Crockett Johnson Gem Unearthed

This story originally appeared in Children's Bookshelf on Thursday, Oct. 13, 2005 Sign up now!

-- Publishers Weekly, 10/13/2005

More than four decades after its creation, a picture book by the late Crockett Johnson will be published just as the renowned creator of Harold and the Purple Crayon and its sequels had originally envisioned it. In November, Front Street Books will release Magic Beach, a poetic tale inspired by the legend of the Fisher King, in which two children encounter a king in a magical seaside setting. The volume features a foreword by Maurice Sendak and an afterword by Philip Nel.

Johnson had already created four books about the beloved Harold in 1958, when Ursula Nordstrom, his editor at Harper and Brothers, asked him to write another story featuring this character, aimed at a slightly younger audience, to be released under the new I Can Read series. What emerged from Johnson’s drawing board was not a Harold tale at all, but Magic Beach, which he submitted to his publisher. At Harper, a reader’s report by Susan Carr (now Susan Hirschman) noted that the story missed its mark. After reading Johnson’s revised version of the story, Nordstrom concluded that it was not a book for children at all and turned down the project.

Johnson, who in a letter to Nordstrom referred to the book as “the best small thing I have done,” eventually sold the manuscript to Holt, Rinehart and Winston, which published it in 1965 as Castles in the Sand. Curiously, the house decided not to use well-known illustrator Johnson’s own art, opting instead to have a young freelance artist, Betty Fraser, create new pictures for the story. Thirty five years later, Philip Nel, a children’s literature expert and associate professor of English at Kansas State University, was researching a biography of Johnson (which has since expanded into a double biography of Johnson and his wife, Ruth Krauss) when he came across the original text and sketches for Magic Beach in the archives of the Smithsonian Institution. Intrigued by the idea of having the work published in its original form, Nel showed copies of the dummy to Front Street publisher Stephen Roxburgh.

“What I initially saw was a Xerox of a Xerox, and even in this rough form I was totally flabbergasted and blown away by the dummy,” Roxburgh recalls. “The story and art has so much resonance, so many levels and layers, yet has that same simplicity you see in Johnson’s other books. I knew instantly that I wanted to publish it.”

Yet exactly how to publish it posed some questions. The publisher considered various options in deciding how to reproduce Johnson’s art. “This was an old dummy and we could have done a lot of Photoshop tweaking to take out the glitches,” Roxburgh explains. “But one of my favorite aspects of the art is the ‘ghosts.’ On some pages Johnson had drawn images and then erased them, but you can still see echoes of the lines. And we conceivably could have had someone go in and add color to the art. But every time we bounced up against what we might do we realized that we were moving into areas where we didn’t know what the author would have done. So we decided to go the relatively pure route, reproducing it as it was. It was not broken, so we did not fix it.”

Though Johnson’s original art consists of pencil sketches, usually reproduced in one color, Front Street chose to use a full-color process to reproduce the art, thereby giving the lines what Roxburgh terms, “a little more weight,” since, he muses, children even more than adults appreciate “the richness, fullness, gradations and subtleties” of book illustration. The publisher reinforced the concept of Magic Beach as a high-end sketchbook by selecting handsome, speckled, raw binder’s board for the cover, which features four-color art pasted into a depression on the board. “We produced this book elaborately, and that is revealed in every element of its design,” Roxburgh observes. “How often am I going to get the chance to publish a book by Crockett Johnson?”

Maurice Sendak, to whom Johnson and Krauss were close friends and mentors, comments in his essay that the book, as conceived by its author, “was way ahead of its time,” a notion Roxburgh muses may hold some truth. “There are far more publishers today than there once were, and we have many different notions of how books should be published,” he says. “Who am I to second-guess the likes of Susan Hirschman and Ursula Nordstrom? I’ve thought numerous times about the fact that when they reviewed this book they were much younger than I am now. I’d hate to see the rejection letters that I wrote when I was 27 and I hope I’m spared that experience! I don’t publish for Everychild, I publish for Anychild. This is an exquisite story and a work of art—it is brilliant in every aspect. And my criterion for publishing books rests there.”