What were your favorite picture books when you were a child? I’m especially interested in ones that aren’t as famous as Where the Wild Things Are and Goodnight Moon.
Two that I fondly remember (and own) are Jenny’s Hat by Ezra Jack Keats and Andrew Henry’s Meadow, by Doris Burn.
Margarite Henry’s Album of Horses, illustrated by Wesley Dennis. I LOVED that book as a little girl, carried it everywhere till it fell apart and tried so, so hard to draw those lovely horses. I loved that book so much I bought a copy of it off eBay a few years back, just because…
The Snowman.
The Pokey Little Puppy, a Little Golden Book. I was recently dismayed to hear that my mother came to hate this book because I would ask her to read it to me all the time. She tried to get through it faster by skipping a page, but I always noticed.
The Monster at the End of This Book, another Little Golden Book, featuring Grover from Sesame Street. I always thought it was very clever, even before I knew what “breaking the fourth wall” was. Although this might be considered one of the more popular books, because my sister showed me that there is now an iPad version of it, which she got for her kids.
All of the Frog and Toad books by Arnold Lobel. I always thought the pictures were great, and loved the simple stories of two friends just doing everyday activities.
Sylvester and the Magic Pebble. I don’t remember the author. It was kind of a goofy story about a donkey who gets a wish-granting pebble.
When I was a kid, my older sister had a bunch of books in the “Sweet Pickles” series, which had a book for every letter of the alphabet, each featuring a different animal and how they overcome their faults. I used to love those, particularly Elephant Eats the Profits (an elephant has to stop snacking or she’ll put her store out of business) and Fixed by Camel (a carpenter camel teaches a kangaroo a lesson about practical jokes).
Why do I remember all this in so much detail? Beats me. For someone who had a rather unhappy childhood (poor social skills, few friends) I certainly get very nostalgic for it.
Full Moon Soup by Alastair Graham. (Not actually from my childhood because it was published only twenty years ago.)
Hojo the Laughing Dragon by… I have no idea. I haven’t seen the book in years. But it was one of my early favorites. I didn’t really learn to read until second grade, but when I was four I would sit down and “read” it anyway, because I had memorized every word.
The Tall Book of Make Believe. Very imaginative stories, but the best thing about the book is the amazing illustrations. I used to look at the pictures and make up my own stories. My book was printed in the '40s, and not in very good shape, but I still look at the pictures now and then. Truly extraordinary book.
The Pokey Little Puppy is my all time favorite Little Golden Book picture book. We used to make my mom read it all the time. I bought the book for my son before he was even born. I never got tired of reading it.
We also loved Sylvestser and the Magic Pebble, Alexander, and Hooray for Captain Jane.
I liked a Golden Book about twin girls who always dressed alike, and then one decided to get her hair cut. It sounds stupid, but I liked it. It was illustrated by Eloise Wilkin and I liked the way she drew, too.
My daughter liked The Nightgown of the Sullen Moon.
OMG! Me, too! (didn’t buy it, but LOVED it to death in my horsey days!)
“Little Pictures of Japan” by Olive Beaupre Miller and Katharine Sturges - Japanese art and haikus. To this day I love spare Japanese art prints and paid upwards of $60 for a print of Mt. Fuji to go with my print of The Big Wave.
William Steig, who also wrote Shrek.
My favorites: A Big Spooky House, by Donna Washington. Beautiful, and fun to read out loud, too. There are hidden cats in all the illustrations.
A Dark, Dark Tale, by Ruth Brown. Just one cat this time, and the pictures are even more beautiful.
Stephen Cosgrove’s Serendipity books, like Leo the Lop.
Anything by Audrey and Don Wood, like The Napping House and King Bidgood’s in the Bathtub.
Also a really obscure series from a German baron called Wolo, I’d love to see Friendship Valley or Amanda made into an animated film.
Another vote for “Monster at the End of this Book”.
Leaving aside a zillion Dr. Seuss books, I have fond memories of “Our Animal Friends at Maple Hill Farm”. I’ve never seen anything else quite like it, with its beautiful pictures and descriptions of horses that bite people, cows that get tangled in barbed wire fences and dogs that were hit by cars.
I’m 51 years old and still in my ‘horsey days’!
There was a book simply called ‘Gnomes’ by Wil Huygen that really captured my imgination when I was a kid. It showed the day-to-day lives of Gnomes and I loved it.
My kids really like the ‘Corduroy’ books by Don Freeman.
Super-popular, but both me and my kids love the Busytown books.
Well, for me the obvious answer is Dr. Seuss. My faves were If I Ran the Circus, On Beyond Zebra, and The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins.
I also had (and still have) an old edition of The Snow Queen with amazing, surreal, Art Nouveau illustrations. IIRC, they were done by three women… I’ll have to get their names; I’m pretty sure the illustrations contain signatures.
The Frances the Badger books by Lillian and Russel Hoban, especially Bread and Jam for Frances.
I grew up in the 70s in rural New Zealand, and a lot of children’s books in our School library had artwork with a very 50s or earlier style, and it wasn’t until the 80s that there was a mini-revolution where those older books were flushed out of the system and a huge influx of new, more relevant stories and art streamed in. So my era was on the cusp of change.
I taught myself to read before I started school, so I didn’t need to bother with those First Reader type books that were central to what the other kids had to deal with, but nonetheless, being an artist of sorts, I was fascinated by the imagery in some of them anyway.
Quite a well known one locally was A Lion In The Meadow by Margaret Mahy. I can’t recall if I personally loved the story or its illustrations, I just know it was popular. In retrospect it was quite beautiful. Margaret Mahy has had some small amount of international success, too, so you may have heard of her. I met her once, she’s a very charismatic woman.
I know I loved the art of In The Night Kitchen, a slightly less well known book by Maurice Sendak.
I read a lot of American classics of the era, like Dr Seuss and the Berenstain Bears, where there’d be loads of quirky tiny things somewhere in the illustrations that would fascinate me. The Richard Scarry books were a particular love for that reason, and I pored over The Best Word Book Ever hundreds of times right up to my early teens, because it was just a glorious tome.
Before I started school, there was a book I used to get from the local library so often they eventually just let me keep it. And then soon after we had a house fire, and lost everything, so I now cannot remember what that book was. It had a huge array of simple images in rows and rows, animals, cars, houses, trees, that kind of thing. It wasn’t Richard Scarry, but it had a similar intent; learning by information overload. Wish I knew how to search on it, but it’s just a vague blob in my memory.
The Three Billy-Goats Gruff
But not just any version. It has to be this one, with absolutely charming woodcuts by Susan Blair. I can still remember reading this in my mom’s lap some 40 years ago.
