Last night when I was reading to the kids before bed, I happened to come across an old picture book of mine, published in 1962.

I imagine my parents picked it out because of its content and not because if its awesome LOWER CASE sans serif title (!!! That would never happen in this age of screaming book covers!). The illustrations were done by Aliki, whose list of published books is about seven miles long.

Anyway. The kids were interested in reading a book about alaska (and not ALASKA!) so I cracked that baby open. And totally fell in love.

There is some magic in 2-color printing. And that magic lies in the paper becoming the third color. Look at how that whale is made up of the water surrounding it, and a couple of simple black lines defining its most basic features. Look at how that grizzly bear is given so much dimension by putting the yellow behind the black, and letting the black be a furry texture on top of it. And let’s not even get into how frickin’ cute his little face is.

And then there’s this page:

Look at the sky! The sky, being yellow, makes the snow snow, and not just empty white space! Look at how that airplane is thrown into the third dimension by not just being white, but by having a shadowy patch on the tail and on the pontoon below. And if you look really closely, you can see that the propeller of the plane is just a circle of black dots! Brilliant! And you’ve got to love the way she’s drawn the water – a pretty heavy pattern that keeps from being overwhelming because it’s yellow (whose value is close enough to the white of the paper that it isn’t distracting), and is de-emphasized by that heavy boatload of black fur-lined hoods and coats. Genius!

And let’s not even get into how frickin’ cute the little sled dogs are (the one with the white face! Get those cute little eyes and ears to pop by just not drawing all the fur on its face! Holy cow! Amazing!!).

I also like this page because it talks about the Alcan Highway, which we drove on quite a few times to get from Maryland to Alaska. When I was a kid, it was still 90% dirt road. For some reason, I feel nostalgic for the many many hours spent bumping along in the back of a (covered) pick-up truck, stretched out on sleeping bags with my brother and sister, stuffing rags in the cracks of the windows to keep the dust out and trying (unsuccessfully) not to vomit every 10 miles. These days it’s all paved, so the soft spot in my heart is partly due to the fact that it will never be as I remember it.

But back to these illustrations. Check this one out. Perhaps the greatest coup in the whole book:

A swarm of mosquitos! Flying across the sun! But do any of those little flecks actually look like mosquitoes? NO! But we know exactly what it is a drawing of! I can’t stand it!!

But here’s the rub: I hated these illustrations as a kid. I mean really, really hated them. I liked my illustrations detailed, tight, and in full glossy technicolor. This 2-color nonsense was for cheap magazines with crummy paper or for babies who didn’t know any better. Well, I suppose “less is more” is a hard concept to really grasp as a kid. I’m glad I’ve come around all these years later. It really does take a certain genius to be able to pare anything down to the basic, most important elements.

In the meantime, the kids’ assessment was, “But where’s the part about our house?” This 1960s version of alaska is different from the current version of ALASKA in more ways than one.