Hilary Knight

Asked how it feels to see Eloise Takes a Bawth (S&S, Oct.) in print, nearly 40 years after its inception, artist Hilary Knight says, 'To have it appear finally is a thrill. An absolute thrill.' This Eloise adventure, featuring the heroine basking in a bath which runneth over into every nook and cranny of the Plaza Hotel and floods the Grawnd Ballroom, has had plenty of time to marinate.

Knight, illustrator of more than 60 books, nine of which he wrote himself, says that the process of working with author Kay Thompson (who died in 1998) was like no other. Knight's then-neighbor D.D. Dixon (to whom Knight dedicates Eloise Takes a Bawth) introduced him to Thompson. 'Kay was always doing this funny little voice [at parties],' Knight recalls. 'D.D. said, 'You really should do a book with this voice.' ' Dixon knew of some drawings Knight had been working on, inspired by British comic artists, and thought the style would be a good match for Thompson's 'voice.'

Knight points to no single source for his visual representation of Eloise, but rather an amalgam of paintings and people--a black, pink and white image painted by his parents (both author-artists) for a New Yorker cover, a friend (also named Eloise) at the Herald Tribune whom he tried to imagine as a girl, an illustration from his mother's artwork for Little Pictures of Japan, etc.

Knight's description makes the process of collaborating with Thompson sound nearly symbiotic: 'We'd talk about [the images], I'd sketch them, she'd hang them up on a clothesline in a kind of storyboard.' From the very first title, Eloise (S&S, 1955), their books went like clockwork--until Bawth. 'It's the only book that Kay and I took a lot of time with.' All the others were done in a matter of six months and came out in consecutive years (Eloise in Paris [S&S, 1957]; Eloise at Christmastime [Random, 1958]; Eloise in Moscow [S&S, 1959]). Knight feels that the ultimate reason Bawth did not succeed was that the process took so long. 'At the end of the fourth year, when we had completed it, we had decided that it wasn't her best. We had worked too hard,' Knight said. The book is listed in a 1964 Harper & Row catalogue as Eloise in the Bawth; Ursula Nordstrom was the editor, and it was not until she sent the blues of the book to Thompson that the author pulled the plug--though she and Knight 'mutually agreed' that the book wasn't ready.

But the book as it appears today, Knight believes, 'represents the best of [Kay's] writing and the original intent of the book.' Two years ago, S&S editor Brenda Bowen, Knight and playwright Mart Crowley, a close friend of Thompson's and one-time collaborator of hers, got together and sifted through the original manuscript. 'The whole general idea of it remains Kay's original concept,' Knight says. 'Mart has filled in and extended and cut; they're his words and they're Kay's. This was a real collaboration.'

Did any of the drawings from those early days of 1963 make it into the published book? 'I kept a few drawings that I had liked, but most of them were gone,' Knight says. 'What I did have were all the sketches that Kay and I had worked on.' Two of the original spreads were used in the published book: an underwater spread and a sequence in which the tub transforms into a speedboat. 'The boating sequence was just a black-and-white ink drawing and I reworked it. It was drawn on 40-year-old paper, and I added the color of the water.' He described the ease of adding color today as compared with the process used in the 1960s, when he would have had to prepare a separation for the color.

One of his favorite spreads in Bawth echoes a popular spread in Eloise's debut title: a vertical gatefold of the Plaza Hotel's interior plumbing (as it bursts with the pressure of the intrepid heroine's extended soak) calls to mind the vertical gatefold of the elevator in Eloise. 'In the late '60s, they were reprinting [Eloise] and lost the metal plate for it, and asked me to redraw it, and I was happy to,' Knight recalls. 'In the original drawing, D.D. Dixon was standing next to the elevator with her husband. When I redrew it, D.D. by then had two little children, so I added them, plus Greta Garbo and my parents.' The image of Thompson and Knight huddled together, working on books in hotel rooms from Central Park South in New York City to Moscow, affixing drawings to clotheslines as story lines emerged, seems like the epitome of creative partnership. One can only hope that Thompson is in that great Plaza Hotel in the sky, rawther pleased that Eloise has finally had her bawth.

