Bev Qualheim – who wrote the original mitten pattern, Michelle Edwards, KRJuchem, Yvonne Jefferson, Basya Karp, Mary Nida Smith, Barb Hatch, and Barbara Gruener.

Simms Taback, author, graphic artist, illustrator, and winner of the Caldecott Medal for Joseph Had a Little Overcoat (Viking, 2000), died peacefully in his home December 25 surrounded by his family and friends. He was 79.

Image found with original SLJ Tribute article.

Taback (left) died from pancreatic cancer, which he had been fighting for over a year, but he managed to fulfill his dream of traveling to Israel and London before his death.

Taback wrote or illustrated more than 40 children’s books, winning many awards, including the Caldecott Medal for his adaptation of a Yiddish folk song and a Caldecott honor for There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly (Viking, 1997), which was designated as a New York Times Best Illustrated Children’s Book and the Children’s Book of the Year selection from the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA). He also received several notable book designations from the American Library Association, Parents’ Choice Gold awards, and the Sidney Taylor Award.

He designed the first McDonalds Happy Meal box in 1977.

Born in New York City in 1932, Taback grew up in the Bronx and graduated from the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Art in 1953. After serving in the U.S. Army, he worked as an art director at CBS Records and the New York Times, and later as an advertising art director at William Douglas McAdams.

Taback formed a successful design studio in 1963 in partnership with Push Pin Studios’s cofounder Reynold Ruffins. He worked as an illustrator, writer, art director and graphic designer, and taught at the New York City’s School of Visual Arts and Syracuse University.

Image found with original SLJ Tribute article.

Taback also was a founding president of the Illustrators Guild, which later merged and became the New York Graphic Artists Guild, where he was a founding member and president. He was an advocate for artists’ rights with his service as author, editor, and production supervisor for the Graphic Artists Guild Handbook: Pricing and Ethical Guidelines.

A lifetime member of the Society of Illustrators, Taback had three children and five grandchildren. He and his wife Gail in 2006 moved from their home in New York’s Catskill mountains to their home town of Ventura, CA.

When Taback wasn’t working on children’s books, he would often enjoy long walks along the beaches of Ventura with his dog Buddy, explore new and interesting variations of all things chocolate, and stay current with most every new motion picture with Gail.

“Simms may have wished that those who loved him would not feel such grief, but the world truly seems less bright without his presence,” says his website. “One does not meet too many quite like Simms, and if his times helped defined him, it may be that such as he will not come again. Along with the astonishing creative gifts he shared with us, he carried a contagious warmth, humor, genuine humility and kindness, and a deep abiding sense of service to others.”

A retrospective of Taback’s work is currently on display at the Museum of Ventura County until February 12, 2012, and many of his old friends from the publishing world went to see the show. At the show’s December opening, Taback’s grandson Oliver, 11, read a letter that he wrote to his grandfather, and another grandson, Nelson, knitted him a scarf.

SLJ Tribute article can be found here.

Image from Pobble's Way, written by Simon Van Booy, illustrated by Wendy Edelson.

by Baylis Greene

“They’re having a kid? His life’s over.”

I heard those only half-joking words at a summer barbecue a few years ago. It took me a while before I could complete the thought: “And a new, richer one begins.”

What’s nice about Pobble’s Way (Flashlight Press, $16.95) by Simon Van Booy is that on a winter walk a father’s flights of fancy match his daughter’s, and the two play off each other. To him, a leaf is a butterfly raft. To her, a mushroom is a frog umbrella.

And the exercise in imagination extends to a menagerie of woodland animals who, in a furred and feathered Rashomon effect, take turns deciphering what a dropped pink mitten actually is. The options: cotton candy, a mouse house, a wing warmer, a fish coat, or a carrot carrier.

Mr. Van Booy, originally from Wales but a South Fork resident-slash-visitor ever since he earned an M.F.A. at Southampton College, is the author of a recent debut novel and story collections that range from well-received to prize-winning, and the language here is fresh: The duck comes “strutting over to the Something”; the mouse “parked her plump body” on top of it. Or simply fetching: “Dusk had stilled the creaking trees, the branches wore long sleeves of snow. . . .”

