I'm fairly sure I never heard of Richard Scarry when I was growing up. I'm not sure why, but I never came across his books (which began appearing before I was born) until well after I was an adult and they became the subject of pop culture references. It looks like Busy Town came out in 1976, when I was almost finished with high school, so maybe his books just weren't circulating that much in libraries before that.
Anyway, I had still never heard of The Animals' Merry Christmas (by Kathryn Jackson, art by Scarry) until yesterday, when one of my relatives shared this on Facebook:
It would be cool to get a copy of this book — from the second year of his book-illustration career — to see how all of the images presage the later appearance of Scarry's work. There are quite a number of versions of it, including at least two different
ones from the publication year 1950 that claim to be first editions. It looks like one is a Big Golden Book and one was not, and there might be a Little Golden Book from the same year... it's pretty hard to sort out.
As you can see in this single example, Scarry's animals already had a lot of personality, while the illustration style was much more complicated than it became.
No comments:
Post a Comment