Welcome to Looking at Picture Books. We’ve done some deep dives into how great picture books work. Here are some reading lists. And this is the shop.

Today we present a conspiracy theory about the postal service and share an irritated memo Margaret Wise Brown sent to an illustrator who altered her text.

MAC: Hi Jon.

JON: Hi Mac.

MAC: So the United States Postal Service just released Goodnight Moon postage stamps.

I bought some.
I think you know this about me, but I am a "big mail guy."

JON: I do know it about you. On the one hand it's nice cause I get a lot of mail from you. On the other hand it's sad cause I, as YOU know, am a terrible "mail guy."

MAC: Yeah.

Anyway when the stamps came I got excited.

We recently did a deep dive into Goodnight Moon where you taught me about tangenting. Do you want to explain it again for people who don't want to click that hyperlink?

JON: Yes.

Tangenting, in a visual composition, is when things are kind of uncomfortably close to one another without overlapping, or too close to the borders of the piece itself, like the edge of the page or poster or whatever. Conventionally speaking, you want plenty of overlap in your objects or plenty of space between things, for clarity's sake.

So tangenting would be if you drew a chair and the outside line of the chair touched, but didn’t overlap, with a window, or a fireplace. Or a word you were putting in was juuussst about to graze an illustrated element but not quite.

It's kind of what John Baldessari was talking about with this (very funny) piece. The man here is tangenting with the tree. The separation between them could have been compositionally made clearer if he was standing somewhere else, or even the photographer had moved the camera.

MAC: So we talked about how the tangenting in Clement Hurd's compositions contribute to the unsettling, surreal experience of Goodnight Moon and capture the strangeness of falling asleep.

JON: Yes.

MAC: Well, Jon—

THE STAMPS ARE TANGENTING

JON: They really really are. Like ALL over the place.

MAC: Look at this.

JON: Check out at the “d” in “Hurd”—

MAC: Hats off to the USPS for creating stamps as unnerving as Goodnight Moon.

But Jon—

JON: Yes.

MAC: Do you think they read our post.

JON: Look. We know that these stamps take a long time to work their way through the system. Choosing the artists that are featured, plus choosing the particular art that goes in them, must take an awfully long time in what we are sure is definitely a very streamlined government agency with clear processes.

However, until we get proof from someone with real knowledge, we're very comfortable entertaining the theory that someone over there read our post.

And made these stamps accordingly.

MAC: Someone sprinting through the halls, their laptop open to Substack, approaching the Federal Engraving Room screaming: "STOP THE PRESSES!!"

JON: Their reasonably-priced and beautifully produced "Looking At Picture Books" hat flying off their head with the speed. (Restocking soon!)

MAC: Their Extra Yarn poster rolled in a mailing tube (stolen from the supply closet), safely tucked under their arm. (In stock now!)

JON: IF this ISN'T what happened, I like the alternate theory that Clement Hurd's illustrations are SO tangent-y that they somehow imbue anyone working with them in any way, to become a master of weird and amazing tangents themselves.

MAC: One more nice detail: the back of the stamp sheet prints the last three lines from the book, and puts slashes between each phrase, as you do to denote line breaks when transcribing a poem.

It’s a thoughtful move that respects the importance of line breaks and page breaks in picture books. That’s especially true of Goodnight Moon, one of the 20th century’s great poems.

Margaret Wise Brown really cared about her line breaks. She once sent an angry memo to the first illustrator of The Important Book (who later got fired), chiding him for messing with her text:

The important thing about the break in typesetting is
That you break here
It is true that you might want to break elsewhere
And breaking elsewhere makes a pretty picture
And that you forget the break is for the reader
And that the break is to make a pause
In which the child will chime in
And that that is the purpose of the book
So that the important thing about the break is—
That you break here."

JON: Which is actually a great place to stop this post.
Might've even been really great without my saying that.

MAC: Yeah.