Your Jon Klassen, or, What’s Up With All the Board Books?

Hey. Wanna see something cool?

Check this out:

You know what that is? That’s the newest Jon Klassen board book. You may be familiar with his Your Places series (I’ve a co-worker with a child that is obsessed with those books). The titles are now extending into other areas. Your Truck, for example, is now part of the new Your Things series. And Your Horse? It comes out October 27th of this year.

With everything he’s been doing with board books these days, I couldn’t help but get a bit curious. I mean… why board books? They’re hardly the most heralded form of children’s literature (though, perhaps, they should be). Why has Klassen gone this route with his recent work?

Only one way to find out:

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Betsy Bird: Jon! Before anything else I just want to say how much I’ve been enjoying your Substack site Looking at Picture Books, which you host alongside Mac Barnett. A person couldn’t ask for a better regular education in picture book creation than those writings. Flipping through past posts, though, I don’t believe you’ve covered board books that began their lives in that particular format. Now that you’ve released board books of your own, could you tell us a bit about why you’ve started these series?

Jon Klassen: Betsy! Thanks so much for a) having me on and b) your writing about the board books and c) for saying such nice things about the Substack. We’ve been so happy with the response it’s been getting, and it’s been super fun figuring out what it even…is, but I think we’re in some interesting territory these days! 

My reasons for starting the board books were a little murky, but I do think every project is kind of a reaction to the previous one. In this case the previous book was “The Skull”, and there were things I wanted to keep about that experience and things I wanted revenge on. I found that I really enjoyed thinking about a slightly more specific age group – in the case of “The Skull” I thought it was aimed at slightly older kids, and I was really into how much clearer the sound and the tone were in my head because of that. Picture books, generally, are actually really broad. They’re given to early grade school kids but also to like, babies. That’s a big group to try and grab, and it’s tough. So after “The Skull”, I wanted to try another specific age group, and board books do give you that. The other thing was that “The Skull” was very involved, writing-wise and illustration-wise, at least for me and what I’m used to. I was in the mood for something very simple on all fronts, and again board books lend themselves to that inherently. I felt really lucky that there was this great format waiting there that checked all the boxes.

BB: You’ve also an uncommon appreciation of your forebears, which makes me curious. Do you have any particular board books or board book creators that you look up to? Whether as influences or simply as artists. 

Jon: In particular, for board books, I was thinking of Sandra Boynton and Taro Gomi. Sandra’s work is so considered and exacting – she’s doing precisely what she wants to do and yet she’s completely in touch with her very young audience and I’m in awe of her connection with them. There’s a combination of fun, gentleness, and craft with her that I look up to a lot. Taro Gomi I think shows how board books can lend themselves to a kind of poetry. His idea of what a book can be about, what a page, or a moment, or a series of moments can be, I’d never seen anything quite like that, in any books.

BB: Board book reading levels are, as with many types of children’s books, variegated. Certainly someone could read YOUR TRUCK to someone below the age of 6 months, but I don’t know that they’d get as much out of it as, say, a 2-year-old. But is any of that in your head at all when you come up with a series like this one? 

Jon: Only very vaguely. There’s only so much you can know and use. I think maybe you’re thinking the most of your specific audience and where they’re at when you’re at the concept stage, working on the idea and the general sound it will have and setting up the rules. But once you’re into the page by page of it, I’m really more into technically trying to make something I’m interested in making myself, inside of those rules, and the kid goes away for a bit. You come back to them at the end, once it’s done, and just hope they like it.

BB: YOUR FARM, YOUR FOREST, and YOUR ISLAND were all very much about a sense of place. Setting a scene in a landscape. YOUR TRUCK is an object, which is a bit of a switch. You can still place objects in space around it, but it’s a smaller setting. Why did you opt to change the focus this way? 

Jon: Another big attraction to board books that I didn’t mention earlier is that they are really great objects themselves. They’re solid and geometrically clean and satisfying to hold and touch. It was a lot like what I imagine designing a toy is like, and those “Places” books are a lot like simply describing a small toy place, piece by piece. Shifting from describing a set of small toy components to describing one singular toy, just kind of sitting with it and talking about it while it is in your hand felt fun.  Like you really do kind of feel like you’re holding a little truck, and that even though there are a lot of copies of it, that one really is yours. It says so.

BB: Just to round everything out, are there future installments in this series on the horizon after YOUR TRUCK? And, related, is there a name you’d personally give to this series? 

Jon: There are! There is “Your Horse” and “Your Rock”. If there is an opportunity to name the set I’d go with “Your Things”, even though the horse might object to the classification. 

BB: P.S. I was very pleased to see your cameo in Scott Campbell’s CABIN HEAD AND TREE HEAD promotional video. Well done, sir. 

Jon: Anything, ever, for Scott C. and those books. He is a wizard.

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Wizardry isn’t a terrible way to describe Jon’s board books, quite frankly. The books in the Your Places series are out now and Your Truck is the latest “thing”. Look for these anywhere fine books are sold. A thank you to Jon and a thank you to Rachel Kirby and the folks at Candlewick Press for helping to put this talk together. And if you’d like to actually hear Jon talk about these books, he discusses Your Truck in a video right here.

Filed under: Best Books, Best Books of 2026, Interviews