Why Did So Many Mid-Century Designers Make Children’s Books?
What do you do when you’ve secured your legacy as one of the great creative minds of the 20th century? You make children’s books, apparently. From Milton Glaser’s If Apples Had Teeth, Saul Bass’s Henri’s Walk to Paris and Paul Rand’s I Know a Lot of Things, to Bruno Munari’s Zoo, Dick Bruna’s Miffyand Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar, a number of prominent mid-century designers and illustrators turned their hand to books for kids as they sank into their own old age. Milton Glaser — creator of the iconic I Heart New York logo, the DC Comics logo and that 1966 Bob Dylan poster for CBS Records — had already cemented his place in history with a portfolio of pop-culture iconography, yet the designer also found himself drawn to illustrating children’s books such as author Alvin Tresselt’s The Smallest Elephant in the World and writing If Apples Had Teeth, which he created with his wife, Shirley Glaser, and published in 1960. Perhaps producing the most famous tale of them all, Carle is best known as the author of The Very Hungry Caterpillar — an irresistible story of transformation that has sold upwards of 50,000,000 copies around the world. While he had prior success as an illustrator of books such as Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?, it was a career in advertising that got Carle noticed as an emerging creative talent.
