The following program is dedicated to Randolph Caldecott.

Born in Chester, England, in 1846, Caldecott illustrated a series of picture books which changed the history of publishing for children.

With wit and style, he devised pictures which revived many forgotten and overlooked nursery rhymes.

It's hard to forget his frog.

Who would a wooing go.

His four and 20 blackbirds.

His rat that ate the malt and his dish.

Who ran away with the spoon.

Caldecott died in 1886 at the age of 39.

At the height of his popularity.

You are Cambridge and everything I read.

Little boy blue.

A lady with a shoe and a dish.

Run off with a spoon.

The hickory dickory dock.

The scholar.

He's late to the school.

And I like a cow, I jump over the moon.

♪ Rick> Hi.

Welcome to Jump Over the Moon.

I'm Rick Seebach, and today we have a very special program about writing, designing and illustrating children's books.

We have two award winning guests with us, Don Bolognese and Elaine Raphael, a husband and wife team who've worked together on many children's books.

And while they met, while they both were studying at Cooper Union Art School in New York City, they've worked individually on many projects and have collaborated on several outstanding books.

I just found out that they did the illustrations for John Gardner's novel October Light, which is an adult book, as well.

We're happy to have both of them here today.

Elaine> Thank you.

>> Thank you very much... Rick> We want to start by asking, first of all, how you got started in the business of drawing and writing children's books.

Elaine> Well, this was really at Cooper Union, where Don and I met.

This was about 30 years ago.

And at the school, we were encouraged to work together.

It was like understanding what the guild, the old artist guilds were like.

And we did many joint projects.

And from that, after we were married, we did projects together.

Rick> You actually, worked on children's books while still in art school or just illustrations - Elaine> It was part of the program.

Children's books- Don> Children's, children's illustration was one type of illustration.

We had a very strong foundation in art in general, and that was just one of our interests, but we did a lot of other things.

But as Elaine said, much of the class work was very communal and, with the teacher sort of being the master and all the students being apprentices, and very much in the old tradition of the old studios, the old art guilds.

So the idea of collaboration was something that we learned very early in our careers.

Elaine> And the more we collaborated, the more we understood our own artistic nature.

And this is I mean, it's really, even if you have to fight and argue about a situation or design, but you work it out.

And this is how we learned to do it in school from beginning that way.

Rick> I'm interested to know about the first book.

And was it one of those books that Cooper Union that was actually published, or was it after that?

Don> No.

The first, actual book that we, worked on together was a children's book was called A Sleepy Watchdog.

And, it grew out of, a story we were telling our younger daughter who had the chickenpox.

And we made up the story to amuse her.

And, it grew and developed, and we try to have it published and was one of those nice things that worked out.

Rick> Well, let's talk a minute about collaborating.

Elaine> Okay.

>> You both do the artwork as well as the text of the books.

Don> That's right.

We collaborate on both ends of it.

Which is sometimes very confusing to people, but, both of us have different strengths.

And we, try to bring each one of us tries to bring their particular strengths to a project, whatever it is.

Elaine> I would consider myself more poetical in nature, and Don is more structural.

And I'm very concerned about the expression of a book, totally.

And Don is concerned about the totality in design, and we seem to combine this very well.

And at some points we've actually passed the drawing back and forth so it doesn't look like one or the other.

Rick> Well, you make it sound so easy.

Is it ever hard?

Elaine> Well, it's hard, I think in the beginning, when we're conceiving what the expression of the book should be.

But then we get past these rough spots.

It really works out very well.

And we do many books at the same time, so we're actually juggling books.

Don> We actually have many hats while we're working, you know.

And, as Elaine said, one of the more, the more most difficult part of it is getting into it, because the conception of the book, trying to interpret what the author has meant and that interestingly enough, is as true when we're the authors as well as the illustrators, that we have to complement our text with our illustrations and not just repeat it so that it becomes a redundancy.

Rick> Is one more important than the other, or is the text more important than the pictures, or does it vary with different books.

Elaine> Gee I don't know.

I don't think it's...

I think an illustration is there to illuminate a book and it becomes something, something third.

It doesn't stand by itself.

It brings it all together, perhaps- >>-for example, Elaine> I can explain it that way.