There’s comedy, too. A mitten?

“ ‘Never heard of it,’ Mouse muttered.” Rabbits are accused of engaging in gluttony when it comes to carrots? “ ‘Some do, I suppose,’ Bunny said, looking at her paws.”

Wendy Edelson’s illustrations, in watercolor glaze, capture the woods’ profusion of life. She hails, not surprisingly, from Washington’s Bainbridge Island, where the wildlife is indeed wild and the greenery so green it practically throbs.

She includes charming endpapers showing where each of the animals makes its bed. Which is where they retreat to as the story, set after dinner but before bedtime, comes to hint at the eternal parental struggle to get a child to sleep.

And the moon “pulled her white blanket across the woods.”

My Side of the Car

At last, a kids’ book that explores life in the car. It occupies so much of a parent’s time, energy, and worry — from negotiating harnessed safety seats worthy of the Space Shuttle to the use of rolling motion as sleep inducement, and what do you do when the kid’s asleep and you have to run an errand? — you’d think they’d have proliferated like so many side-impact air bags.

My Side of the Car (Candlewick Press, $16.99), by Kate Feiffer with deft pencil-and-watercolor illustrations by her father, Jules Feiffer, is about a long-delayed trip to the zoo that gets put off yet again by rain. Complication ensues when little Sadie notices that it’s falling on only the driver’s side of the car. Her dad splashes through puddles and can barely see past the wipers, but out Sadie’s window it’s all garden parties and sunflowers.

(The whimsical book, based on an actual argument the two once had in trying to get to a nature preserve on Martha’s Vineyard, is one of a number of projects the cartoonist had lined up for himself when he holed up in a rental off a quiet Southampton street not long ago.)

Is it merely wishful thinking? To investigate, Sadie steps out of the car and into mud up to her pink stockings. On his side, anyway. She relents.

But one good turn deserves another, and they don’t get far before the sunshine crosses the (psychological?) divide, enabling father and daughter to stride happily into the zoo together. At last.

Orani

You won’t find a lovelier children’s book than Claire A. Nivola’s Orani (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, $16.99). It tells of a family trip she took close to 60 years ago back to the village on Sardinia where her father grew up. (Her father being the artist Costantino Nivola, who kept a house in Springs for many years.)

Like magpies, she and her Sardinian cousins “flew and settled wherever something was happening” in Orani, a small place of stucco and red tile roofs ringed by mountains. The sheer immediacy of life there renders her experiences indelible. “All I needed to learn and feel and know was down there,” she says from a perch overlooking the village.

She eats fruit and figs right off the tree. Women bake bread communally at night to avoid the heat of day; neighbors make the cheese and honey. She walks the streets and through open windows hears plates being cleared. Among the sights are a three-day wedding celebration, a nearby newborn, and, in a second-floor room open to children, a corpse laid out for a funeral, “his face rigid and white and cold with the unspeakable strangeness of death.”

She finds her return home to crowded New York City, with its height and symmetrical layout, equally strange. The book ends with her wondering what different worlds so many people might have come from. It’s a passage with all the feeling, hope, and generosity of a prayer.

Their own Oranis? They should be so lucky.

This East Hampton Star post appeared online on Sept. 29, 2011.

written by Linda Ravin Lodding, illustrated by Suzanne Beaky

The Busy Life of Ernestine Buckmeister
Linda Ravin Lodding, author
Suzanne Beaky, illustrator
Flashlight Press/IPG
527 Empire Blvd, Brooklyn, NY 11225
9780979974694, www.ipgbook.com

