Here Is an Interview: A Talk with Elisha Cooper About Here Is a Book

Sometimes when I look back at the eleven years I lived in New York City I think about how the town was so good at randomly throwing me in the general vicinity of the authors and illustrators I admired, in kooky ways. Take Elisha Cooper. By the time I became a children’s librarian he’d already established himself with a number of picture books. From the start, his style was distinctive. Nobody’s books looked like his books. Then, I was invited to a celebration of his picture book Farm, held in his apartment, where I came away with the realization that children’s literature scholar Leonard Marcus is a #1 source for good information on where to get decent bread in Manhattan. I also ended up with a print from the book that hangs over my bed to this day. I like it that much.

As a Greenwich Village resident for a while, Cooper and I connected over the Jefferson Market Branch of NYPL. As I was leaving to work in the Schwarzman, he created massive murals of animals to hang on the walls. Then I left the city and came to Evanston. Even here, Elisha has been extraordinarily generous, creating wooden signs for my library’s children’s room.

But today, I want to talk, not about the largesse of Cooper himself necessarily, but his latest title. Here Is a Book is, to my mind, a book we’ve needed for a number of years. Speaking simultaneously to the philosophical, the artistic, and the technical process of creating picture books is a lot to ask of any title, let alone one as succinct and tight as Here Is a Book. Here’s my short write-up of it:

How does an idea get turned into the book in your hands? A supremely lovely delve into both the process and the heart of bookmaking.  I am of the generation that grew up watching Reading Rainbow. One episode that sticks out particularly prominently in my head is the one about how books are made. I remember the book they focused on was Aliki’s How a Book Is Made (a kind of early proto-nonfiction picture book). That book was lovely but it’s been outdated for quite some time now. In comes Elisha Cooper to fill the void. Not that there aren’t other similar titles out there, but Cooper has an artistic style and a kind of inner calm (dosed with humor) that makes all his works distinctive.

Better still? Let’s talk to the creator himself:

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Betsy Bird: Elisha! Such a delight to talk to you about your latest. It’s a bit different from many of your recent animal-related titles. In some ways, it almost feels more akin to some of your earlier work, since it delves into not just some technical aspects of bookmaking but industry as well. Before I get into any of that, though, where did the idea of the book come from?

Elisha Cooper: And a delight to talk books with you, Betsy!

I think the idea came from school visits, those times in a classroom when a child asks, “How do you make your books?” and ten minutes later I’m still answering, and the students are asking more questions, and the class flies off into the whole messy process of bookmaking.

Then a few years ago I was reading Zadie Smith’s essay Something to Do. It’s a wonderful essay — I recommend it to all your readers — in which she considers the creative process. The banal, the beautiful. She has one line, “Here is this banana bread, made with love.” When I read that line, while sitting alongside the Hudson River, I instantly saw the arc of my book. And its foundation, the building blocks. Like, here’s a thing, add ____, then something happens. The cumulative quality to art. So it really started with words: structure, color, rhythm, love.

I’ve always been drawn to books about how stuff get made. This one begins with an artist by the ocean. She’s reading, early morning, a garden, she gets her idea, and we’re off. Painting, creating, printing, delivering. The book ends up in the hands of a child, and — wait for it — it’s also the one you are holding in your hands! (so, very meta). Can you tell that I loved making this book?

Now, to answer your pencil/ink question. Black ink made sense for Big Cat, Little Cat (simple story, life and death). I thought pencil fit better for a book about process. It’s quick, more fluid. I wanted the art to move. When I sketch out in the field, my pencil has a roughness I like. I’m trying to hold onto that feeling in the finished paintings.

BB: That sense holds steady throughout, but I want to get back to the process again. This is certainly not the first book to talk about the process of making books (Aliki’s HOW A BOOK IS MADE comes to mind) but your book is rare since it speaks to 2025. Also, part of what’s so nice is the balance you find between the creative side of bookmaking and the realistic production steps. How much of the technical aspects did you want to show at the start of making this book? Did you change much between the initial rough draft of HERE IS A BOOK and the end? 

Elisha: Okay, you’re onto something here. I was very aware that I didn’t have the technical ability of illustrators like David Macaulay or Brian Floca (also, I have no patience!). I wanted to show enough so we can see what’s happening, but not so much as to slow down the narrative. That’s the sweet spot. So, if I’m painting a printing press, I hope readers will think, “Wow, I had no idea a printing press was so big and wild!” but I didn’t want to paint each widget. I’m trying to get the vibe (hmm, can’t believe I wrote “vibe.” I’ve been watching too much Love Island).

Not much changed with the arc of the book since that day on the Hudson. That said, there were sooo many drafts and edits and little smoothings. I did remove a spread where the book was shipped across an ocean, because that would have interrupted the narrative. Other changes, at first I just called it Book (I have a thing for single-word titles, like Farm, Train, River). I’m glad my editor convinced me to round it out to Here is a Book, which gets at that book-within-a-book idea. Now I’ve been using the phrase “Here is…” in everything I write. Like, Here is an Email. Here is an Interview with Betsy Bird. I’m going to keep pounding this darn joke until my friends tell me to stop.

