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.