The Busy Life of Ernestine Buckmeister is a paean to play, especially for kids. Well-meaning adults end up pressuring children to fulfill busy schedules of performance expectations without realizing that one of the most precious experiences only children will have is free time to play, experiment, imagine, and just be. Ernestine’s busy life should be fully satisfying, with sculpting, water ballet, knitting, tuba lessons, yodeling, karate lessons, and yoga. But something is missing, even though the Buckmeisters hire Nanny O’Dear to help keep Ernestine on schedule. Ernestine begins to look pale and tired. What Ernestine would really like to do is just spend some time playing ball outdoors with Hugo, her neighbor. Ernestine decides to schedule something new for herself. This alarms her parents, who are unable to find her at any of her exhausting, scheduled activities. Finally they find her on top of a big hill, just looking at clouds and inhaling, enjoying the view, with Nanny O’Dear. All adults gradually see the light, and though Ernestine continues to do some of her scheduled activities, sometimes she just plays! The vibrant, colorful illustrations help lift each page of spunky narration. The Busy Life of Ernestine Buckmeister will appeal to overachieving kids of all ages, or 4-8.

Original review can be found here.

Pobble's Way, written by Simon Van Booy, illustrated by Wendy Edelson

Now you can knit cuddly mittens just like the ones Pobble wears (and loses and finds!) in Pobble’s Way. Click here for the knitting pattern.

Note to bloggers (knitting or otherwise): Please help us spread the word about this heart-warming story by award-winning author Simon Van Booy, by posting this announcement on your blog. Send us an email with a link to the post to be entered in our weekly lottery for a free copy of Pobble’s Way. Be sure to include your name and mailing address.

That Cat Can't Stay, written by Thad Krasnesky, illustrated by David Parkins

Did you use pictures of real cats to draw from?

If I have to draw something I don’t know well, I would always gather lots of pictures of the thing so I get it right. It’s easy to do this nowadays with the internet. I didn’t need to research cats, though, because we have kept cats as pets for years. At one stage we had six, but right now we have just three: a big grey one (very like the big grey cat in That Cat Can’t Stay), a black one and a tabby who is quite old (about 19 years, I think) but very sprightly still. I see them all the time, so I sort of know how they look.

What about people? 

Again, I didn’t need to research or gather reference for the people, because I have drawn so many over the years I just seem to know how to do it now. Sometimes, if I need to draw someone in a very difficult position, or they are, say, playing a sport I’m not completely familiar with, I may have to look that up. But I don’t think I needed to do that for this book.

Were any of the characters based on people you know?

No, I don’t know anyone quite like these characters. Although memories of how someone might have stood, expressions they may have had in certain circumstances, that sort of thing will have informed the drawing. It’s important to be a good observer when you are an illustrator. Always notice how your friends stand, what faces they pull, how they react to things. Then you will know how to draw people in similar circumstances. And you can always exaggerate a bit if you want to make it funny.

How long did it take you to create this book?

I didn’t get all that long to do this particular book. I think it took about three months to do the final art, but I was doing other work as well. If I had been able to sit and do just the book, and nothing else, it would have probably taken about six weeks. Add maybe another couple of months for the roughs and discussions, so perhaps five or six months in all.

Were you responsible for the use of white backgrounds and using text as part of the picture?

Sort of. I am given a manuscript, and I know how many pages I need to fill. Sometimes I decide which bit of text will go on which page, and sometimes a designer or editor will tell me (I think that’s what we did with That Cat Can’t Stay). Then I produced a set of rough pencil drawings that went with the text. After I had done that, it was the designer at Flashlight that had the great idea of changing the layout of Dad’s rants, so that sometimes it was boxed like a comic strip, and sometimes the words snaked around the page. She re-sized and re-positioned my sketches to fit, and then I used that new layout when I did the final art.

Did you like drawing for a children’s book?

I always enjoy doing pictures for children’s books. Well, nearly always. Except when I’m a bit behind with my work, then it just seems like work that has to be done. A bit like homework.

We liked the expressions on the character’s faces, esp. the Dad’s. How did you manage to get the expressions right?

Remember that thing about watching your friends’ expressions? I’ve been doing that a long time. But also, drawing is a bit like acting. You have to imagine what the person is feeling, and what that would make them look like. And I’ll let you into a secret: when I draw faces I am usually acting the expression that I’m drawing. I sit scowling as I draw a scowl, and grinning when I draw a grin, trying to feel what it is to be the person I’m drawing. When I was doing all Dad’s expressions, I think my wife must have thought I was quite bonkers.

