Off-Center Views: 2/8/26

2/11/26

Photos Into Kiddie Books at the Eric Caryle Museum

PHOTOS TO PICTURES (and random stuff)

Eric Caryle Museum

Amherst MA

It’s been a long time since I was a kid. Back then, children’s book choices were much more limited. I’m sure there were others, but I only recall Mother Goose rhymes, expurgated Grimm’s fairytales, Little Golden Storry Books, and Dr. Seuss. Today’s kids have many things that tickle their imaginations, a gamut that runs from the magical stories of Jane Yolen and Mo Willems to Beverly Cleary and Roald Dahl. In my working-class family we didn’t even have A. A. Milne, C. S. Lewis, or Beatrix Potter; they were too “limey” (English) for my 1950s-early 1960s family. The closest we got to a Harry Potter-like stories were greatly fictionalized Knights of the Round-table stories. Nor did we have anything from the pen of Eric Caryle.

I only learned about any of these when my nieces were small and former students started having kids. By then, I was a bit long in the tooth to put myself on an extended reading diet of present-day kids’ writers., though a former colleague specialized in children’s books and tried to tell me it was serious literature that was miles beyond Little Golden Story Books, My deeper education came from exploring Western Massachusetts and learning more about Theodore Geisel (Dr. Seuss) who was from Springfield. Then, in 2002, the Eric Caryle Museum of Picture Book Art opened in Amherst. Caryle lived much of his life across the Connecticut River in my town of Northampton. Even I had heard of The Very Hungry Caterpillar, but it was the word “art” that grabbed me.

I loved comic books once I got out of toddlerdom, but until the Teenage Ninja Turtle creators opened a now-closed (sigh!) museum in Northampton, I never thought of storybooks or comics as real “art.” But when Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird dumped the “comics” label for the Ninjas and called them “sequential art,” a lightbulb went on in my head. I went there often and to other museums spotlighting the art involved in my favorite childhood Loony Tunes and Hanna Barbera cartoons. I still haven’t read many recent children’s books, but I absolutely love the art work. If I’m honest, I have to admit that I’m ready to be four-years-old again!

Trips to the Eric Caryle Museum doesn’t make me physically younger, but it does allow me to set free my inner four-year-old. I knew from an artist friend that he and his colleagues often work from photographs and a current exhibition at the Caryle Museum highlights how pictures and set ups are (and have been) the basis for the illustrations in children’s lit.

I don’t know the books associated with the following, but I’m fascinated by how photographs and playing with fruit made their way into books.

The above two are from Peter Buckley's Cesare of Italy (1954). They bespeak the poverty but vivid thoughts of Cesare's mind.

The above two are from Nina Crews setup shots of a young Black child. the top is, of course, "Jack and the "Candle Stick," the bottom is the poem that begins "to market to market..."

Saxton Freyman

This and the header shot are from Children of the Tsaatan Reindeer Herders, a book for kids in Inner Mongolia. Tsaatan means "he who has reindeer."

The Caryle also has original illustrations that now hang on the wall and are often as detailed as much of the so-called “fine art” that adorns major metropolitan art museums.