Tundra Goes Back in Time
By Sally Lodge, Children's Bookshelf -- Publishers Weekly, 9/11/2008
Quite a bit of time—almost five decades—has ticked by since Beth Gleick’s three-year-old son James asked her, “What is time?” That deceptively simple question inspired Gleick to write a picture book describing what one can do in a second, a minute, an hour, a day—and beyond. Time Is When, with art by Harvey Weiss,was released in the U.S. by Rand McNally in 1960, and has been out of print in this country for many years. This month, Tundra Books will issue a new edition of Time Is When, featuring fabric and paper art by Marthe Jocelyn.
Jocelyn discovered Time Is When rather close to home. At a family reunion in fall 2005, she learned that Gleick, a relative of her ex-husband, had written a children’s book years earlier. “Slightly nervously, I asked Beth if I could take a look at her book and when I did, I thought it lovely,” she recalls. Without telling Gleick, Jocelyn showed the book to Kathy Lowinger, publisher of Tundra, which has released a number of Jocelyn’s books.
“I told Kathy that I wanted to re-illustrate the story,” Jocelyn says. “As she looked it over, she read the line, ‘In one minute, you can walk one block (if you walk quickly and don’t stop to look in the store windows).’ Since Kathy’s a big shopper, that line grabbed her.” Lowinger told Jocelyn she loved the book and wanted to publish it. Jocelyn then phoned Beth and told her the news. “I said I hoped she didn’t mind that I’d sold her book again and that I wanted to illustrate it. She was thrilled.”
Jocelyn, whose prior works include picture books using collage art, chapter books and fiction for teens (most recently Would You, a YA novel released in July by Random House/Wendy Lamb Books), had never before illustrated another author’s story. “Illustrating someone else’s words was harder for me,” she says, “since normally I am able to write to whatever the picture is evolving into. In my own books, if something isn’t working, I can always change the words.”
Jocelyn’s efforts paid off, says Tundra senior editor Sue Tate, who edited Time Is When. “Martha trimmed the text considerably, condensing it into 32 pages from the original 48, a format we thought was better for a preschool audience,” she says. “And she did a wonderful job of paying homage to the original art while putting her own spin on it.”
Sadly Gleick, now 84, recently suffered a stroke and cannot participate in the festivities surrounding the new book’s debut, which includes a launch event on September 14 in New York City and another in Toronto on September 21.
But there’s a happier postscript to the book’s saga: Gleick’s now-adult son James has become a bestselling author, with books including Chaos: Making a New Science and Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything, which examines the ever-increasing pace of life. “I’d like to think that perhaps Beth’s book somehow led James to write that one,” Jocelyn says. “Of course I’m kidding—but it’s nice to think that this new edition may inspire today’s kids to stop and think about the feeling and the passage of time.”
Time Is When by Beth Gleick, illus. by Marthe Jocelyn. Tundra Books, $15.95 ISBN 978-0-8876-870-5