Petra Mathers

Lottie, a cheerful white hen, and Herbie, an always-hungry white duck, are the best of friends. Though these birds occasionally ruffle each other's feathers, one will always take the other under a comforting wing. This reassuring theme is but one of the many charms to be found in the five picture books (all published by Atheneum/Schwartz) that Mathers has set in Lottie's seaside world, from Lottie's New Beach Towel (1998) to the just-released Herbie's Secret Santa (Oct.).

'The books really came from my love of the beach,' Mathers says of their genesis. 'I wanted to write something about going to the beach, and I prefer drawing animals to people. I am very fond of white chickens--I love their shape, the contrast of the red cockscomb and orange feet. So I wrote a story about a chicken enjoying a glorious, beachy, wonderful, peaceful day without any major events. My editor encouraged me to add some other characters. When the book was done, I realized I wanted to be there with them [Lottie and Herbie] in that world. Within two weeks I had outlined two more stories.'

Lottie and Herbie's various outings--to a wedding or a poetry contest, for example--zip along with sharp humor (and some downright silliness) and heart, and usually introduce other pals in the town of Oysterville, such as exotic German bird Dodo or crusty Captain Vince, a retired rescue pilot. In Herbie's Secret Santa, Herbie's 'bottomless belly' gets him in trouble: he clandestinely gobbles up a Christmas cookie from a holiday display at a bakery and is wracked with guilt until he can set things right.

It turns out Mathers drew from personal experience to craft the tale. 'When I was a child I stole a package of Wrigley's chewing gum,' she admits. 'I know what it was like during those days until I worked up enough courage to tell my mother. I apologized to the girls from whom I had stolen the gum and I replaced it, but I never forgot those feelings.' Translating the experience to Oysterville just seemed fitting. 'I love Christmas and Herbie loves to eat, so it would be his greatest temptation to steal a cookie.'

Mathers notes that writing her own stories--she often illustrates texts by other authors--is not an effortless pursuit by any means. 'Even though I know these characters so well, none of the stories is easy. I write very slowly. The whole thing takes about a year. I make it up in my head until it's there, and I'm always talking out loud when I walk the dog in the morning,' she says with a laugh.

Judging from the letters and comments Mather receives, her fans are grateful for Lottie books on any schedule. 'They love Herbie the most because he really is all of us,' she says. 'Kids know all the funny lines from the books, but they really love the characters; they feel they are friends of theirs. They don't seem to miss having children in the stories at all. The books are lighthearted, but they are still about the same pain we all go through. Lottie could just as easily have been a matronly person [instead of a chicken].'

As for Lottie's future, there's no telling when she'll fly the Oysterville coop. 'We all thought it would end at three books,' Mathers says, 'but I've just finished the dummy for the sixth one [due in summer 2004]. Some people say that in a way it's detrimental to do a series. But I don't care. Children love the books. And I know how wonderful it is to have a whole big fat world of characters to explore.'

Forthcoming Lottie books may focus on Aunt Mattie and her life in the city, and book six features Baby Rose, 'a little girl we've already met twice [in the books],' Mathers says.

While she waits to hatch more Lottie stories, Mathers is also turning her hand to illustrating 'a manuscript from heaven' about French composer Erik Satie by Feed author M.T. Anderson, which will be published by Viking in fall 2003. 'It's a great opportunity to really let loose with my imagination,' she says. 'I'm extremely busy, but I love my work.'

She believes that the right time to end Lottie's adventures will eventually present itself. 'People think that once you hit on a good thing you're going to hammer it into the ground. The Lottie series is not a smashing hit by any means, but it is gaining ground. I have this way I want to go, and I'm going to keep on going.' Sounds like Mathers and Lottie are truly birds of a feather.

Chris Van Allsburg

It's been 20 years since Peter and Judy opened a mysterious board game named Jumanji that unleashed chaos inside the covers of the eponymous picture book and a virtual juggernaut of success for the author and illustrator. In addition to being awarded his first Caldecott Medal (he received a second in 1986 for The Polar Express), Chris Van Allsburg also snagged a movie deal and the kind of exposure that most authors and illustrators dream of.

