Saturday: Brooklyn Museum + powerHouse events

From 12:00 to 4:00 on Saturday, November 17, I’ll join forty or so (!) other Brooklyn authors and illustrators at the Brooklyn Museum’s annual Children’s Book Fair. Says the museum: “Meet your favorite Brooklyn authors and illustrators at this year’s fair, featuring storybooks, picture books, and graphic novels. Enjoy readings, games, and activities for all ages.” Details are here.

Following that event a group of us will lock arms and head over to a fundraising event at powerHouse Books in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Dumbo. I know powerHouse because my studio used to be around the corner from the store, because it’s a great bookstore and event space, and because back when the Book Maker’s Dozen was more of a going concern we had a great time showing some of our prints there. Two weeks ago, powerHouse took a pounding from Sandy — read more about that at Publishers Weekly, here — and Saturday’s event is to help the store recoup. The event runs from noon to 9:00. A formidable collection of authors will be on hand to read and sign (Jonathan Franzen, Rick Moody, Paul Auster, Sarah Vowell, more) and then by around 5:00 our group from the Brooklyn Museum should have staggered in to round out the lineup and sign books. At 6:00, happily, powerHouse will start serving drinks. Come for the sake of the store, come for the children’s literature, or come for the Côtes du Rhône, but come!

PowerHouse will be requesting a $10 donation. Available for purchase will be a variety of donated books and prints, including prints from The Racecar Alphabet and Moonshot. (See above, click to enlarge.)

More information is here and here.


Whether you can make it to the museum or the bookstore or both, I hope I’ll see you on Saturday!

At the library!

I’m excited to have my work included in a show opening this week at the Brooklyn Public Library, “Drawn in Brooklyn.” The show is curated by John Bemelmans Marciano and features the work of 34 children’s book illustrators who live in Brooklyn. (One of them is the talented Sergio Ruzzier, who put together a list of all the artists in the show, with links to their web sites, on his blog. I suppose I could do the same, but why reinvent the wheel? Sergio’s list is here. Grazie, Sergio.)

My contributions to show are original drawings and paintings from Ballet for Martha, Moonshot, Poppy’s Return, and The Hinky-Pink. Several of us with work in the show are also exhibiting process drawings in display cases in the library’s youth wing. In my case (so to speak) there’s a soup-to-nuts presentation on the making of The Racecar Alphabet: initial inspiration, sketches, storyboards, book dummies, revisions, original art, and a scale model Mercedes-Benz 300SL (1952). It’s an honor to have work up in the show. I hope you’ll be able to come by and see it! Exhibit details are here.

Brooklyn Book Festival

This Sunday, September 12, the Brooklyn Book Festival will be held in and around Brooklyn’s Borough Hall. I’m glad to be one of the readers this year, and look forward to reading and sketching at the children’s tent at 3:00. I’ll read from The Racecar Alphabet — not my most recent book, but the one I think best suited to the expected audience category: Children of Varying Ages, Energy Levels, and Attention Spans. If there’s a wave of interest in lightships, astronauts, or Martha Graham, though, well, we’ll see what happens. Event details are here. Scroll down to the “Target Children’s Area” header for a full list of children’s book readers. It’s a great lineup (if I do say so myself), including Tad Hills, Michael Rex, Mac Barnett, John Rocco, Sergio Ruzzier, Chris Raschka, and others. It should be a great festival and I hope I’ll see you there!

The Racecar Alphabet book dummy

Recently I was tweaking my school visit slide show, or what we used to call slide shows. These days I give my presentation using Apple’s Keynote program; no slides are harmed. A benefit to having the show on a computer instead of in a carousel is that video can be incorporated into the talk, and after years of fumbling to show a roomful of students what a book dummy looks like — my old dummies tend to fall apart as they’re being held up — it occurred to me that I could instead or also simply show some video of a dummy in action.

Here, then, is the dummy I submitted when I pitched The Racecar Alphabet. (You can see the video in higher resolution on YouTube here.) When laying out a book now I sometimes fiddle with InDesign but the media here is strictly old school: pen, ink, pencil, paper, photocopies, tracing paper, tape, glue, staples.

More about The Racecar Alphabet is on my web site here, and images from the final book are here.

What would Buck Rogers Drive?

The New York Times points out that this weekend Mercedes-Benz is marking the 75th anniversary of die Silberpfeile — the racecars known as the Silver Arrows. From the Times story, here:

“As the story goes, technicians from Mercedes-Benz stripped the white paint off its grand prix cars at the 1934 International Eifel race at the Nürburgring track in Germany to bring the cars below the maximum weight permitted by the new racing formula of the time, 750 kilograms, or 1,650 pounds.

