Robert Lawson

Robert Lawson (1892 - 1957) in his dual role as illustrator and author is the only person to have the distinction of winning both a Caldecott Medal (for They Were Strong and Good) in 1940 and a Newbery Medal (for Rabbit Hill in 1944). Although he has excelled both at illustrating and writing children's books, most people are more familiar with his illustrations. His preferred medium was pen and ink and he was known for his realistic, detailed style.

During his childhood in Montclair, New Jersey, Lawson did not show any pronounced inclination to be an artist, but became seriously interested in art during high school after winning a poster contest. He went on to attend the New York School of Fine and Applied Arts. Initially, Lawson aspired to be a commercial artist. To that end, after graduating, he worked in a variety of areas including magazine illustration and designing stage sets for a small theater in Greenwich Village. His service in World War I was spent designing camouflage in France with the Camouflage Section, Fortieth Engineers.

After the war, Lawson's magazine illustrations and other work eventually led him to children's book illustration. His first children's book illustrations, created for George Randolph Chester's The Wonderful Adventures of Little Prince Toofat, were published in 1922. Later that year, he was asked to provide illustrations for Carl Sandburg's Rootabaga Stories when they were published serially in Designer magazine.

In 1922, he also married Marie Abrams, an illustrator and author in her own right. In the early days of their marriage, they supported themselves by designing greeting cards. One story goes that they each designed a greeting card every day for three years in order to earn the money to purchase their house in Westport, Connecticut. This house was named Rabbit Hill and is the setting for the book of the same name as well as its sequel, The Tough Winter. During the Great Depression, the Lawsons moved back into New York where work was more plentiful. It was during this time, in 1930, that Robert Lawson took up etching. His well-known talent for detailed draftsmanship was an asset in this endeavor. When asked to create illustrations for The Wee Men of Ballywooden by Arthur Mason, he used the etching technique. The following year (1931), he was awarded the John Taylor Arms Prize of the Society of American Etchers. Despite his success with this technique, Lawson's preferred medium remained pen and ink. He illustrated very few children's books with etchings.

The book that Robert Lawson is probably the most famous for is The Story of Ferdinand by Munro Leaf. The Story of Ferdinand was one of my particular favorites as a child. I loved the idea of a bull who did not want to fight in the bull ring, but just wanted to stay in his meadow and smell the flowers. I suppose it was the message of individuality that appealed to me. The illustrations of the matadors trying to persuade Ferdinand to charge always made me smile and I was fascinated with the notion of sitting under a cork tree (who would have imagined that corks came from the bark of trees?) My 5 or 6 year old take on this book not withstanding, it created quite a stir for different reasons. Originally released around the time of the Spanish Civil war,some people saw it as promoting an inappropriate pacifist message in a time when the world seemed destined for another conflict; others saw Communist propaganda in the story and, still others, a "glorification of fascist militarism". According to the author, Munro Leaf, it was not meant to be any of these things. He wrote the story in forty minutes one Sunday afternoon to give his friend, Robert Lawson, something to draw that "was not a cat, a mouse, a dog or a horse - something different in children's books."

Lawson's first effort as an author and illustrator was the book entitled Ben and Me, a fantasy devised to introduce young readers to Benjamin Franklin and his many accomplishments. The narrator is a mouse named Amos who becomes a dear friend of Mr. Franklin and who, incidentally, gives Ben Franklin some of his best ideas. The success of this book with young readers led Lawson to continue the idea with I Discover Columbus, Mr. Revere and I, and Captain Kidd's Cat.

As noted above, Lawson achieved striking success both as an author and as an illustrator, winning the prestigious Caldecott Award for his illustrations in They Were Strong and Good and the highly regarded Newbery Award for the text of Rabbit Hill . No other person has excelled in this way with these two complementary, but very different talents. I have mentioned his talent for detail and realism in his illustrations, but perhaps it is also his subtle sense of humor that shines through in both his illustrations and his text that helped him to achieve this distinction and that continues to ensure the popularity of both the books he has written and the ones he has illustrated.