Did you mean to have the Dad look harsh?

I didn’t want Dad to look harsh, exactly, but he had to look disapproving and completely determined. If he had not, it wouldn’t have been as funny when the rest of the family kept winning, and the cats kept staying. And in the end, we know he’s really an old softy, don’t we?

What is your favorite style of illustrating?

Such a difficult question. I have done quite a few children’s books, and each time I approach it differently. I always try to make the style of the pictures fit the text as best I can. My favourite style is the one that works best with the writing. But I know that’s not really a proper answer to your question, so I will confess that I do like to draw slightly cartoony characters with lots of energy and exaggerated body language and facial expressions. Like Dad, in That Cat Can’t Stay.

Do you like reading books?

I love reading books, but I always feel that I should be working and not sitting enjoying a book because I have so little time. So when I don’t have enough time, I love to listen to audible books. I do that while I work. I find I can listen while I am drawing without any problem, although I can’t if I have to think. So if I am working on roughs, and I’m thinking about the text I’m illustrating, I can’t listen at all. It distracts me. But once all that is done, and I’m just concentrating on the final drawing, I can listen to another book and it’s fine (I really enjoy Charles Dickens). Maybe drawing and listening occupy different parts of the brain.

David Parkins, November 2011

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When a Dragon Moves In, written by Jodi Moore, illustrated by Howard McWilliam

When a Dragon Moves In is included in Barnes & Noble’s Best Kids’ Books for Easy Gifting online store, as well as in their Picture Book Favorites online store.

Written by Linda Lodding, illustrated by Suzanne Beaky

Darell Hammond, CEO of KaBOOM!, an organization devoted to saving play for America’s children, wrote the featured HuffPost article below. KaBOOM!’s mission is to create great community playspaces, ideally within walking distance of every child in America. And here’s what Mr. Hammond has to say about our newest book, The Busy Life of Ernestine Buckmeister: 

Want to know a frightening fact? In neighborhoods without a usable park or playground, the incidence of childhood obesity increases by 29 percent.

As part of our recent Scary Playgrounds! Let’s Find ‘Em and Fix ‘Em contest, my national nonprofit KaBOOM! asked folks across the country to submit photos of rundown, decrepit playgrounds that are in desperate need of fixing up.

By entering, contestants helped further our effort to create a nationwide Map of Play, which charts the location of thousands of playgrounds across the United States. It should be a joyous geography, showing where our children climb and run, laugh and shout, learn and grow.

But alas, scary playgrounds don’t do children much good. Knowing where they are helps us find the Play Deserts – that is, areas where children have no viable outdoor play opportunities within walking distance.

The winners of our Scary Playgrounds! contest are committed to turning these decrepit playgrounds, pictured below, into vibrant community playspaces that encourage healthy, creative, unstructured outdoor play. We at KaBOOM! know it can be done. The slideshow also includes “before” and “after” shots of scary playgrounds that, with the help of community volunteers and funding partners, we have transformed over the course of just one day.

Do you live near a playground that’s overrun by rust, weeds, and disrepair? A playground that seems haunted by the ghosts of the children who once scrambled, screamed, and scurried around there? Add it to our Map of Play by downloading our free mobile app or visiting kaboom.org. We offer construction grants and an online playground project planner so you can get started transforming your own neighborhood playground.

The Busy Life of Ernestine Buckmeister, written by Linda Ravin Lodding, illustrated by Suzanne Beaky

Debut author Linda Ravin Lodding appeared yesterday at Books of Wonder in NYC, alongside Caldecott Award winner Chris Raschka and 8 other fantastic picture book creators, to sign copies of her first picture book, The Busy Life of Ernestine Buckmeister.

Enjoy the fun beyond the book with our many printable activity pages.

Like all Flashlight Press books, Ernestine is distributed by IPG and is available at your local or online bookseller.