This fall, Van Allsburg is making a return trip to the visual landscape he explored in Jumanji with a sequel entitled Zathura (Houghton Mifflin, Oct.). 'Each of the 20 years that has passed since Jumanji has brought a lot of mail from kids asking me what happened to Walter and Danny Budwing,' says Van Allsburg. 'I thought it might be interesting to figure out the answer.'

The characters he's referring to are introduced on the last page, running off with the board game and clearly headed for trouble. Deciding what befalls them caused Van Allsburg 'a little trepidation,' he says. 'Sequels often cross territory that's already been explored in the first effort, and sometimes they're dismissed as not particularly creative undertakings. I wondered if it would be possible to tell a story that actually worked on its own.'

And so he decided to have the Budwing boys discover another game wedged in the bottom of the Jumanji box, a game that whisks them off to outer space and a wholly different set of adventures.

'The theme here is slightly different as well,' Van Allsburg notes. 'The boys have a relationship which I think is a little more pronounced than anything we knew about the siblings in Jumanji.'

Not surprising, given that the author-illustrator has become a father himself in the intervening years (he has two daughters) and is now fully versed in sibling relationships. 'I didn't have to fish around very much for the patterns of behavior for an 11- and a seven-year-old,' he admits with a laugh.

In fact, his daughters served 'not only as the behavioral but also the figurative models for the book,' he says, explaining that he had to 'slick their hair back so I could see their ears. They'd get a little edgy--the last picture I drew was one where they're wrestling, and they were really getting into it.'

Fatherhood also brought another significant change in Van Allsburg's life: he gave up teaching at Rhode Island School of Design to be at home with his girls. 'I found that the time that I spent away from the drawing board in the classroom, time that brought me a fair amount of pleasure and gratification, was now going to be spent with other young people.'

Like Jumanji, Zathura is also illustrated in black and white, a medium Van Allsburg notes 'is becoming stranger and stranger--it's almost vanished from newspapers, and you never see it in broadcast anymore.' At the same time, it has become more intriguing to him, and he points to the Coen brothers' recent movie The Man Who Wasn't There as an inspiration. 'The quality of light and mood and atmosphere in the film was just so compelling to me; it reconfirmed my conviction that black and white really can do it all,' he says. 'Plus, it reproduces so much better than color.'

Creating Zathura took Van Allsburg about six or seven months, he estimates, fairly average for one of his books. 'I work on a story for two or three weeks, and once I have a pretty good rough draft I start doing sketches. I do a lot of sketches, because for those 15 images I choose to put in a book, in telling that story in my mind there are 10,000 images. The process of trying to pick the ones that will add as much story value as possible to each page is a critical one.'

As for what else he has up his sleeve, Van Allsburg says he's juggling several projects, including something that's been in development as a film for a long time. Zathura, meanwhile, has been optioned by Sony/Columbia, which also produced Jumanji. Whether or not he will be involved in the making of the movie remains to be seen at this point, he says. 'With Jumanji I was pretty thickly involved, and I assume that, because I know the producers and they might value the contributions I could make, I might be involved in the development of Zathura.'

Still, he hastens to add, 'an optioned project is just the first baby step. There's a long stairway to climb.'

Elise Primavera

You better watch out, we're telling you why: Auntie Claus is coming back to town. Santa's spirited sibling makes an appropriately grand return in Auntie Claus and the Key to Christmas (Harcourt/Silver Whistle, Oct.), Elise Primavera's follow-up to her smash-hit picture book Auntie Claus (Harcourt/Silver Whistle, 1999).

In the magic-tinged and richly whimsical Auntie Claus, young Sophie Kringle learned that her great Auntie Claus is none other than Santa's sister. In the sequel, it's Sophie's younger brother, Chris, who discovers the family secret. 'This book is kind of a mirror image of Auntie Claus, but this time it's Chris's version,' Primavera says.

