just seeing the picture. It's the same with looking at this some of these covers- these small little details count for everything.
As I write this and look at the cover an obvious thing hits me that I'd never quite realized when I looked at this cover before. The two forgegroud figures on either side and the one in the background right are holding bamboo poles that join above the lantern and from which it hangs. It's obvious, I know, but when looking at this before I never said it to myself. I think that's one thing I like about this image- I wasn't able to read it right away. I'd always assumed that the far left figure held the banners aloft, and I was way wrong.
Why do the two figures foreground left each have one eye covered?
The robes of the three foreground figures mix complexity of pattern and color with great variety. The far left figure has a lot of orange, which balances out the dominant black on the right. The middle figure is more complex in terms of color and pattern- it's just loud enough to do something really interesting: most of this drawing has fairly straightforward, smooth-edged, flowing line quality except for the two roosters at top; they are drawn with much more character, with shorter, choppier, more angular strokes. This is the most graphically expressive or "ragged" drawing here, and I think it's nicely balanced by the more complex robe of the central girl figure below. So, around the lantern there is a left and right, top and bottom kind of balancing through color, density, pattern, weight, and visual action.
Both the banner pole and bamboo pole on the right go up diagonally to the left, making a nice wide channel that the eye rows down from top to bottom while reading the title. My eye tends to run in a couple of different ways- round and round the lantern counter-clockwise, or begin at the dark figure at the bottom right, go up the bamboo pole, jump over to the top of the banner and follow it down like a funhouse slide, slide over to the left up through the black figure again, and start over: "When I get to the bottom/I go back to the top of the slide/Where I stop and turn and I go for a ride/Till I get to the bottom and I see you again/Yeah, yeah, yeah[1]."
A little more about the story illustrations rather than the cover:
From biblio.com, "Lovely book about how a timid tiger and an old magician came to live in a cherry tree in a Japanese village. Beautifully illustrated, in the style of Japanese woodcuts."
No, the illustrations are not in the style of Japanese woodcuts, and to me aren't nearly as interesting as this cover. Compostionally they have a lot going on, but the drawings are more completely rendered and telling, rather than, in this cover, dynamic and suggestive. The drawing and compostional style inside the book are actually quite conventionally Western, but that's no great surprise.
This is the third book in a row I'm showing here for which the cover artist is different than the actual story artist, and in which the cover art is way more interesting that the internal art.
Another cover can be found for this book that looks like it was done by the author and is vastly inferior to the two color print job I have.
One thing I can't quite get a handle on is this book's relation to history as a book for English readers. In 1958 American occupation of Japan was just six years in the past, and the country was still in the middle of rebuilding and retooling. If I had read this book in, say, the post-war and early Cold War 1965 at age 8, what would my unformed world view think of this?
First, my impression would be that most Japanese adult males wear heavy black-framed glasses. Check that off the list: Japanese, male, adult, black glasses, expressive eyebrows? Check.
My second impression would be that everyone in Japan wears wooden platform shoes (they're called Geta- I had to look that up), whereas anyone who watches a Kurazawa movie knows that isn't true (I say that with tongue in cheek).
And my third impression would be that when the Japanese build a little bridge over a tiny brook the bridge has to be one of those semi-circular ones that arches high up in the middle that you have to practically climbs up and down.
As I look inside these books I realize even more fully that I collected them for the covers, not what's between the covers. How about that?
August 02, 2006
Sutro
Sutro, 20060802, HTML, 400 x 400 pixels
The background image is a JPEG converted to an HTML tabel with Don Relyea's Reductionizer.
Ask Mr. Bear
Ask Mr. Bear, story and pictures by Marjorie Flack, The MacMillan Company, New York, 1958
See 20060801 for explantion of this series.
On the surface Ask Mr. Bear seems like a pretty typical pattern book for early readers. A very young boy, Danny, asks the Hen if she can give him something for for his mother's birthday, and the Hen offers an egg, but his mother already has an egg, so they go along until they encounter the Goose who offers feathers for a pillow, but she has a pillow, and so on through the menagerie.
Books like this reinforce reader recognition of a set vocabularly through repetition to develop reading fluency, and also practice and develop the reader's ability to recognize and predict narratives and narrative typs and patterns, character types, and so on. This is the kind of book where you read to a young child, "So Danny and the Hen and the Goose all hopped along until they met..." and then the younger developing reader guesses what is next- another animal, of course. If the reader is really young and may not be able to predict quite yet you can turn the page, they'll see the animal and shout, "A Goat!" Everyone has experienced this.
But there are some strange things about this book. After Danny has asked five barnyard animals for a gift the Cow finally suggests Mr. Bear, who lives in the woods, but none of the animals will accompany Danny. Danny goes to the woods alone and asks Mr. Bear, who whispers something in Danny's while in a pose that's just a little too intimate. At the end Danny ends up giving his mother a "Bear Hug" for her birthday.
It's bizarre that Danny goes to the woods alone, and that Mr. Bear is the only non-barnyard animal and has, in this context, a foreboding formal title "Mister". The Bear-to-Boy relationship probably sails over most readers heads.