Picture Books

Otter on His Own by Doe Boyle and illustrated by Robert Lawson

Story of Ferdinand by Munro Leaf and illustrated by Robert Lawson

They Were Strong and Good written and illustrated by Robert Lawson

Independent Readers

Adam of the Road by Elizabeth Janet Gray and illustrated by Robert Lawson

Ben and Me written and illustrated by Robert Lawson

Mr. Popper's Penguins by Richard Atwater, illustrated by Robert Lawson

Mr. Revere and I written and illustrated by Robert Lawson

Rabbit Hill written and illustrated by Robert Lawson

The Great Wheel written and illustrated by Robert Lawson

Wa-Tonka by Joe Novara and illustrated by Robert Lawson

Wee Gillis by Munro Leaf and illustrated by Robert Lawson

George Orwell "Politics and the English Language

Over many reading years, I have occassionally heard reference of George Orwell's essay written in 1946, Politics and the English Language. It has always seemed an intriguing essay, complimented or mentioned positively by writers whose discernment I respected. But since it was always incidental to what I was doing at the moment, I have never tracked it down and read it.

Until today.

And now having read it I understand why it is held in high regard. Take a look at it through the link above. A few quotes give a feel for his pugnancious advocacy to not write lazily but do so with attention and concentration. His message is pretty similar to that of E.B. White in his Elements of Style or of Robert Graves in his The Reader Over Your Shoulder which I have always particularly enjoyed.

"A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers."

I especially like his translation exercise.

"I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Here it is in modern English:

Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account."

And then later in the essay.

"A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. "

Not much nostalgia for the old days

Sultan Mehmet II

From Bruce Felton and Mark Fowler's The Best, Worst & Most Unusual.

Most Unusual Archer: Mohamet II was an avid archer who insisted on practicing his art upon moving targets. Citizens straying too near the palace were frequently found studded with arrows, and it did not take pedestrians too long to learn to stay well out of the range of their mad sultan. Understandably, Mohamet was disappointed when he discovered that his people were avoiding him. Left with no alternative, he ordered the palace guard to round up a regular supply of Instanbullians for hazardous assignment as royal prey.

At last, the terrified Turks appealed to Sheik Ul-Islam, an influential man of the cloth, who was one of the few who still dared to approach the world's most imprudent archer. After patient and tactful negotiations, the sheik persuaded Mohamet to limit his practice to eight targets a day - restricting himself to prisoners of war.

Now there's a thank-you

USS Skate, 1943. US Navy Photo

Also from Time-Life's War Under the Pacific. This time it is relating an incident following one of the first deployment's of submarines as life-guards. The USS Skate has been assigned life-guard duty, seeking and rescuing pilots downed in the waters around Wake Island. Though not as glamorous as their preferred hunter-killer missions, life-guard duty was very dangerous for submarines but a tremendous booster of morale among pilots tasked with flying hundreds of miles across open ocean in enemy territory. Skate has made several rescues in this, its first operation.

From the carrier Lexington, some of whose fliers were among those saved, came a grateful signal: "Anything on the Lexington is yours for the asking. If it's too big to carry away we will cut it up into small parts."

Sometimes it comes down to luck

Reading Time-Life's War Under the Pacific, I came across a couple of items.

The first relates an incident in the first twelve months of the war in the Pacific, a period when US submarines were badly handicapped by highly defective torpedoes. But as related, sometimes plain luck is enough to sink an enemy ship.

The (USS) Tambor moving along briskly on the surface at night, fell in with four cruisers and two destroyers, presumably American. By first light, she saw that the warships were Japanese - and they saw her. In the ensuing confusion, two of the cruisers collided. Both were damaged in the crash, and one sank that afternoon without being hit by a single torpedo from the Tambor.

One can only imagine the feeling on the submarine's bridge as the early dawn suddenly reveals their predicament. "Uh-oh" hardly covers it.

Animals in our lives

Animals are not for everyone, no doubt about it. For children they can be frightening, messy, intimidating, rambunctious, scary, clumsy, and terrifying. But they can also be one of the most important elements in growing up. First you know your parents, then siblings, then family, then friends, an ever widening circle of comprehending that there are all sorts of ways of understanding the world. And then you get to pets - how do they understand the world that you as a child know and how do you understand them? When there is a pet, there is also responsibility, caring and (if it's a dog) an unrelentingly loyal friend. OK, maybe cats too.

