The new picturebook by WashU Children’s Studies lecturer Danielle Ridolfi offers a contemporary take on the here and now story. Deeply inspired by Margaret Wise Brown and the pedagogical framework of Lucy Sprague Mitchell, When the Dark Clouds Come is a mindful exploration of the coming and going of an ordinary summer event—a thunderstorm. The text invites a curiosity about the ways in which the storm impacts the objects in a young child’s view, including sheets on a clothesline, leaves on a tree, and the rooms inside a house. The layered, textured collages, which feature items like fabric, pressed leaves, wallpaper, and old book pages, and together with the books lyrical text, strengthen the book’s focus on multi-sensory learning and invite readers to explore their own material here and now outside of the book’s pages.

Integrating a physical tactility and materiality to the illustrations in a picturebook is a powerful means of connecting readers to the material here and now. What Color Is The Wind is a picturebook that relies as much on sight as it does on touch. The paintings are layered with colorless embossing and glossy-printed areas that must be experienced by moving one’s hand across the page. Herbauts transforms something as mundane as the wind into an engaging multi-sensory experience that encourages deep questions about the nature of our senses and our means of experiencing the everyday world around us. It provides a beautiful example of how illustration can be used to support an object-based exploration of the here and now.

The work of contemporary author-illustrator Lois Ehlert demonstrates a clear commitment to celebrating the ordinary, unassuming objects and happenings of the natural world. Rain Fish offers a catalog of found objects that float by in streets and city gutters during rainstorms and invites readers to imagine what those objects might resemble. The poetic text invites curiosity about unwanted objects, particularly in city landscapes. That Ehlert’s collages are made from actual found objects, like feathers and crinkled paper, makes the narrative and its focus on the power of unassuming, ordinary objects all the more powerful. Such three-dimensionality enhances the sensory learning inherent to Ehlert’s books.

After winning the first Bank Street Negro Scholarship, Ellen Tarry went on to write several children’s books in the 1940s, some of the very first picturebooks created specifically for black children. While more plot heavy than Margaret Wise Brown’s work, Tarry’s books demonstrate a clear connection to The Bank Street pedagogy given their setting in urban neighborhoods and their focus on everyday objects—in this case, the automobile. Hezekiah Horton, illustrated by the notable cartoonist, Oliver Harrington, features a young black boy who is obsessed with Mr. Ed’s red convertible. Mr. Ed, a white man, befriends Hezekiah and gives him a ride. Other of Tarry’s picturebooks, like Janie Belle, are similarly interested in relationships between white and black neighbors.

The Important Book, another collaboration between Margaret Wise Brown and illustrator Leonard Weisgard, is a quintessential “here and now” picturebook. It offers a plotless catalog of ordinary objects a child would be familiar with—shoes, grass, spoons, glass—along with poetic descriptions of each. Weisgard’s beautiful paintings are paired with Brown’s meditations on the essence of each object: “the important thing about the sky is that is it always there. It is true that it is blue, and high, and full of clouds, and made of air. But the important thing about the sky is that it is always there.” The book invites the reader to see the mundane objects of their everyday lives in a
new and unfamiliar light.

This early collaboration between Margaret Wise Brown and illustrator Leonard Weisgard features an interactive narrative that encourages the reader to respond to questions as a dog named Muffin who cannot see tries to guess what objects might be creating all of the sounds he hears. The decision to set the book in the city, amongst noisy automobiles, trains, dogs, and people, reflects The Bank Street belief that stories should reflect not fantastical settings, but the neighborhoods of 20th century
children. Expressive and repetitive words like “flippity flap” and “patter patter patter” inject a language play into the narrative. By inviting children to mimic these playful sounds themselves, The Noisy Book accomplishes another essential Bank Street goal: to make children themselves a central part of the narrative.

In this canonical “here and now” book, which Lucy Sprague Mitchell thought gave the Bank Street pedagogy its most perfect form, Brown offers a lyrical meditation on the ordinary objects in a child’s bedroom—socks, clocks, a brush, a bowl of mush— bidding them each goodnight in turn. In line with The Bank Street’s emphasis on language play over narrative, Goodnight Moon is a relatively plotless poem that plays with rhyme, repetition, and a soothing rhythm. Clement Hurd’s surreal illustrations offer a visual story that runs parallel to the text, injecting details like the restless rabbit, the mice scurrying about the room, and a room that darkens so gradually as to almost be imperceptible. While firmly ensconced in the picturebook canon today, Anne Carroll Moore’s dislike for the book and her refusal to stock it in public libraries led to its being relatively unknown until the early 1970s.