True or not, the Silver Arrows were born. Manfred von Brauchitsch delivered a win in the debut of the W 25 race car at the Nürburgring. And until 1939, when World War II put a halt to racing in Europe, the Silver Arrows were dominant on the track, matched only (and only occasionally) by race cars from its arch competitor, Auto Union.”

It was the Silver Arrows, as it happens, that brought about The Racecar Alphabet. When I came across an image of one of those cars a few years ago, a switch went off in my head. I had never been much of a racing fan, but suddenly I appreciated how extraordinarily beautiful these cars could be. Here was sculpture, nothing less. It just happened to be sculpture you could drive through scenic European settings at extraordinary speeds. The desire to spend time with those shapes and forms was the genesis of the book.

A few good pictures of Silver Arrows can be found by clicking here and scrolling down to the wallpaper images near the bottom of the page, and of course more are on the Web if you feel up to the image search.

Above: An early and unused cover painting for The Racecar Alphabet, with a Mercedes-Benz W154 in the lead and a couple of Alfa Romeos and a Bugatti playing catch up.

Go like heck

Many of the scenes in The Racecar Alphabet are either of actual raceways, or stand in for moments in the history of racing. The night scene on the V page, for instance, is meant to represent the 24-hour road race at Le Mans. Now there’s a new book about Ford’s efforts during the 1960s to wrest dominance of Le Mans from Ferrari, Go Like Hell: Ford, Ferrari, and Their Battle for Speed and Glory at Le Mans, by A. J. Baime, reviewed here in the Times, that sounds like a lot of fun, if your interests go in that direction.

This also serves as an excuse to mention that I recently received a copy of The Racecar Alphabet from its latest reprinting — its tenth time back to the presses, I’m happy to say. (Tenth big printing? No. But tenth printing!) Thanks to everyone who’s picked up a copy!

Drive on

If you subscribe to Click Magazine (see here and here for more on Click) or read it at your library, I hope you’ll look for Rachel Young’s story in the November/December issue, which is all about cars. I drew some pit stop scenes for the piece, and it was fun to revisit — if briefly — my Racecar Alphabet days. And on the back of that issue, in my regular Click gig illustrating the Beatrice Black Bear comic (John Grandits writes the text—more on John here and here), I was able to cut loose with a lot of vehicle drawings. Behind Beatrice I drew the gas-guzzling International Harvester Scout that I drove in high school and the Vespa that I would drive now if I weren’t so afeared of getting into a wreck on one of those things.

Texas Book Festival

This weekend (November 3 and 4) the Texas Book Festival sets up again on the grounds of the state capital in Austin. I’m glad to be on the roster this year. It’s a great festival, its only problem being that there are more authors to see and hear than time allows. As for me, I’m at the children’s story tent on Congress, Sunday the 4th at 11:00. I’ll be reading from The Racecar Alphabet and Lightship (one book about vehicles that go fast, and one book about a vehicle that doesn’t go at all). If you’re around stop by and say hello. Attending my spiel will also give you a good chance to beat the mobs and to get a good seat for the great Mo Willems, who’s up at 11:30. The size of the Pigeon’s crowd will help keep my ego in check — but it probably won’t beat a few years ago when I was at the signing table next to John Bemelmans Marciano, who was there with copies of Madeline in America and Other Holiday Tales. That book features on its cover (1) Madeline, (2) Christmas decorations, and (3) the Alamo. I bear John no ill will; he’s a smart and talented and nice guy (and he’s dating a friend of mine, to boot). But going up against Madeline, Christmas, and the Alamo in Texas in November — it’s not work for the easily discouraged.

Quasi finito, ancora

Reader, this blog has not the bandwidth to show all of the The Hinky-Pink cover sketches that have been circulating among Team Hinky-Pink of late. Sometime back, when the cover for The Racecar Alphabet was going through design after design after design, my editor, the great Dick Jackson, reassured me, “Oh, these things always go through the contortions of the damned.” And so now with The Hinky-Pink. But the good news is that we are at last arrived at a cover which I actually quite like. The last element that needed approving (received today!) was a revised The for the hand-drawn title. Other illustrator blogs (and, all right, sometimes this one) will show clever little offhand sketches that try to make you think that everything that comes off the pencil is a small glory. Here and today, though, we are not afraid to show the type of stuff that really eats the hours in this line of work. It’s the The.