Looking at Picture Books

Deep dives on great picture books are here. The Looking at Picture Books Shop is here. Mac is out on tour with Shawn for the release of the latest installment of their “First Cat In Space Ate Pizza” series (catch the show if you can — we went to the event in Pasadena and they are dialed IN). So I’m left on my own here, but fortunately I have a book coming out that we announced last week that I can talk about. It is a board book, and quite short, but I really like it and I really enjoyed making it.

Deep dives on great picture books arehere. We recommend picture books here. The Looking at Picture Books Shop is here. Below, we look at few titles from Slate’s “25 Best Picture Books of the Past 25 Years.” You can see their list here. MAC BARNETT: Hi Jon. JON KLASSEN: Hi Mac. MAC: Slate has asked us—indeed hired us—to talk about their big picture-book package, “The 25 Best Picture Books of the Past 25 Years.” (Did you like how I called it a “package”?

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Goodnight Moon, written by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Clement Hurd, was published in 1947. Brown, an aspiring poet with a love of the modernists, lighted on teaching as a way to make ends meet. She trained at the Bank Street School of Education, an experimental lab school in New York City. The consensus among her instructors was that Brown was an unpromising schoolteacher but showed potential as a children’s author.

Looking at Picture Books is a Substack about how picture books work, made by two award-winning, bestselling children’s book authors, Jon Klassen and Mac Barnett. That’s us! Jon is on the left. Picture books are real literature. The best ones are artworks as great as any books humans have made. But like all children’s literature, picture books are misunderstood and undervalued, a centuries-old problem we expect to have fixed after two or three posts. People who love picture books.