A Fresh Face for a Determined Little Engine

by Staff -- Publishers Weekly, 7/18/2005

A new edition of one of the top-selling children's stories of all time will appear on bookstore shelves in September, when Philomel releases Watty Piper's The Little Engine That Could with new art by Loren Long.

Doug Whiteman, president of the Penguin Young Readers Group, became acquainted with Long's work when the artist illustrated The Day the Animals Came: A Story of Saint Francis by Frances Ward Weller, a Philomel release. "Many of us here fell in love with his work and, believing he is a tremendous talent for the future, we signed a multiple-book contract with him," Whiteman said. "At about the same time, one night over dinner I was talking about Loren with Nicholas Callaway [whose Callaway Arts & Entertainment published Madonna's Mr. Peabody's Apples, which Long also illustrated] and he suddenly said, 'You'd be crazy if you don't have him redo The Little Engine That Could.' We were well aware that the Little Engine has been underserved in aesthetic terms. The last reillustration took place 50 years ago, and though that art is charming and has a great nostalgic look to it, the kind of production technology available then is not close to what we have today. I talked to our head of sales, Mariann Donato, and to Patti Gauch, Loren's editor, and we all loved the idea of having him do new art for the story."

Whiteman didn't have to go very far to secure the rights to the book. Originally published in 1930 by Platt and Munk, which is now part of the Penguin Young Readers Group, The Little Engine That Could is currently the property of another Penguin imprint, Grosset & Dunlap. Of Long's finished illustrations, rendered in acrylic, Whitehead says, "What Loren has done is very contemporary, yet it remains faithful to the original feel. His art adds so much to what was already a great book. There is so much more movement in the book—you can actually feel the engine's effort getting up the hill. I believe this is one of the great picture book masterpieces I've seen."

And a popular one: Penguin has sold more than 20 million copies of its Little Engine That Could books in various formats. The new edition has a 300,000-copy first printing,