Both books feature scenes at New York City's fictional Bing Cherry Hotel (home to the Kringles and Auntie Claus) as well as the North Pole, providing Primavera with ample opportunity to stretch her illustrator wings. For Key to Christmas she has created night skies swirling with stars and snowflakes, a sophisticated cityscape aglow with twinkling holiday lights and an elaborate rendering of Santa's traditional stomping grounds. 'I didn't get to show much of the North Pole and other aspects of that world in the first book,' Primavera says. 'I have such a clear vision of how I saw it in my mind as a kid; I wanted the chance to explore some of that.'

Understandably, the aforementioned artwork didn't come without some creative blood, sweat and tears. 'It's amazing how much time it takes to do a book like this,' Primavera says of creating a series of finished paintings that are 20 x 30 inches each. 'I'm not even aware of how many hours I'm spending as I'm sitting there. I thought this book would be easier than the first since I already knew the characters so well. But it took me a year just to figure out the rough draft because I kept reworking things. I feel such a responsibility for the whole Santa Claus thing because it's such a big part of children's inner lives. I don't want to do anything that will tarnish that.'

And now that Auntie Claus and the Key to Christmas has been delivered safely, Primavera knows there is at least a third Auntie Claus book to come. 'I've never worked on books that have been so character-driven,' she says. 'There's a lot of material in my mind about this world. All of the characters are screaming for attention. I go away to work on something else and when I come back they seem to be saying, 'All this stuff has happened while you were gone!' '

In the meantime, Auntie Claus fans and booksellers already have plenty to celebrate. An Auntie Claus Christmas window display originally unveiled at Saks Fifth Avenue in New York City in 1999 is still traveling the country, though it's not been announced where it will set up shop this holiday season. An Auntie Claus film is 'alive and well,' according to Primavera; it's currently in development for Nickelodeon Films/Paramount. And Primavera embarks on a Key to Christmas bookstore tour in early November.

After the cross-country Auntie Claus flurry, Primavera will be back at work, both on book three (she provides only a hint: 'I think Baron von Bing has a little thing for Auntie Claus'), as well as a non-Auntie Claus book. But her biggest project for the coming year, she says, is to get a dog. 'I'm getting a Wheaton terrier puppy right after Christmas.' Auntie Claus, a great dog lover herself, would certainly approve.

Judith St. George and David Small

Following up on their Caldecott Medal-winning So You Want to Be President?, author Judith St. George and illustrator David Small are back in bookstores this autumn with So You Want to Be an Inventor? (Philomel, Sept.).

The book isn't really a sequel, says St. George, but rather part of a trilogy ('if you want to use that pretentious word,' she says) that was envisioned from the beginning. The duo's third title, So You Want to Be an Explorer?, is tentatively scheduled for release in fall 2004.

Why the spotlight on inventors this time around? Simple, says St. George. It runs in the family. 'My grandfather was an inventor. He invented a process having to do with Bessemer steel.' In addition, St. George's son holds patents on a new computer system.

So You Want to Be President? marked St. George's first foray into picture book territory. 'I had to get used to the fact that in a picture book, a bad sentence here or there just wasn't going to make it,' she says. 'It's almost like writing poetry--every word has to count.'

Being teamed with Small was a stroke of luck, she says. 'Patty [Patricia Lee Gauch, St. George's longtime editor at Philomel] put us together,' she recalls. 'David and I hit it off like gangbusters, and we've been good friends ever since.'

For his part, Small says he jumped at the opportunity to illustrate So You Want to Be President? 'It gave me a chance to combine these two worlds I inhabit,' he explains, 'one being children's book illustration and the other being my former life as an editorial artist for newspapers and magazines like the New Yorker, the New York Times and the Washington Post.'

Winning the Caldecott 'was just a wonderful, wonderful thing,' he says, 'but on the other hand it's a full-court press, and the pressure in my case was as much internal as external.'

In fact, though the illustrations for Inventors were complete at the time he won the award, 'when I came back from [the Caldecott ceremony in] San Francisco, I redid the whole thing--repainted it from scratch!' When he looked at the artwork for the book pinned up on the walls of his studio, he recalls, 'I said this just isn't good enough. The color wasn't strong enough--I didn't even like the paper it was on. So I changed a lot, and I think it was better in the long run.'