If you are lucky, animals are not only pets. They are the fellow creatures you find all around us; insects, birds, neighbor's pets, wild animals living in the neighborhood, etc. They remind us of the rest of the world out there from which it is too easy to become divorced and isolated at our cost and deprivation.

I don't have any data to support it but it is my impression that children that have grown up with pets and have familiarity with animals, wild or domesticated, have a more settled and adaptable view of the world - they have a better comprehension of the scope for complicated relationships and for misunderstandings and how to adapt to the unexpected.

As we become ever more urbanized, this creeping isolation from nature can become far more pervasive than is easily realized. A number of years ago when we moved to Australia, (which, despite the images of the outback, is one of the most urbanized countries in the world with 80% of the population living in a handful of cities), I was struck by the lack of knowledge most people had about their surroundings. Everything was of course startlingly new to us. In reading up on plant, bird and animal life in advance I became somewhat familiar with the basic bird types. One afternoon in the first couple or three weeks, one of our neighbors was over visiting and as I looked out over the garden I saw one of the many types of local parrot fly across and alight in the bushes. I knew it had to be either a rainbow lorikeet or a crimson rosella. Each of these birds is brightly colored with various raiments of red, green and/or yellow and blue. I asked our neighbor if she recognized the bird. Wanting to be helpful she stared at the bird for a few moments. Being a true Sydney resident, she then offered that it might be a butcher bird. Now the one thing I did know was that a butcher bird was a big grey bird and there was no way that this flying palette could be a butcher bird. The second thing I now knew was just how urbanized Australia had become.

Animals in children's books seem to usually fall into two categories. There are those stories where the animal is an animal: Misty of Chincoteague, for example or Call of the Wild. Then there are those even more numerous stories where the animal is really a human in cuddlier format: Wait Till the Moon is Full or Wind in the Willows.

There are great books in both categories but their effect is distinctly different. In this essay I am really focusing on the former category; what are the stories where a child begins to learn about the world of animals and how they live?

Even when dealing with animals as animals, there is also the risk of anthropomorphizing them; imputing to them feelings and thoughts that we have no way of knowing whether they actually possess. There was a science fiction writer in the fifties and sixties in the UK, by the name of John Wyndham (abbreviated from his gloriously English full name John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris) best known as the author of Day of the Triffids. In most of his science fiction novels he demonstrated a subtle thought process about framing his stories. While there was an element of fantasy, the real story usually had to do with the central question - How do we understand another life which is incomprehensible to us? How do we connect with the Other, when we are mutually unintelligible?

This is one of the conundrums with animals for children. Animals can seem to be like us in so many ways but we cannot know that they are. Crockett Johnson has a wonderful tale in his Ellen's Lion that tackles this fact head on and is worth quoting at length.

