A Talk with David Macaulay
By Eden Ross Lipson -- Publishers Weekly, 9/18/2008
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David Macaulay in his studio. |
His new book, The Way We Work: Getting to Know the Amazing Human Body (Houghton Mifflin, Oct.), is a deconstruction of the most intricate of all mechanisms—us.
As with all his books, it is technically accurate, visually appealing and accessible to smart kids of almost all ages.
It’s the explaining Macaulay enjoys. Not “just captions and timelines,” he says, but understanding a process with gusto and enthusiasm. That understanding takes time. He took a first pass at thinking about the human body in the 1980s, but decided it was too difficult. By the turn of the millennium, he was more aware of his own body, noticing aches and pains, aware of aging in himself and others, and also aware of the remarkable scientific achievements in the intervening years, particularly in cell biology. So, this time he took the plunge and became a kind of medical student; with the help of friends at Children’s Hospital Boston and the University of Massachusetts Medical School, Macaulay became a visiting faculty member in order to go to anatomy classes, attend labs, watch surgeries. He consulted with specialists to make sure he understood what he was learning. After September 11 he took a detour, spending a year and a half creating Mosque and then returned to working on the body project. Years passed. In 2006 he was awarded a MacArthur fellowship, popularly called a genius grant. He kept working.
How He Works
“I sketch to learn,” Macaulay says, “not to make illustrations. I make drawings of things till I understand them. After a day of studying the abdominal cavity and colon, I’d sit with the television on, just drawing them, not just top to bottom, but in volumetric order. I teach myself through my eyes and brain.”
At about the same time he was working on the abdominal cavity, —four years into the project—he realized that he needed help pulling it together, and through Walter Lorraine, his editor at Houghton Mifflin, he located Richard Walker, an experienced science writer, to help. “I had figured out what I wanted the book to be about, but I couldn’t write it with organization and competence. He gave that.”
The Way We Work is organized into seven chapters corresponding to the systems that make up the human body—cells, circulation, respiration, digestion, the brain, immune and lymphatic systems, muscles and skeleton and, of course, reproduction. The lucid, often amusing illustrations on every page are in full color, the text blocks are short, dense and precise.
Although it’s being marketed as a book for children 11 and up, the first formal presentation of some of the material Macaulay made was to the American Association of Clinical Anatomists, a very professional group, and he has informally shown sections of it to practicing and retired doctors, all of whom have been enthusiastic in their approval. Having worked so long and so hard on the book, Macaulay is spending most of October on a traditional book tour, and he will be offering a free live webcast for middle-schoolers about his work and this book, on Tuesday, October 7 at 10:00 am EST. (For further information, click here.)
The text blocks are very simple, relatively short and in plain English. Children and ordinary readers might not even notice, but there are “no Latin names. I struggled through it” —meaning the Latin, Macaulay says. “But Walter said ‘too many big words.’ By the time you have figured out the word, you can’t remember the sentence. So why not try to spell it out?” He was right.
Those subtle decisions—no Latin, no distracting pull quotes highlighting sentences or phrases and taking up space on the page are, Macaulay says, about making the book accessible to the widest possible audience. Gray’s Anatomy, he says—referring to the classic textbook, not the television show—“is for people who already know what is in it. This is a book for people who don’t know what’s in it.”
In comparison to the fine pen line of some of the his early books, Macaulay’s illustrations here are crayon over sketches done in ink, on cheap tracing paper. “It’s better than the expensive stuff,” he says, because “I wanted these drawings to have a sketchy feel to have a sense of process, that you are getting this information not from an expert but from a student, someone who is excited about the process.”
What Comes Next
The Way We Work marks the end of Macaulay’s unusual and enduring 35-year relationship with Walter Lorraine, who has retired, and the beginning of what Macaulay, at 61, is calling Chapter Two.
“Walter was always ready to support something that I believed in. Always.” Macaulay says. “How many people can come with an idea and say this is what I want to do and get the go-ahead from the first conversation? Cathedral built the foundation for mutual trust that is gone now from publishing. He could only support the authors so far. For most of his career Walter never had to justify to anyone else, he believed in himself and his own opinions and standards.”
Macaulay’s first step last fall was to find an agent—Ken Wright at Writer’s House; in all these years, he’d never had one. Wright invited nine publishers to make proposals. “It was a watershed moment,” he recalls. “I liked everyone. In the end I went with the most imaginative offer, which included having an imprint.” Beginning in 2011, David Macaulay Studio will be an imprint of Roaring Brook Press, with at least two books Macaulay wants to work on himself—one about the earth, one about history, and other collaborative projects.
For most of his professional life Macaulay also taught at the Rhode Island School of Design, and he finds, now that he’s living in Vermont and no longer an art professor, that he misses that collaborative experience. The last thing he needs is another job, he says; “I’m not entirely certain how it is going to work, but it gives me a chance to work with people, some of my former students, people I’ve always admired. I learned a lot from Walter about when to stand back and watch and when to encourage, and we’ll see how well I paid attention.”
Macaulay is old-fashioned and a purist about the process of learning through drawing; he is concerned about short cuts that deprive children of that rich way of understanding. “People ask if I use cameras and photographs. I use photographs to see the way bricks are cut. But they only show the surface, not the depth, the details. There are ways of recording images in front of you. Photography is not going to help you understand, the computer isn’t going to help you reach real intellectual understanding. Save drawing for the search. Taking a picture is glancing, except in a very few hands. From a learning point of view, you have to draw.”
And which drawing did his own children like best in The Way We Work? That’s easy. “It’s the guy taking his skin off.”
Eden Ross Lipson is the former children’s books editor of the New York Times.
The Way We Work by David Macaulay. Houghton Mifflin, $35 ISBN 978-0-618-0233780-6; October 7 laydown; 300,000-copy first printing; 15-city tour.
