When Illustrators Surprise You

Brinton Turkle: Purveyor of Terror.

For that statement to strike you funny you have to first be familiar with the collected works of a man that, I would argue, was the most successful Quaker author/illustrator in the business.

Today I want to tackle the phenomenon of what happens when you discover a new book from your favorite illustrator, only to discover that it’s surprising in some way.  This can happen with someone publishing today who, it turns out, has a long and storied backlist.  It can also happen with one of your favorite illustrators from the days of yore.  In fact, that’s what happened to author/illustrator Elizabeth Rose Stanton (of the delightful and weird Henny) when she reread one of her kids’ books.  And it was by Brinton Turkle.

A quick bit of background first.  For those of you unfamiliar with Turkle, you can find a nice biography of him here.  His most famous books are debatable.  Here in New York I often notice that The Boy Who Didn’t Believe in Spring by Lucille Clifton shows up on a lot of teachers’ reading lists.

Still, I think his Obadiah series (Caldecott Honor book Thy Friend, Obadiah is the only one still in print) remains best known around the country.  It was a historical series following a Quaker boy in Nantucket.

Lovely illustrations.  Sweet storylines.  You’d hardly think the man capable of Do Not Open.

Published in 1981, the innocuous description reads “Following a storm Miss Moody and her cat find an intriguing bottle washed up on the beach. Should they ignore its ‘Do not open’ warning?”

Not to spoil the surprise for you but, no.  No they should not ignore the warning.  Because the contents are, quite frankly, deliciously horrifying.

What interests me about this book isn’t so much the fact that it’s unafraid to get scary, though it is curious that no one minds.  In an age where Pinkerton covers get re-illustrated to remove firearms and Let’s Get a Dog, Said Kate is lambasted for an imagined cigarette, both the Amazon and the Goodreads reviews of this title are remarkably innocuous.  Still, more interesting to me is the phenomenon of trusting an artist to keep producing the same old, same old, only to have them launch in an entirely different direction.  This is particularly interesting when they have a commercially successful product on the one hand, and yet they yearn to get artistic and creative on the other.  Some, like Sendak, could afford to be both but I think we can agree that he’s the exception, not the rule.

Other examples of books that you might be surprised to stumble across, though these are just cases of artists getting silly more than anything else, are:

The Seven Lady Godivas by Dr. Seuss

I had a copy of this at a branch once, and though it was cataloged as adult the pages kept shelving it in the children’s room.  I could hardly blame them, though I did wonder if they ever glanced at the cover.

Uncle Shelby’s ABZs by Shel Silverstein

I like to think most folks already know this one, but there’s a possibility that they don’t.  My favorite section is still, “G is for Gigolo”.  Vintage Kids’ Books My Kid Loves summarizes the book nicely here.

There are others out there, of course.  These were just the first that came to my mind.

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