Sad Interlude

The lion lay stretched out on the soft arm of the big chair. Ellen sat on the footstool and stared at him silently for several minutes before she spoke, in her saddest voice.
"You poor thing."
"Me?" Said the lion.
"Yes," Ellen said to him, and she gently stroked his imitation fur. "From now on I'm going to be very kind to you."
"Are you?" the lion said. "Why?"
"Because you're a poor sad old lion."
"I'm not old." said the lion.
"You're not new, either," said Ellen, looking at two places where the lion's seams were coming apart and at the stain, that never quite had washed out, from the time he fell off Ellen's head into her plate of tomato soup.
"And I certainly am not sad," said the lion.
"You don't look happy," Ellen said.
"I'm not," said the lion.
"Don't you have to be one or the other?" said Ellen. "I do. Right now I'm being very sad, in case you didn't notice."
"You've made it plain," the lion said.
"I'm sympathizing with you. Because you looked so sad ----"
"I'm not sad!" said the lion.
"You're angry," said Ellen. "I've upset you---"
"I am never angry," said the lion. "I am never upset. For that matter, I am never in a good humor either. All this talk of sympathy for my feelings is silly, Ellen. I am a stuffed animal."
"I know," said Ellen, sighing. "That's the saddest part of all."
"Sentimental nonsense!" said the lion, and as Ellen stared at him with eyes that were filling with tears, he went on rapidly. "I'm never sad and never happy, never hungry or never full, never foolish or clever, or good or bad, or this or that, or anything else you imagine me to be—"
"You poor thing," Ellen said, slowly shaking her head. "You haven't any mother, either, have you?"
"What has that got to do with it?" said the lion.
"It just occurred to me," said Ellen, with a sob.
"Now you are being ridiculous," the lion said. "You know stuffed animals don't have mothers. We don't need them."
"You're so brave about everything," Ellen said, dabbing at her tears with her handkerchief.
"I'm neither brave nor cowardly," said the lion.
"You're admiration is as foolish as your pity---"
"All right," said Ellen, wiping away the last of her tears and opening a picture book. "I won't sympathize with you any more if you don't like it."
"I neither like it nor dislike it---"
"Oh, be quiet," Ellen said, without looking up from her book.
She was reading a very sad story about a little tree that was lost in the woods. She read it right to the end without saying another word.

©1959 by Crockett John

The Velveteen Rabbit the lion ain't.

Even in the most urban environment there are still books to open a door to the world around us and begin to expose children to that which is still wild, the unknown and even the unknowable. Following are some wonderful books about animals which children love.



Picture Books

Big Red Barn by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Felicia Bond

Home for a Bunny by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Garth Williams

Wait Till the Moon is Full by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Garth Williams

The Kingfisher Treasury of Pet Stories by Suzanne Carnell and illustrated by Michael Reid

Shep by Sneed B. Collard III and illustrated by Joanna Yardley

In the Small, Small Pond by Denise Flemming

The Big Snow by Berta and Elmer Hader

Ellen's Lion by Crockett Johnson

The Legend of Sleeping Bear by Kathy-jo Wargin and illustrated by Gijsbert van Fankenhuyzen

Floss by Kim Lewis

Carolina's Story by Donna Rathmell and photographs by Barbara J. Bergwerf

Hachiko by Pamela S. Turner and illustrated by Yan Nascimbene

Independent Reader

The Good Dog by Avi

The Incredible Journey by Sheila Burnford

Because of Winn-Dixie by Kate DiCamillo

Black Stallion by Walter Farley

Brighty of the Grand Canyon by Marguerite Henry and illustrated by Dennis Wesley

Misty of Chincoteague by Marguerite Henry and illustrated by Dennis Wesley

All Creatures Great and Small by James Herriot

Pagoo by Holling C. Holling

Minn of the Mississippi by Holling C. Holling

Seabird by Holling C. Holling

Call of the Wild by Jack London and illustrated by Wendell Minor

The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams Bianco and illustrated by William Nicholson

Go Home! The True Story of James the Cat by Libby Phillips Meggs

A Dog's Life by Ann M. Martin

Never Cry Wolf by Farley Mowat

Black Beauty by Anna Sewel and illustrated by Fritz Eichenberg

Young Adult

My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell

Mary Azarian

Although Mary Azarian is both an author and an illustrator, she is primarily known for her detailed, painted woodblock prints (often of classic New England scenes), such as those in Snowflake Bentley by Jacqueline Briggs Martin which was awarded the Caldecott Medal in 1999. She developed an interest in art at an early age, making her first linoleum cut when she was in the fourth grade. It was to be a Christmas card with the word "NOEL" carved below the image. Being new to the process, she was surprised to find that the image was reversed when printed. She ruefully recalls that she "wound up with a Christmas card that proclaimed LEON." Some lessons are never forgotten.

