Tove Jansson pictures

All these pictures were stolen from this website celebrating Tove Jansson.

What James Marshall said

Leonard Marcus interviewed James Marshall (author of George and Martha, among many other books) for Publishers Weekly in 1989. The same interview was included in Marcus' book Ways of Telling.

- I think I became an artist because I wanted a studio, because I wanted to buy art supplies.

- I quickly realized that I would die of a stroke if I had to teach high school for the rest of my life. That's when I started drawing. That's when the doodling began.

- I think I also got into doing children's books because I thought it would be easy. It's a lot of fun sometimes - but it ain't easy.

- Doing two- or three-page stories is the hardest thing.

- I've ruined so many books with no-good endings. 

- I really cannot stand it if something in a picture is misplaced.

- I have the beginnings, I guess, of a hundred stories that never went anywhere, which I know somebody could finish.

Since I couldn't find any good pictures of our James Marshall, I'm posting a portrait of this other James Marshall, second President of Coe College (1887-1896).

What else Arnold Lobel said

- There's a statue in Central Park of Hans Christian Andersen with children climbing all over it. Hans Christian Andersen was a fussy, prissy, old maid of a bachelor, and I don't think he would have children anywhere within 10 miles of him.

- We've all met children who don't seem to have a sense of humor and they grow up to be adults without a sense of humor.

- I think one of the most personal books I've ever written was Owl at Home. It came out last year. It's more personal than any of the other books. 

- I notice that all of my books are rather home-bound.

What Arnold Lobel said

Quotes from an old interview in The Lion and the Unicorn.

- I began writing for children because I couldn't do anything else.  

- I really don't quite know what I'm doing.  

  

- Toad is a neurotic and Owl is a psychotic. 

- You tend to like your friends' work. You meet people in the field, and if you like them, you like their work. If you don't like them, you don't like their work. It's very strange. And sometimes a terrible thing is, you meet an artist whose work you hate but you like him and you don't know what to do.

Unobtrusive genitalia

From an Amazon customer review of the anthology Guys Write For Guys Read:

[...] there is also an illustration of a monster, drawn when the artist was in fifth grade, I believe, that shows the monster's genitalia. It's unobtrusive, but its [sic] there. I'm having to black it out with a felt-tip so I can make the book available for my middle school students.

He's talking about my Sprokostagorubolonoso. Unobtrusive is probably the worst thing one can say about a penis.

Here's the culprit:

The Hey Diddle Diddle Picture Book by R. Caldecott

The Underground Sketchbook

Today is Tomi Ungerer's birthday (and mine too!)
Here's a book of his published by Viking in 1964.