BB: *glances up at what she named this post… then regrets nothing and moves on*

Getting back to the creative act of making a book, your little author/illustrator avatar lives in a windswept cottage where she can bicycle to a larger city and meet personally with her editor. Is she the idealized vision of a picture book creator or based on someone you know directly?

Elisha: One of my grandmothers was a writer. The other was an artist; she painted great landscapes with cloud-filled skies. Her hair was a white nimbus of curls. That’s her in the book. The writer grandmother had a writing studio behind her house. I put that in the book. Then I asked Barbara McClintock to let me sketch her in her studio. And, she has curly white hair! While she was working, her cat jumped on her desk and I put that in the book. So the artist is a mashup of artists. I’ve heard some wise folks say she could be Kate DiCamillo.

I wanted as many people as possible to relate to this artist (I was careful to paint her skin a balanced shade of burnt umber and burnt sienna). So she could be someone’s Nanna or Abuela. That’s my hope. If I failed in that, that’s on me. What felt most important was showing this person at work. That studio spread is one of my favorites, with its packed, pregnant messiness. Things are happening here. And not. Sometimes she putters around. Creativity is famously difficult to depict (think of films of writers tapping away at typewriters). I wanted to challenge that. Here are paintbrushes and wastebaskets and thought.

Lastly, of course, she is me. On my bike, racing down Broadway to my publishers, in the same way the artist cycles down her hill to deliver art to her publisher. I love biking around the city — thinking up ideas, avoiding buses and pedestrians — before meeting my editors at Macmillan or Abrams. I always show up a bit disheveled.

BB: Honestly, I think Chris Raschka is the same way. Now was there anything you wanted to include in the book and it simply didn’t fit in some way and had to be excised?

Elisha: Nope. And….. mic drop.

I’ve always wanted to answer a question with one word! But that would be rude. Also — and this may sound cocky — the book turned out just how I wanted it to be. Better, even. That’s because it benefited from the care of a lot of people. Conversations with friends, and other children’s book authors, shifted the book in ways I hadn’t considered (sometimes a work gets too close to us; it takes someone else’s eyes to make us see, right?). Then hours upon hours with my editor and designer. Finding rhythm. Making each word land right. So, I had help.

Another thing: there are two mistakes in the book. One on the cover, one on the back. The designer and I were just discussing how to correct them in future editions. Which opened up the idea of whether we should actually leave them in. I mean, here’s a book about how books are made, and what could be more honest than acknowledging that mistakes happen? We really deliberated. In the end, we fixed them (which will make the first edition cool, in a way).

BB: Let the record show that I am being VERY GOOD and continuing this interview, even when I want to rush and check my edition to see if I can find anything.

So while the book could have gotten distinctly technical in a kind of David Macaulay kind of way, you made the strategic decision to keep it younger and lighter. Perhaps inspiring young readers to dream of creating books of their own someday. Is that how you see it as well?

Elisha: I’m glad that you saw that! While this may be giving away the ending, the point when we finish the book is inspiration. How one person’s art can change another. Always connect, right? That’s why the artist’s studio bookends with the children’s room. And why there are pencil sketches swirling around the artist, then around the young artist on the final page. Speaking of inspiration, I admire David Macaulay so much. In the second-to-last spread, the one with all the book covers, I painted the cover of Castle. That was a such a foundational book for me as a kid.

And if we return to those school visits I mentioned, where students were asking me about bookmaking, my hope has always been that one of those students will dream of their own book. Make that seem attainable. Then extrapolate that onward to dance, math, science, the world. Like, here’s what one artist made, here’s what I made, now open your own mind and…. go!

BB: That’s so cool. Finally, what’s next for you? What are you working on next?

Elisha: Birds! I just finished a children’s book about a cat who thinks he’s a bird (and a dolphin and an elephant). It’s called The Rare Bird, out next year. I’m also playing with some board book ideas. Mostly, though, I want to celebrate my daughters. One has a dance performance next week, the other is graduating from college later in the spring.

But, work? I guess I just want to be open to love (mmm, more Love Island). I find that when I am curious about a subject, and fall in love with it, good things happen. Speaking of — I’m looking across the street from the café where I’m writing and there are these guys washing the windows. They’re high up, hanging from ropes, squeegeeing the windows. They look like rock climbers, or vertical ballet dancers. I could draw these guys all day. So, yes, I’m waiting to fall in love with an idea.

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There are times, you know, when I feel like I should take pointers from some of my interviewees if ever I myself am interviewed somewhere. The man knows how to answer a question.

Thanks to Elisha Cooper for answering my questions and Elisha Coopering the heck out of them. Thanks as well to Annaliese Merz and the team at Abrams for helping to put this all together. Here Is a Book is, I am happy to report, out right now. Go on and get yourself a copy. Or three.

Or four.

Or ten.

Filed under: Best Books, Best Books of 2025, Interviews