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The Fine Art of Collaboration; or, We Can Have Gold Lettering, right?
The phone rings. It's your editor. She has a manuscript for you to illustrate. By the time she finishes describing it, your mind is
spinning and all you can say is "I'll do it."
The manuscript in question became The Dinosaurs of Waterhouse Hawkins (Scholastic).
Every book is a collaboration and this one had four principal players: the author, Barbara Kerley; the editor, Tracy Mack at
Scholastic Press; the art director, David Saylor; and myself, working as the illustrator and co-designer with David. Tracy served as the lynch pin of the process, keeping everyone aware of what the
others were doing and providing the main source of inspiration. Many, many others were involved as well, but we were the main four.
The original manuscript told the story of Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, who built the world's first life-size sculptures of dinosaurs
in 1853 (before most people had even heard the word dinosaur). It culminated with the triumph of his creature's public unveiling in England, including an incredible dinner party inside his iguanodon for all the top scientists of the day. Pretty amazing stuff, but then I read the author's note. It seems that after that triumph, Waterhouse was invited to America to build dinosaurs in Central Park but after two years of work he ran into trouble with Boss Tweed, a corrupt politician who had all of Waterhouse's American dinosaurs destroyed. The broken pieces were taken and buried somewhere in Central Park!
I immediately called Tracy and said that the story is good, but the author's note is incredible and it really should be in the book itself. Tracy agreed and spoke with Barbara. It turns out that Barbara had originally intended for it to be in the story, but an earlier editor had suggested she take it out because it was too depressing. Well, it went back in and became the dramatic focus of the story.
A scrapbook belonging to Waterhouse that Barbara directed me to at the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences became the key to
the design of our book. We based the cover and many interior details (such as the red and black rules around the text and art) on the scrapbook. David and Tracy monitored the overall flow of the
book, from one picture to another. They encouraged me to try different angles in my illustrations, rework things that seemed too easy, and basically pushed me to make each picture and the build of
the visual story overall as dramatic as possible.
We decided to break the book up into three sections, to help the reader follow the story since it covered so much time and
territory. We were all in constant communication and worked closely on every detail in the book, from the endpapers to the copyright page, to the kind of paper the book would be printed on, to the
gold lettering on the jacket. I really wanted fancy gold letters, and I was very lucky, because David one-upped me by suggesting that the letters not only be gold, but embossed as well.
Waterhouse himself had collaborated very closely with many workmen to create his monsters, and especially with the scientist Richard
Owen, the man who coined the word "dinosaur." Together they came up with what the creatures should look like after wrestling long and hard with every detail. It is with this same spirit of
collaboration that good books are made—people trying to put something together that is better than any one of them could do alone. To me, that's the fun of it. •
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About the Author:
Brian Selznick, originally from New Jersey, graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design. He then
worked for three years selling books and painting windows at Eeyore's Books for Children on Manhattan's Upper West Side. His first book, The Houdini Box (Simon & Schuster), was
published while he was still working there. Brian is the winner of the Texas Bluebonnet Award and the Rhode Island Children's Book Award for The Houdini Box, and the Christopher Award for Frindle (Simon & Schuster). Amelia and Eleanor Go for a Ride
(Scholastic) was an ALA Notable book, and a Booksense Honor Book among other distinctions. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Recent books illustrated by Brian Selznick include:
• The Dinosaurs of Waterhouse Hawkins written by Barbara Kerley (Scholastic, 2001)
• Amelia and Eleanor Go for a Ride written by Pam Munoz Ryan (Scholastic, 1999)
• The Doll People written by Ann M. Martin and Laura Godwin (Hyperion, 2000)
• The Houdini Box written and illustrated by Brian Selznick (Simon & Schuster, 1991/republished 2001)
• The Boy of a Thousand Faces written and illustrated by Brian Selznick (HarperCollins, 2000)
To contact this author or illustrator, please use the information for his or her publisher provided on our list of CBC member publishers.
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