illustration

Last week in the South Court training rooms, I gave my presentation “Changing Styles in Children’s Literature.” Although I’ve given this talk on various occasions over the last few years, doing it again always focuses my attention on the strange power of children’s books and sets my mind spinning back to my own dim past, when I would stare up at the family shelf of books in a kind of awed yet uncomprehending fascination. I might not have been aware of much else, but I already knew that those books were the key to some unknown yet highly desirable place. They were full of pictures which created interesting puzzles for me to resolve and indecipherable words which nonetheless buzzed with elusive possibilities.

Scientifically speaking, learning to read is a step-by-step process, each incremental bit building up a solid foundation. In memory, however, it seems much more of a magical transformation. My mother would read the words, I would look at the pictures, and they were always two separate levels of enjoyment. Until a certain memorable day when I began to recognize the actual words myself (something like, “Brontosaurus was a plant-eater”) and suddenly the whole enterprise gelled into one big, amazing package. I would no longer have to make up my own stories to go along with the pictures. And those blocks of text took on a resonance I had never even suspected.

In some ways, this process of integrating words and pictures mirrors the two faces of children’s book illustration, particularly during the twentieth century. One the one hand, there are the artists who stress the individual illustration, without too much concern over the accompanying text. On the other hand, there are those who attempt to blend text and image into a richer whole. Throughout my own readings prior to giving my talk, two names kept emerging: Arthur Rackham and Maurice Sendak. They are the two inescapable masters of children’s picture-making, although each seems to represent an opposite end of the spectrum.  read more »

With new technologies that can make images of molecules, biology has been returning to its origins as a visual science, according to Moselio Schaechter, writing on his blog Small Things Considered. Biologists can now “see” how an enzyme works or how macromolecules interact with molecules large and small, and the revolution is leading to a specialist field called Structural Biology.
The visual origins of biology are abundantly illustrated in the holdings of The New York Public Library, including original and facsimile editions of Robert Hooke’s beautifully illustrated Micrographia. This flea is reminiscent of Hooke's famous illustration, but actually appeared in Harper's Magazine of 1859.

New York artist Julie Rauer has been making drawings at SIBL inspired by Charles Darwin’s illustrations of barnacles, adding textual information, or making lovely colored versions that stand on their own as fine art. As is common with any user seeking to access rare or valuable items, she gets to sit in a special area behind our delivery desk, making it her temporary studio during her visits. We visited her there recently to find out about the latest illustrations, which she hopes to publish as a book, Barnacle Codex.

A project based at Cambridge University is providing online access to Darwin’s personal archives of writings and publications, including high-quality images from his work. The barnacles that Rauer is working on are particularly well represented and can be found here.