Items24The creator’s order
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John TennielBorn 28 Feb 1820John Tenniel, chief cartoonist of Punch, drew the 92 illustrations for Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in 1865 and Through the Looking-Glass, cut into wood by the Dalziel brothers' engraving firm. Carroll was a demanding collaborator and the first printing was withdrawn over print…0i - 2
Randolph CaldecottBorn 22 Mar 1846Randolph Caldecott's sixteen picture books of nursery rhymes and comic verses, printed in colour by Edmund Evans from 1878, made pictures move the story along instead of decorating it: a line of text, then a lively drawing showing what the words leave out. Maurice Sendak called him the inventor of…0i - 3
Beatrix PotterBorn 28 Jul 1866Beatrix Potter self-published The Tale of Peter Rabbit in 1901 before Frederick Warne took it on, insisting on a small format that a child could hold. Her watercolours, based on close study of real animals and the Lake District, keep the creatures anatomically right even in waistcoats, which makes…0i - 4
Arthur RackhamBorn 19 Sept 1867Arthur Rackham's tinted ink drawings for Rip Van Winkle in 1905, Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens and Grimms' fairy tales, with gnarled trees that have faces and spindly goblins, defined the look of the Edwardian gift book. New colour printing let his muted washes be reproduced faithfully. His…0i - 5
E. H. ShepardE. H. Shepard sketched Ashdown Forest and Christopher Robin's real toys for A. A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh books from 1924, and later drew The Wind in the Willows for its 1931 edition. His light pen lines leave white space around the figures, so the drawings sit inside the text and are part of the…0i - 6
Jean de BrunhoffBorn 9 Dec 1899Jean de Brunhoff turned a bedtime story his wife Cécile told their sons into The Story of Babar in 1931, a large-format book with handwritten text and big, flat-coloured spreads that read like a stage set. He made seven Babar books before his death in 1937; his son Laurent continued the series. The…0i - 7
Dr. SeussBorn 2 Mar 1904Dr. Seuss, the pen name of Theodor Geisel, drew in a rubbery cartoon style honed in advertising. The Cat in the Hat of 1957, written from a limited word list after a challenge from his publisher, showed early readers could be wild and funny, and Green Eggs and Ham used only 50 different words. Some…0i - 8
Garth WilliamsGarth Williams drew the pictures for E. B. White's Stuart Little in 1945 and Charlotte's Web in 1952, then re-illustrated Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books in 1953 after travelling to the places she described. His soft pencil animals have expressive faces without becoming cartoons. His…0i - 9
Tove JanssonBorn 9 Aug 1914Tove Jansson, a Finnish painter, wrote and illustrated the Moomin books from 1945, with ink drawings full of dark forests, storms and odd, lonely creatures that give the gentle stories an undercurrent of unease. Her Moomin comic strip for London's Evening News from 1954, later drawn with her…0i - 10
Ezra Jack KeatsBorn 11 Mar 1916Ezra Jack Keats made The Snowy Day in 1962 with collage of patterned papers, oilcloth and spattered paint, following a small Black boy, Peter, through a city snowfall. It was one of the first mainstream American picture books with a Black child as an ordinary hero, and won the Caldecott Medal.…0i