>> They say that, it should be more than the sum of its parts so that you don't have a text that's, repeated in the illustration, but when you experience both of them, you have a third thing, as you said.

And, and the best ones, I think that is accomplished, you know, whether we do it or someone else does it that way.

Elaine> And we begin with the subject.

The subject tells us how we should begin to explore this book.

For instance, we could begin by discussing one of these.

Rick> Sam Baker Gone West.

Don> Well, Sam Baker really grew out of, in this case, Elaine's interest in (indiscernible) Tolstoy.

And she unearthed a story by Tolstoy called... Elaine> How Much Man Does One Man Need?

How much Land Does One Man Need?

Don> Yeah.

Elaine> And... George Steiner, a critic of Tolstoy, said this was this story was the closest thing to, an American, a Western man going and conquering nature.

Yeah.

Don> It was >> It was very similar Rick> But Tolstoy wrote it about Russia...Russia.

Don> Right.

But the similarities were so startling.

Of course, we had been interested in Americana for a long time.

And also the difference in how the Indian, treated, the land and the pioneer treated the land.

And so we adapted the story Elaine> and, but a similar thing happened in Russia with the, they have a nomads on the steps of, in Russia.

And when, there was a story that in this particular story, that Tolstoy did was that he wanted as much land as he could.

He was very greedy.

And this Indian felt that greed will really undo him.

And it was the same thing that happened in the West, where men wanted to take over the land.

And the Indian concept, is one can never own this.

So he was willing to go along with this bargain of, yes, you can have as much land as you want, not knowing that it was going to be sold.

Rick> I thought there was going to be a trick when I read it.

And, I was I was surprised at the ending of the book.

I'm interested to know if, you know, there was any sort of critical reaction to that ending.

Sam Baker dies in the end of Sam Baker Gone West.

When he's finally got as much land as he wants.

He's exhausted and dies, and gets only the six feet of ground that it takes to bury him.

Don> Well, we knew it would be, somewhat controversial.

You don't like to kill off the hero in a children's book like that, but it got very good reviews and good response, and it certainly is.

Very natural and organic to the way the story goes.

Another ending wouldn't have worked out.

Elaine> And it is an exaggerated... being a fable was an exaggeration of an illustration of a man bigger than a page they would normally be.

And in all the illustrations is that way.

Rick> Well tell me this is certainly at some point there must have been an idea of Sam Baker that later became an illustration of Sam Baker.

Don> And this is a very early, almost benign version of Sam Baker.

And you can see that he developed... Elaine> This one.

Don> into this and then finally into the of (indiscernible) Elaine> this one.

Don> Well, that's another view of him.

Elaine> Yeah.

Don>This is the final one.

And, you know, he's really quite aggressive and acquisitive in nature, you know, and as he does.

But that is one this is a good example of one approach.

And because of the fabulous nature of it and, the Americana, it came out looking like this, with a very bold and very energetic, style.

The other books we've done, are very different.

For example, the book, for very young children, Turnabout.

But in this book.

We wanted it to be extremely graphic and very simple, because it was for a very young child.

We wanted them to grasp the, the message of it very quickly.

And it was a humorous folk tale about, folk song of early American pioneer life.

Again, our interest has been in that area and some of this grew out of the research we did for Sam Baker.

When we do many of our stories, especially those that are set in historical, settings, we try to research as much as possible so that when the reader enters the book, he doesn't enter a book, only, he enters another dimension.

I think people probably understand this very easily when you're talking about films, because we know how important the art direction in the film is to create this world so that the story has a reality.

Elaine> And it's even rather unconscious if it becomes authentic.

And you wouldn't even know, but you feel that you're in that time and place and that should happen when you pick up the book and you look, especially if it's a star.

Rick> Do you find yourself being influenced by other illustrators?

Elaine> I think we're influenced by painters and artists and in general.

Rick> Yeah, >> I mean, we've many trips to the museum and, you know, days just walking and looking.

Rick> I know from wandering through the children's room in the library that there are a lot of couples who do this who work together.

Any idea why?

Well, I think, children's books was originally a cottage industry where things were done, at home.

And, it's really a small quiet, you know, Don> It's a it's not a, fast paced kind of business.

