DOMINIC W. MASSARO, editor
University of California, Santa Cruz

More Than Meets the Eye

Inside Picture Books
By Ellen Handler Spitz. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999. 230 pp. Paper, $25.00.

To the casual observer, children’s picture books seem trivial, superficial, simplistic, and unimportant, particularly when compared with literature for adults. Legitimate literature is purchased in bookstores; picture books are readily available at any local megastore. Highquality literature is expensive; children’s books can be purchased in those megastores for a few dollars, some for less than a dollar. “Real books” are stored systematically on open bookshelves in homes, a place of honor; picture books can be found just laying around on floors or stuffed in wicker book baskets, cupboards, or the crevices of chairs, sofas, and beds. Parents methodically vacuum accumulated dust from the books in their home libraries; with a damp dishcloth, they occasionally wipe jam, peanut butter, pet hair, and saliva (human or pet) from the picture books. Real books are weighty, filled with words, and serious in content. Picture books for children are slight, filled with pictures that anyone can read, and insignificant or silly. Picture books are just “kiddie lit.” Why, then, would someone take the time to analyze in depth a select number of picture books as Spitz does in Inside Picture Books? Because Spitz knows that there’s more to children’s picture books than meets the eye.