[See the previous entry in this series here.]
Adult readers know unambiguously what it means to “read a book.” They have an image of someone — most often themselves? — sitting somewhere in a comfortable chair, on a commuter train or in an airport terminal, good lighting from over the shoulder… The book lies open in their hands or lap, somewhere in the middle, with a sheaf of pages pinned in place behind each thumb. Because, y’know, whether the book in question is a potboiler or a metaphysical treatise, that’s where all the action is — in the middle. It’s the heart of the book.But just inside the front and back covers? Those “pages,” the endpapers, serve a purely physical function; they’re where the dynamic stresses are greatest, where the tension between spine and glued contents would most likely result in tearing and/or separation. In a book, they’re the analogue of a painting’s picture frame: they physically hold it all together, hence are important, but they have no real point otherwise. They’re to be gotten through.
But kids harbor fewer clearcut preconceptions. From their perspective, the very first spread of paper and the very last might well be places to expect the most drama, the most meaning. And in a book or elsewhere, when faced with a large two-page spread of blank paper, few kids could resist the temptation to scribble, to color, to fill. Leaving them empty would be such a waste, no?
I don’t know, but can guess, that artists and illustrators love having the freedom to fill whole tabloid-sized sheets of whitespace, too, free from the constraints of story and the rigid geography of text on the page. Bill Watterson, creator of the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip, hated the tedium of the daily strip format: day after day, year after year, working within the same narrow rectangle. (It especially had to frustrate him as the creator of such an undisciplined protagonist.) If I remember correctly, he stipulated in his contracts that if you wanted the daily strip, you had to give him a half-page on Sunday, to fill with whatever layout he wanted. His Sunday strips dazzled, even before you’d read any of the text in the speech balloons.
The publishers of kids’ books, especially illustrated ones, know all this. And the publishers of great kids’ books pull out all the stops.