It's something that must be done in quiet and in private.

And there's an awful lot of research and contemplation about it and development of skills.

For example.

What we have laid out here is a fact of the amount of work that we go through whenever we do a book.

I mean, it's incredible.

You we have stacks of, of, sketches and dummies, which a dummy is a kind of a rough copy of the whole book.

And we do several of these when we, when we're preparing for this kind of thing.

So working together on it is just kind of a very easy and natural thing for us to do.

Elaine> Stories might come into your head, you know, as we're talking at the dinner table, and then, I could go off and go to the garden, and it's is developing in my head, and I need a lot more quiet time than Don does and I tend to write more than he does.

And then we get together and we discuss the dialog, if we're writing this.

In fact, we play parts in the dialog, and, the last book we just did, in fact, the second one is coming out is, Donkey and Carlo, and we kind of switch roles all the time.

And one time I was playing Donkey, and I start to stamp my feet.

I mean, it was a natural thing.

Like I said, no, you can't do that.

And I was stamping... and this is just the this the these characters develop that way, like, out of friendship.

What do you promise each other and how you keep a promise?

And he wasn't keeping a promise and I was stamping my feet and and we wrote the story around this very small happening, Don> Yeah.

That's, that's true.

And we, we fight about who's who in the book, depending on who we think at the moment is the more sympathetic character.

Rick> Tell me a little bit about how it all starts.

Where does where do these ideas come from and how do you know when the idea is right and worth pursuing?

Elaine> You want to answer that first?

Don> All right.

Well, let's take Donkey and Carlo, that's a good idea.

That started with a very we found an old law about sumptuary law that how people were supposed to, by law, dress in the 1700s.

We wrote a story about that.

We sent it to an editor, and she didn't like any of it, except for one little picture and sentence about Carlo and his donkey, and she said, if you could write a story that was very natural about how these two interact, I'd love to see it, Elaine> actually, she said, I think this is the story right here.

And she said, these were two lines.

And, she said, why don't you go home and think about that Elaine?

And she was absolutely right.

I went home and I thought about how the story grew from those two lines, and we built the story around it.

Don> So we threw out everything else about the sumptuary laws and everything, and we just focused on this developing friendship between these two, creatures, let's call them.

And, and that's the way one began, Elaine> Sometimes it's from what our pictures are in our heads, sometimes it's from another author's idea.

We get his picture.

Right?

Don> This is when we illustration for another author.

Rick> But I know Turnabout came from a song.

Elaine> from a song that we found that we thought was, was a lot of fun.

And it was something very contemporary, the idea of husband and wife sharing work together.

Rick> I see, there is a little collaboration involved there, too.

>> Yes.

It's it's like today, what's happening, Don> you know, the reversal of roles.

>> Our children are experiencing this in the home.

We thought this was a good way for them to see how parents work it out.

I mean, it's a little tease too, you know, okay, Rick> Let's walk around and look at some of these things and talk about the, the various stages that go on after the idea is arrived at.

Don> Let's take this one first.

Elaine> Okay.

Letters to horse face was written by Ferd Monjo and it's a story of Mozart's travels to Italy with his father when he was very young.

Mozart was about 13, and, he wrote letters to his sister.

And like any young, person he was, he teased his sister a lot.

But he also included a great deal of information in the, in the, in the letters and the book was conceived by Elaine as the a journal, a traveler's journal of the 18th century.

And everything followed from that, you know?

Rick> Okay.

So they're not actually letters that were written by Mozart.

They were written by Manjo?

Don> Exactly.

Elaine> He created them.

But he did take them out of Mozart's letters.

Yes he did.

And we kind of thought it would be great to do a, a sketchbook.

Like, he would keep a little notebook and do these little sketches of what he saw.

And we even included calligraphy like Mozart would have written.

Exactly the things on the side here, for example, at the carnival or at the opera.

Rick> And now some of these things I can see show progression of drawing.

Don> This is just a very simple progression.

And it's as I said, oversimplified.

We we've eliminated some of the steps, but this is one of the early sketches.

This is another sketch in progress.

This is the finished drawing.

And this is how it looks in the actual book.

It's obviously a, almost a pencil like style.

And you both draw on this.