The cover is obviously done by a a different artist, and this makes me think that these two and three color covers were not typicall done by the book's illustrator. In yesterday's post I remark on how different the cover is from the inside illustration, and Ask Mr. Bear is no exception. The drawings inside this book are also quite different from the cover: on the cover the lines outside the define the boundaries of the figure; inside, the drawing style is more of what I typically call Dufy, though lots of other artists and illustrators do this- color is layed down and then defining lines are drawn on top, with the under color peeking out beyond the drawn outlines. The style of drawing on the cover contains each figure and separates them from each other, while the drawings inside use this Dufy style, which diffuses each figure a bit situates them better in their environment on the page.
The Danny on the cover looks nothing like Danny inside the book. Outside Danny has a big head with dark haired jutting out over his forhead. Inside Danny is Arayan blonde, taller and better proportioned. The animals are all drawn differently, too; for example, Inside Goat has a beard, Outside Goat doesn't.
It's peculiar to me how the Sheep and Goat are cut off on the left hand side about half an inch inside the binding- why bring it in like that? I wonder how many young kids were confused by the Sheep's head attached to the rear of the Goat?
The pale green and dark purple printed on the cover are not colors used inside the book. And there is something weird that happens when I look at the cover: there are five figures- four animals and a boy. The entire bodies of the animals are printed. All of Danny is printed except for the inside of his shirt and the tops of his socks- the fabric is used as a color. But because Danny is the only figure that uses the background as a color my eyes fall through his torso to the cover's fabric. His torso kind of drops out as a hole in the composition, and I see his over-sized head as precariously balanced on a torso-skeleton of a few thin lines. It makes him strangely disembodied.
Danny, Hen, Goose, Goat, and Sheep all look to our right, off the edge of the book, as if they've just glimpsed the next animal they will encounter, which in the book is the Cow. But this cover gives no indication that there is a Cow- the title suggests that they are looking at Mr. Bear, and to me they seem, especially Danny, just a tad reticent. Getting ready for those secrets to be whispered in his ear, I guess.
August 01, 2006
Daisy
Daisy, 20060801, HTML, 370 x 430 pixels
The background image is a JPEG converted to an HTML tabel with Don Relyea's Reductionizer. I'll be making images with this toll during August, and talking about it more later.
Across the Borderline
Douglas Witmer and I will be showing a collaborative drawing installation titled Across the Borderline at the Rike Center Gallery at the University of Dayton, Ohio in January 2007. We will use a weblog, Across the Borderline, to document our preparation for this show. A proposal for the show and the gallery floorplan can be found there, too.
Two Artist's Talking
A few weeks back Joanne Mattera and I began a weblog conversation called Two Artists Talking, to which we'll post once or twice a week and plan to continue indefinitely.
Flip and the Cows
Flip and the Cows, story and pictures by Wesley Dennis, Cadmus Books, published by E. M. Hale and Co., Eau Claire, Wisconsin, 1942
A couple of weeks ago Steven LaRose posted a scan of a book, Anyone Can Paint!, which reminded me of a project I've wanted to do for a couple of years but have avoided because it's labor intensive- scans of childrens' books I have. So in the next few days I'll scan and post a few.
I have three or more boxes of books like this collected during my elementary school teaching years in the 90's as our school library threw them out, usually in large batches. Kids just weren't checking out books like this anymore. These are books of my own childhood. I primarily collected books that tended towards graphically strong one and two-color printing on colored covers, something that seems to have been dropped over the past two or three decades. I'm a little repelled by, but also drawn to, how these books clearly represent a kind of post-war white American idealism of the late 40's and 50's. I also have books from the early 60's that get a whole lot more graphically loose, sort of jazzy, with splashes of color and line reminescent of Raoul Dufy, or in other cases clearly using geometric and collage elements.
Many of these covers do standard stuff: make good use of flat areas of few colors, layout and carve positive and negative space, have lines with interesting qualities or shapes with suggestive edges, and activate the background as an active color and area. This is all Art 101 kind of stuff, but it's a lot easier to point out and talk about than it is to do it successfully.
The drawings inside Flip are fairly academic, drawn in charcoal and crayon, and aren't nearly as interesting as the cover, which is one of my favorites. A simple google of Wesley Dennis returns lots of links to his work; apparently, he was quite well known for his horse drawings (1, 2, 3). A number of used copies are availabe via Alibris, the descriptions of which often refer to the book bearing the name of a school or library; one synopsis says, " A colt realizes his desire to jump across the brook following a dream in which he sprouts silvery wings."
I love the three fonts: the block letters used for "Flip" and "Cows", the tidy linked letters use for "and the", and the swinging cursive of the author's name. I like the rectangular field of red and the few lines carved into the black to make Flip; it's not really that well drawn, but you easily getting the feeling of "young horse". I am mezermized by the regular sawtooth halo around Flip- you'd think it wouldn't work, even be a little buzzy or unsettling, but so much of the cover is crisp and even that this jagged halo neatly envelopes Flip and makes the strong red recede. And finally, I really like the double-sawtoothed stretch of black grass below that spans from edge-to-edge, beneath which Flip's hooves disappear into the background of the fabric of the cover; by simply contrasting slightly larger blades of grass above with small ones below an easy feeling of foreground and background is suggested.
Later editions of this book have a much less compelling cover.
July 31, 2006
When I Met You (Baja)
When I Met You (Baja), 20060731, HTML, 300 x 400 pixels
July 30, 2006
When I Met You (Merritt)
When I Met You (Merritt), 20060730, HTML, 300 x 400 pixels