Picture Books

for grownups!

I love picture books. There’s something about the combination of images and words that thrills me. Thankfully, I’ve got some handy kids to use as a cover whenever I check out a stack for myself at the library.

My private office collection, mostly pilfered favorites from my daughter’s overcrowded bookshelf.

Having recently become a person trying to learn how to draw, I pore over the techniques of picture book illustrators. Sometimes if I’m reading to my youngest daughter and pause too long on a page, she’ll scold me. “Mom! You’re looking at the pictures again, aren’t you?!”

Guilty.

In my defense, weren’t pictures our first written language?

I’m a little obsessed with cave paintings, too. These horses are from the Chauvet Caves. I once heard Jean Auel (author of Clan of the Cave Bear, set in the time of cave painters) recount in an interview about being invited into Lascaux Caves, blocked off to everyone but a handful of scientists. Author perks at their finest!

But there are also picture books intended for adults. And having recently come across three such wonders, I wanted to share them with you, my fellow adults:

1. Myra Kalman’s Women Holding Things. I first came across her work as a young clerk at the now-shuttered Waldenbooks and bought her illustrated version of Strunk & White’s Elements of Style:

From her Illustrated Elements of Style. I mean, how could I not?

Women Holding Things is meandering but short and profound. I found myself crying by the end.

I like to think that my own aunt, who taught me the piano, only thought the best of me, despite my insistence on wearing mittens during my lessons.

The fact that Kalman publishes books like this makes me feel glad to be in the world.

2. Richard McGuire’s Here. This is a book that looks at one room through the lens of history. Reaching into the prehistoric and then into the far future, with most of its stops somewhere between 1930-2012. Looking through these overlapping storylines is an experience. It will change (or at least send a pleasant shock through) your worldview.

For some reason the background year dates in the corner are cut off but they are 1955 and 1009BCE, respectively.

3. Carson Ellis’s One Week in January: New Paintings for an Old Diary. One of my favorite children’s book illustrators unearthed an old detailed diary about life in her 20s as a broke and aspiring artist and painted pictures about it. I love Ellis’s work and it was oddly so charming to read about the pizzas she split with her pals and the tedious and infrequent process of checking her emails back in the internet cave-era of 2001.

Maybe I’m just nosy and like reading people’s diaries.

What picture books (grown-up or otherwise) do you love?

Cheers,
Lacy

P.S. Apparently, HERE is being adapted into a movie starring Tom Hanks. (How??) As a new fan of the book, however, I’m obviously here for it. Get it?? ;-D

P.P.S. Carson Ellis writes one of my favorite substacks.

P.P.P.S. It’s okay to look at the pictures.