Although being the author of a Caldecott winner didn't have quite the same effect on St. George, who notes that 'my first book came out in 1969, so to get this kind of publicity and recognition at this point in my career is really terrific,' she certainly understands all about revision.

A self-confessed information wonk ('I love to research--I could do it forever!'), St. George says that each of the three picture books took her about a year to write. Much of that time was spent 'reworking, reworking, reworking,' she says. 'I wrote about three times as many inventors as we actually used, for instance, and I think I've written the Explorer manuscript 20 times.'

Small, who often illustrates books written by his wife, Sarah Stewart (the pair won a Caldecott Honor in 1998 for The Gardener), says he has several projects up his sleeve at the moment, including another collaboration with Stewart tentatively titled The Friends. He's also the featured artist in a traveling exhibit sponsored by the National Center for Children's Illustrated Literature in Abilene, Tex.

Asked whether there will be more books in the So You Want to Be... format down the line, St. George laughs. 'My 10-year-old granddaughter wants me to write So You Want to Be a Movie Star? She thinks that would be the best book ever. I told her, 'Emily, I'll think about it!''

Holly Hobbie

When she published Toot & Puddle back in 1997, Holly Hobbie had no intention of creating another tale featuring this pair of pig pals. 'I never anticipated writing a series--I'm just not that organized,' the author muses. 'When I finished the first book, I thought that was it.'

But she changed her mind and went on to write six subsequent tales in relatively quick succession. Little, Brown released the sixth caper, Toot & Puddle: Top of the World, last month with a 75,000-copy first printing. And next fall the publisher plans to issue the seventh, Toot & Puddle: Charming Opal, which introduces Puddle's young cousin.

Why the change of heart? 'Well, I had had so much fun writing the first book and the response to it was so positive that I decided to do a second one and then the others sort of followed,' she replies. 'After the first story came out it occurred to me that I really wasn't ready to leave Toot and Puddle where I'd left them and move on to a whole new story with different characters.'

Hobbie acknowledges that the impulsive, adventurous Toot and the timid, stay-at-home Puddle are never far from her consciousness. 'A single day does not go by without my thinking about them,' she says. 'I live in a quiet, isolated place and if I go into town to do some shopping I always visualize Toot and Puddle there and wonder what they would do in various situations. The other day I was watching a ballroom-dancing competition on TV and I envisioned Toot and Puddle in that setting. They're always right there--and very alive for me.'

And, quite clearly, alive for children as well. Hobbie receives a steady stream of correspondence from her sizable stable of fans (combined sales of the first five Toot & Puddle tales topped 500,000 copies). 'I'm gratified that these characters are so real for children, though it is an enormous responsibility for me,' she remarks. 'The kids I hear from and those I meet at book signings believe in Toot and Puddle so much that I find it amazing and a bit daunting. They are always curious about what these friends will do next and make many recommendations, including putting them in a spaceship and sending them to the moon.'

Though they don't explore outer space in Top of the World, Toot and Puddle do venture far from their Woodcock Pocket home. In fact, Puddle leaves home for the very first time when his buddy goes for a walk and fails to return by nightfall. Intuitively mimicking Toot's every step, Puddle tracks his pal to a town in Provence and the two go on to climb Mount Everest together before returning home. 'A whim motivates Toot's travels, but his devoted friendship to Toot motivates Puddle to take his first trip away from home,' says Hobbie of the core message of this episode. 'I always try to deal with real and universal childhood themes in my own way--giving them, I hope, a fresh look.'

And, Hobbie comments, as long as she can keep her Toot and Puddle stories 'vital and fresh,' she will continue to create capers starring these complementary characters. 'I do have more stories to write--there's no question about that. But I definitely don't want these books to become formulaic. The moment I feel they are no longer challenging to create and that something new isn't going on then I won't go any further and I'll give Toot and Puddle closure. But that's not happening now.'