{"id":2034,"date":"2010-03-20T17:30:26","date_gmt":"2010-03-20T21:30:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/?p=2034"},"modified":"2011-02-21T23:06:49","modified_gmt":"2011-02-22T03:06:49","slug":"book-design-and-illustration-my-bookhouse-series","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/?p=2034","title":{"rendered":"Book Design and Illustration: My Bookhouse Series"},"content":{"rendered":"

My two year old daughter has always been really interested in books (as I’m sure most kids her age are) and so I’ve been thinking a lot about children’s books–specifically, I’ve been thinking a lot about how crappy looking and shoddily constructed most modern children’s books are.\u00a0 At some point, I’m going to maybe do a full post about specifically about the terrible, terrible binding methods that are employed almost universally with modern children’s books that virtually guarantee that they’ll wind up in the recycling bin in a year or two.\u00a0 For now, though, I just wanted to post a few images from a beautiful set of books that were just passed on to my daughter from a relative: the My Bookhouse<\/em> series edited by Olive Beaupre Miller<\/a>.<\/p>\n

We were lucky enough to receive a full six volume set of the original 1920-1922 edition of the series and they’re all in really remarkable shape.\u00a0 The material is selected to advance as the reader ages.\u00a0 So the first volume is mostly nursery rhymes and such, but by the final volumes selections are things from Robert Burns, Alfred Tennyson, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, etc. along with myths, legends, mythology and Bible stories.\u00a0 I imagine it’ll be a while before my daughter’s interested in reading Don Quixote<\/em>, even the\u00a0 condensed excerpt here, but in the meantime I’m content to just look through them myself.\u00a0 Here are a few scans:<\/p>\n

\"bookhouse_01\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This is the beautiful cover image to Volume Five, done by an illustrator I’ve not heard of: M.D. Charleson.\u00a0 Volume four, though, has an N.C. Wyeth cover.<\/p>\n

\"bookhouse_02\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This gorgeous image appears as the endpapers in the front and back of all six volumes.<\/p>\n

\"bookhouse_04\"<\/a><\/p>\n

What a beautiful title page.\u00a0 I love computers as much as the next guy, but damn that pre-helvetica hand-done typography is amazing.\u00a0 I love the way it mixes so many different typefaces and combinations of\u00a0 upper and lower case letters, yet it all coheres somehow.<\/p>\n

\"bookhouse_03\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Here’s an interior illustration from the Don Quixote<\/em> section.\u00a0 The books use a number of different illustrators, but this individual–I believe it’s Donn P. Crane–is my favorite.\u00a0 What a great image: amazing composition, beautiful draftsmanship, and I love the restrained color palate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My two year old daughter has always been really interested in books (as I’m sure most kids her age are) and so I’ve been thinking a lot about children’s books–specifically, I’ve been thinking a lot about how crappy looking and shoddily constructed most modern children’s books are.\u00a0 At some point, I’m going to maybe do … <\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"footnotes":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[44,32],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p46veT-wO","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2034"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2034"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2034\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2819,"href":"https:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2034\/revisions\/2819"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2034"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2034"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2034"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}