Creative Endpapers Celebrated at New Eric Carle Museum Exhibition
E. H. Shepard, Illustration for The World of Pooh by A. A. Milne. Courtesy of Penguin Young Readers Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.
A new exhibition at The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art explores the creativity of endpapers which have become an expanded artistic canvas in contemporary children’s publishing.
Open + Shut: Celebrating the Art of Endpapers includes art from more than 50 books including Blueberries for Sal and The World of Pooh, and featuring three decades of contemporary works by Sophie Blackall, Yas Imamura, Eliza Kinkz, Grace Lin, Jessica Love, Jerry Pinkney, Paloma Valdivia, and others. It runs at the museum in Amherst, MA, from April 19 through November 9.
Open + Shut will explore how endpapers can tell a story within a larger story, frame or comment on the main story, serve as a warm-up act or overture, or simply provide extra information like a visual introduction or epilogue.
“I think of endpapers as the picture book equivalent of a movie or television show’s title and credits sequence, or a tempting appetizer at the start of a meal plus a sweet dessert at the end," said Bruce Handy, Open + Shut guest curator and author. "In the digital age, they give us yet another reason to cherish the pleasures of physical bookmaking and reading.”
The exhibition will be divided into four distinct themes:
The Decorative Tradition - examples include Virginia Lee Burton’s The Song of Robin Hood (1947), with a repeated wavy pattern of Robin Hood in Sherwood Forest, Ed Emberley’s ABC (1978), with vibrant hand-drawn swirls of green, purple, and orange, and Ashley Bryan’s endpapers for Beautiful Blackbird (2003) introduce colorful African birds and feature scissors that his mother used in her sewing and he then used in cutting the paper for the collages in this book.
Maps, Landscapes, and Stage Sets - this section will focus on books exploring imaginary lands and endpapers with a map or landscape to geographically orient the reader, such as E.H. Shepard’s childlike map of the Hundred Acre Wood featured in the endpapers of A.A. Milne’s The World of Pooh (1957), while the front endpaper of Brendan Wenzel’s Inside Cat (2021) captures the limited, house-bound perspective of his title character, compared to the back endpaper which completes the hero’s transformation into an outdoor cat who can embrace an entire city.
Before & After - endpapers that visually encapsulate change, featuring Sophie Blackall’s If You Come to Earth (2020) which takes the form of a letter written by a child to a Visitor from Outer Space, and Paloma Valdivia’s endpapers for Pablo Neruda’s Book of Questions (2022) which suggest a modern riff on medieval illumination.
Wit, Wisdom, and Surprise - how endpapers can provide an extra layer of fun or meaning including a preliminary sketch on view including Robert McCloskey’s Blueberries for Sal (1948) which shows the iconic scene of mother and daughter canning blueberries in the family kitchen, a coda to the story’s main events. Grace Lin’s endpapers for A Big Mooncake for Little Star (2018) pays homage to Blueberries for Sal, connecting the traditions of her contemporary Chinese-American kitchen to McCloskey’s older New England archetype.
