This fall, HarperCollins is celebrating half-century milestones of three titles, all of which joined the HarperCollins Children’s Books roster with the company’s 2021 acquisition of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Books & Media. These include Cathedral: The Story of Its Construction by David Macaulay and Ira Sleeps Over by Bernard Waber, two picture book bastions of the Houghton Mifflin backlist; and Farewell to Manzanar by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston, a memoir set in a World War II Japanese American incarceration camp, of which Clarion will release a 50th-anniversary edition this month.
Building an Architectural Masterpiece—and a Career
Cathedral, which was David Macaulay’s debut children’s book, launched the writer and artist on his picture book journey in high style. It was named a 1974 Caldecott Honor Book, has been translated into 12 languages, and has sold more than 200,000 copies in the U.S. alone. (Macaulay’s subsequent Caldecott nods were an Honor Book designation for Castle in 1978 and the 1991 Medal for Black and White.)
Initially, Macaulay had a very different vision for Cathedral than what evolved. “My original idea was to create a fantasy story about gargoyles,” he said. “I made two drawings to show Walter Lorraine at Houghton Mifflin. The first was of the gargoyles flying around my boy character. The second was filled almost entirely with the facade of the cathedral the boy’s father was helping build.”
Lorraine’s reaction inspired Macaulay to change artistic direction. “Walter looked at the facade drawing and said something along the lines of, ‘We don’t really need more gargoyle books, but why don’t you tell us about the building?’ ” Macaulay recalled. “I think Walter knew that I was perhaps making up this story because I wanted to show a magnificent architectural achievement.”
And that is exactly what Macaulay did. After researching the construction of French Gothic cathedrals, he said, “I used logic and common sense to lay out a sequence and make the most appropriate drawings—perspective, cross section, details—to give as full a sense of the process as possible. I was so excited to have been given the chance to actually make a book—one that would have my name on it.”
In creating Cathedral, Macaulay was unaware that, with his incisive architectural probe and intricate pen-and-ink drawings, he had found his literary métier. “While working on the book, I had no idea that I might have been carving out a niche for myself, or creating something that would earn the recognition it did and incredibly quickly,” he said. “I was just trying to make the best book I could and that’s all I thought about. I now recognize that I couldn’t possibly have built a better foundation for what turned out to be my career, my life, than with my early books.”
Looking back on creating Cathedral, Macaulay expressed gratitude for being able “to do what I’ve been able to over the startling number of years I’ve been at this. What started with a phone call out of the blue to a place called Houghton Mifflin to ask for a chance to show some ideas I’d been working on led to opportunities that have taken me around the world and allowed me to meet so many people whose enthusiasm and encouragement and intellectual generosity I have been the recipient of. Who could ask for more?”
A Memoir’s Milestone
Five decades ago, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston wrote (with her late husband, James D. Houston) Farewell to Manzanar, chronicling her Japanese American family’s experience living in a California incarceration camp during World War II. The book has become a curriculum staple in schools and colleges nationwide, and has sold more than one million copies in the U.S.
To mark the occasion, Clarion has released a 50th-anniversary edition of the memoir, featuring a new cover; a foreword by National Book Award finalist and Printz Honoree Traci Chee; and photographs by Toyo Miyatake, a Manzanar prisoner who smuggled in photographic equipment to document life in the camp.
Houston’s memoir was inspired by questions posed by her nephew, who was born in Manzanar but had no knowledge of the incarceration camp until he heard about it in a college class. When he asked his aunt to tell him about his birthplace, since his parents were reluctant to talk about it, Houston said, “I began to remember, and found myself choking up and unable to speak, so I told my nephew I would write something for him.”
When she attempted to chronicle her life in Manzanar, Houston became so distraught that she asked her husband, a writer with whom she had never shared the complete story of her wartime internment, to help her capture it on the page. He agreed, Houston said, since he recognized that “this is not a story for Japanese Americans only, this is a story all Americans need to know.”
Waber’s Sleepover Tale Still Spry at 50
In 1973, 11 years after Bernard Waber introduced his loveable Lyle the Crocodile to picture book audiences, the author-illustrator’s Ira Sleeps Over was published, telling the story of a boy’s simultaneous excitement and trepidation about spending the night at his friend’s house. Ira’s emotions resonated widely with readers: the picture book has remained in print continuously, and its U.S. sales tally more than 930,000 copies.
The author’s daughter, Paulis Waber (who illustrated 2010’s Lyle Walks the Dogs), shared some reflections on the enduring appeal of her father’s works—and the essential ingredients he added to his books to create such a rich legacy.
“I recall my father saying that to create children’s books it helps to have ‘inner mirth,’ ” she said. “He had it abundantly and I feel it was present in all his books, including Ira Sleeps Over. As children, and beyond, we found him fantastically silly: his exaggerated—for our entertainment—expressions. His wit. His appreciation for absurdity.”
Paulis noted that another aspect of Waber’s appeal, his stories’ “unforced attunement to children’s emotions,” may well have been rooted in his paternal role. “As a parent, my father was a wonderful listener—perhaps better than we knew when you consider the dialogue in Ira Sleeps Over,” she said.
“He wasn’t one to push his views on us, intuitively allowing us the space to work things out ourselves. I believe he treated his readers, and characters, with the same respect. He saw his job as creating the best possible story book. Plot and characters had to engage; the pace, rhythm, and honesty of the story had to feel right; illustrations needed to balance well with text; language should be vivid; and gentle humor was essential. On top of all that—it had to feel natural. And it did!”
Although Bernard Waber died in 2013, at age 91, Paulis noted that “he remains very much within me. I’ll never stop seeing the world with the perspectives that came from knowing him: that we must care deeply about what we do. That we’re all only human—even if we’re crocodiles—so we should try to be gentle. Anyone who has enjoyed my father’s books knows him too.”
Appreciating Backlist Mainstays
HarperCollins executive editor Bethany Vinhateiro has worked on Macaulay and Waber’s backlist titles and is the editor of Farewell to Manzanar: 50th Anniversary Edition. She offered her perspective on what has kept these three books continuing to connect to multiple generations of young readers.
“Cathedral has stood the test of time because it is transportive in a way that the best nonfiction can be,” Vinhateiro said. “David Macaulay is able to take readers right into a time and place very different from their own. He revels in diving deeply into his subjects and looking at them from every angle, just the way children do when they are trying to understand something new.”
The compelling message of Farewell to Manzanar, the editor observed, speaks to “young people’s profound sense of right and wrong.” Houston’s memoir, she added, “pulls the curtain back on events in American history that were so deeply wrong and, so often not taught. It makes readers question the truth and the institutions they trust, and they’re moved to seek empathy and connection with others and their stories.”
And a key to Ira Sleeps Over’s continued popularity, Vinhateiro said, is children’s easy identification with the protagonist. “There is an undeniable authenticity to Bernard Waber’s voice,” she said, “and children see themselves in his characters and the situations they get into, because his work is guided by a youthful sensibility and an emotional compass that points toward truth. There’s immense comfort in that.”