Elaine> Yes we do, Don> That's right.

Elaine> I mean if you, if you ever have seen Dürer's ....work or lot of the sketchbooks have this sepia look and they do it with this pencil.

So the Conti pencil is sort of orange and we use this and it has a watercolor, technique, a sort of a wash, Don> a little wash of it.

Right.

Elaine> We would, we would a work, we would design, lay it out like, for instance, here lay out and then, we would pass the drawing back and forth and to sort of work out some of the detail or costuming detail, you know, where buttons and, (indescernible) which was at that time all they had.

Rick> A lot of research involved in it.

Elaine> And then this go into the library for a month or two just finding out and some of the, things we discovered, for instance, there was this and this part of these were the early sketches we had to present to the editor, and he would go over, Don> you see how the how much they changed from, when, from the final product.

But one thing we did discover, it was just by accident, was that we found an old engraving of the Cathedral of Milan, which was under construction, the facade of which was right at the time.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Right at the time when Mozart was traveling through there and, yeah, it was a nice little bit of history.

It's not such a great bit of news, you know.

But on the other hand, it, it sort of fleshes out the whole thing and gives an authenticity to the to the book itself.

Rick> Well, now this book seems to be for a little bit older audience than, say, Turnabout or Sam Baker Gone West.

Is that a lot different?

I mean, illustrating books for an older audience?

Don> Actually not, you know, our attitude about illustration stays the same, whether it's for older or younger children.

It's, Yeah, here's the here's the picture of the, cathedral and the construction.

But getting back to the question of how we consider it, we do consider it the age and the age, because younger children, I think, respond more to, kind of a, a bolder, more easily understood picture.

I think all the children can take more complexity in, in the pictures.

And, we adjust.

Elaine> Yeah, they seem to enjoy detail.

Getting back to this, Ferdinando, I didn't even know that the cathedral was under construction at the time.

So when we travel, we did, Mozart's tours ourselves, and we discovered that it was under construction, so we had to change the illustration.

We had done a complete drawing of the cathedral, so we had to put it in like it was under construction, being built.

Rick> So you were actually working with Monjo?

Elaine> Yes.

Rick> Did ever his text change to match something like this that you found?

Don> It might have in one or two small cases, but not sure.

Elaine> He was sure he was very generous with his material.

And we shared a lot.

Don> Yeah, he had a lot of information.

Elaine> He was very concerned about getting everything right.

Rick> Is it at all easier to work from someone else's work?

Elaine> I've no idea.

Don> I don't think there's any general rule about that.

No.

I think the hardest part to say it again is getting the concept, the original concept.

And once you have that and you're and you're comfortable with it and it's amazing how many things flow from that.

On the other hand, if you get a concept which is has a real serious flaw and you struggle to adapt the book to this flawed concept, nothing goes right.

And so we have had instances where, you know, two thirds through the book they'll scrap everything.

As it happened with Turnabout.

Turnabout was an excellent example of that.

Turnabout started out as three folk songs for children.

The young children and the editor kept insisting that the three folk songs would should be included, and we kept feeling that the folk song should be for young children.

And as we kept designing the book, we were struggling, struggling, trying to get these three stories into this book so that they were coherent to children and they weren't even coherent to us.

And so we said there was something wrong.

And finally we realized that for the age group, we were really interested in three was too many.

And we decided we wanted only one.

And we came to a very serious point with the editor.

I see, you know, conflict and, it was resolved in a very interesting way.

The editor went to another publishing house and a new editor came and took over the project.

And it just resolved itself.

Elaine> Well, she saw it differently.

Don> Yeah, she saw it, Rick> I see, and we decide on the one story and going very young and going into, doing it with bears instead of people.

Rick> Talk about that for a second.

It's something that's, that fascinates me.

You know, why is there so much use of animals in a children's book?

You know, why aren't these people that's a story about people, but it works with bears, too.

I mean, and what made you decide to use bears?

Elaine> Well, I don't know.

I just think we like bears.

Elaine> Yeah.

Don> In Vermont, we have bears, in the woods, and we occasionally see them.

That's sort of an a sort of an unconscious thing, but I, we felt that children related more to the animals figures as stand-ins.