Perhaps it is not surprising that so many of Azarian's illustrations for children's books are of farms and country scenes. She was born in 1940 and grew up in what is now suburban Washington, DC, although at that time it was very rural. She recalls "I had the best of two worlds. On the one hand, I lived surrounded by gardens, fields, and woods. I spent hours on a pony exploring what was then still a rural area. On the other hand, we lived within thirty minutes of Washington and its wealth of museums and other cultural opportunities. I spent many hours in the National Gallery, the museum of Natural History, and other parts of the Smithsonian." She studied art, specializing in printmaking, at Smith College in Massachusetts and received a BA in art in 1963. She and her husband, Tom Azarian, moved to a small farm in Vermont in 1967 with the goal of living on a subsistence farm with a cow, a flock of chickens, and a garden. When it became obvious that additional income would be needed, Azarian began teaching in the one room schoolhouse in her area, responsible for children in first through eighth grade. The school had very few resources and, to help decorate the classroom and teach the alphabet to the younger students, she created a set of alphabet posters made in her preferred medium: wood block prints.

Several years later, the Vermont Council on the Arts sponsored grants for artists working on projects with themes related to Vermont. Azarian proposed to create another set of alphabet posters, with each letter representing something that is traditional to Vermont. She won the grant and, when the project was completed, the Vermont Council on the Arts was so taken with her work that they arranged for a complete set of the posters to be printed for every elementary school in Vermont. This set of posters later became a book entitled A Farmer's Alphabet . The prints are all done in black and white and the lettering is in red. Drawing inspiration from her love of gardening, she also produced another alphabet book, A Gardener's Alphabet, in which the illustrations are woodblock prints that have been colored.

Most of Azarian's book illustrations are woodblock prints that are later painted with acrylic paints. This approach is unusual for a printmaker as most printmakers ink the woodblock if color is desired in the final print. It also provides a very different "look". Azarian usually makes several copies of a print, allowing herself to experiment when painting the print so that she can get just the right effect.

Another striking aspect of Mary Azarian's art is that much of it is so solidly based in New England. Looking at the illustrations in Snowflake Bentley, Miss Bridie Chose a Shovel, Faraway Summer, and From Dawn Till Dusk, the location is very clearly New England. The details of the tidy farms and farm houses, the apple orchards, the gardens, the interiors of the houses all have a classic New England look about them. I grew up in South Carolina, accustomed to the look of farms in the South - old ramshackle barns, graying fences, verdant growth. It is a very, very different scene than that of a Vermont farm with its crisp, tended look. I did not visit New England until I was in my twenties, but the landscape was familiar simply from being exposed to illustrations such as those by Mary Azarian and Tasha Tudor, another New England artist and illustrator.

Although it is based in Norway rather than Vermont or other parts of New England, The Race of the Birkebeiners captures the essence of the "look" of Northern Norway. These illustrations are filled with birch trees, thick forests, mountains, traditional Norwegian architecture and, of course, lots of snow. What a wonderful armchair adventure it is to be able to immerse yourself in a story from another time period in a faraway corner of the world, yet have the sense of knowing what it might have been like because the story has been so carefully and ably illustrated.

Mary Azarian continues to run her print shop in Vermont and continues to illustrate children's books, preferring to do at most one a year. I hope you will find as much enjoyment from her illustrations as our family has.

Picture Books

A Christmas Like Helen's written by Natalie Kinsey-Warnock and illustrated by Mary Azarian

A Farmer's Alphabet written and illustrated by Mary Azarian

A Gardener's Alphabet written and illustrated by Mary Azarian

Barn Cat written by Carol P. Saul and illustrated by Mary Azarian

From Dawn Till Dusk written by Natalie Kinsey-Warnock and illustrated by Mary Azarian

Here Comes Darrell written by Leda Schubert and illustrated by Mary Azarian

Miss Bridie Chose a Shovel written by Leslie Connor and illustrated by Mary Azarian

Snowflake Bentley written by Jacqueline Briggs Martin and illustrated by Mary Azarian

The Race of the Birkebeiners written by Lise Lunge-Larsen and illustrated by Mary Azarian

Tuttle's Red Barn written by Richard Michelson and illustrated by Mary Azarian

Independent Reader

Faraway Summer written by Johanna Hurwitz and illustrated by Mary Azarian

The Unsigned Valentine written by Johanna Hurwitz and illustrated by Mary Azarian