100 Years of Children's Book Week Posters

Leonard S. Marcus compiles a century's worth of official Children's Book Week posters into one 130-page volume, and the range on display is the whole point - N.C. Wyeth's early painted work sits in the same book as Christian Robinson's contemporary illustrations, with names like David Wiesner, Mary GrandPré, Marcia Brown, and Jillian Tamaki filling in the decades between. Published by Knopf for ages 6 to 10, each page is simply a new poster, so the book reads less like a traditional narrative and more like walking a gallery wall chronologically, one commissioned image at a time.

Because every image was made for the same annual purpose across a hundred years, it doubles as an unintentional timeline of how illustration style itself has changed - a comparison a parent and child can make just by flipping pages side by side rather than needing outside context. It works well as a browsing book more than a read-through, something to open to any page and talk about: what's happening in this picture, why the artist made certain choices, which one is a favorite. A kid who already has a favorite illustrator gets the most out of this one, suddenly able to place that artist's style inside a hundred years of everyone who came before.