And since there was an element of what's the word, controversy or, I don't know what, well, controversy in the story itself between the the husband and the wife, we thought that if we could use the bears, it could be more humorous, too.

Because we have the bears doing a lot of slapstick things, Elaine> And you could almost laugh at yourself if you saw yourself as a bear.

Rick> Okay.

Elaine> Seeing these things.

Don> I must say that whether this is true, whether it works, we don't know.

You know, there's a lot of theories about this, but I, for one, don't have any.

Elaine> ...the editor encouraged us to do this, you see.

Rick> Encourage the bears?

>> Yes, she did very much.

You know, another editor might not.

Rick> So this is...they weren't they weren't ever people.

They were bears in your mind from the beginning?

Elaine> No, first they were they were people.

They were very people from the beginning.

And we had three stories going.

And you see, now, this is where an editor plays a very important part.

They have a vision also has a different vision.

And then you have to collaborate with the editor.

Now some editors make you have for rain and some feel very strongly and they insist upon certain things.

Now she wanted the book to be very, very young.

So she said, let's do a bear.

And I said, fine, this is good with us because we can laugh at ourselves.

And then things got funnier, right?

Because otherwise we just were serious.

And she saw something that we didn't see, and it worked out very well.

>> And you decided to do them in linoleum block print?

Don> Well, the linoleum block, idea came out of our research into Americana, into early bookmaking, and early bookmaking is almost exclusively black print work.

Almost all the early books were printed or reproduced from block prints.

Either would print mostly wood prints and, woodblock prints.

So we thought that was would give it also quality of authenticity because we like when we do a book, we like to give as much as possible, even if it's in a subliminal way.

In other words, we're not trying to teach children or parents about American, traditions and art and so on, but it's there you know, and if you look at it and you look for it or you see something else and you say, oh, you know, that reminds me of what I've seen.

It's a nice sort of enrichment.

Well, we thought it would be a good idea to do it that way.

Even though we had begun with, watercolor techniques.

Rick> These bears look meaner too.

(laughs) Elaine> I think we're working that out.

Yeah, but it went, I think, over a period of time from, color work, just really a very limited color and just really black and white, because the course of the book, as I think it came within the last five years, the cost of the book kept rising.

And we had to really change it because of that reason.

So to keep the cost down.

So we went to just, black and white at one point.

At one point we had we had, played around with woodblocks or linoleum cuts, which were multicolored, Don> but this is a little interesting side note to all three books.

Each one of these books, believe it or not, took at least three and sometimes four years from beginning to end.

Now, we didn't work on these constantly.

But between this and the other factor, it took that long to get them to the point where they they were publishable.

You know, we've always tried to experiment in dealing with books.

And about 1967, I did a doodle, and Elaine was standing over me, and she watched this doodle develop.

And she said, you know, there's a story in that doodle was only about that big.

And that doodle turned into a story called Once Upon A Mountain.

And it was the first time I did a book that was made from only one picture.

I did a picture about that big, and then I did blow ups of each picture.

It was a little anti-war or a fable about not how silly things lead to a war and was and, it, it was funny and kids enjoyed it.

And, but then it led to I like the idea and Jean George have done a lot of science work.

She won the Newberry for Julie of the Wolves.

She did a book called All Upon a Stone, which is a science thing about a mole cricket, and that I use the same technique where I took a whole painting.

This time, it was three feet by four feet.

And I did again, blow ups of the particular, of each particular section.

And finally we did the last book was called All Upon a Sidewalk, which was, The travels of an ant and a crack in the sidewalk.

And, the, the books were very well received, and they even did a film of All Upon a Stone.

But the point was that what it did for the child and a lot of kids, when I used to go out and give this, would say this, to me, they never thought that you could get down very close and magnify a very small section and find within it a whole world.

So that again, going back to what we said, what illustration does it illuminated the world for them.

It made them see what, life through another perspective instead of always, 3.5 feet off the ground or how tall they are, off the ground just looking out like that.

Instead, they saw that world could be viewed another way.

And I think all the best illustrations that are produced do that for a child.

They they let them see the world.

Through an imaginative set of eyes.

And, you know, that's I think that the best thing that could be said for, for illustration, I mean, that's its real job.

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