Madeline Takes a Roman Holiday
By Sally Lodge, Children's Bookshelf -- Publishers Weekly, 9/18/2008
In 1939, Ludwig Bemelmans’s iconic French heroine made her debut in Madeline, the first installment in a picture book series that has sold more than 11 million copies around the world. Now, the author’s grandson, John Bemelmans Marciano, sends the gregarious girl and her 11 fellow convent-school students on holiday in Madeline and the Cats of Rome. Out this month from Viking with a 150,000-copy first printing, this is the first full-scale, all-new Madeline tale in 50 years.
Yet this isn’t Marciano’s first encounter with Madeline. In Madeline in America and Other Holiday Stories (Scholastic/Levine, 1999), he provided artwork for a story Bemelmans originally wrote as a promotional publication for Neiman-Marcus. In 2001, Viking published Marciano’s Madeline Says Merci: The Always-Be-Polite Book, in which the chapeau-wearing girl emphasizes the importance of kindness. Marciano also wrote a biography of his maternal grand-père, Bemelmans: The Life and Art of Madeline’s Creator, a 1999 Viking release. It was that memoir that eventually inspired him to create a new Madeline story with gouache and watercolor art in Bemelmans’s signature style.
“This biography certainly got me closer to my grandfather, who died seven or eight years before I was born,” says Marciano. “Going through his letters, writings and the different drafts of his books, I got to know so much about his thought processes. And I worked on the book with my grandmother, who passed away a couple of years ago. She was beginning to suffer from dementia at the time, but she was able to remember things about his life and helped me fill in the blanks.”
A self-taught artist like his grandfather, Marciano came across Bemelmans’s manuscript and sketches for Madeline in America while researching the biography, and he based his illustrations for that book on the existing sketches. “When I did the illustrations for that book, I think I had an undeserved self-confidence,” he reflects. “And then when I went back and looked at my grandfather’s art in his Madeline books, I realized what a genius he was and I became more wary of doing an original, full-length book myself.”
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John Bemelmans Marciano. |
Marciano says he took pains to ensure that his art was true to his grandfather’s style. “I examined his original line drawings to be able to understand the scale he worked in, and I used similar ink and pens, as well as a kind of vellum much like that he had used to place over his pencil sketches to ink the lines,” he explains. In fact, he initially traced over copies of Bemelmans’s own drawings to “follow his lines” so that he could get a feel for the number of strokes that were used. “When I was ready to do my own art, I threw out those sketches and created my art from memory.”
And why bring Madeline to Rome? “I had lived in Rome for a few years, on and off, and had spent a lot of time wandering the streets,” Marciano explains. “And I have always been a cat lover, and the streets of Rome are filled with cats.” The book’s plot—Madeline befriends a Roman girl who cares for cats in an abandoned house and then joins forces with her to arrange their adoptions—was inspired by the felines that have inhabited the ruins of Rome’s Torre Argentina for centuries. Marciano returned to Rome to write the story’s rhymed text and to take thousands of digital photos and make sketches in preparation for creating the art.
Regina Hayes, president and publisher of Viking Children’s Books and the book’s editor, says she is “delighted” with both the art and the verse. “We were all astounded at how close John’s illustrations are to his grandfather’s work. He worked hard to achieve the same luminous, transparent look in his art. And his portrayal of the landmarks of Rome was clearly a labor of love.”
Rome, alas, is not on the itinerary for Marciano’s current 11-city, cross-country book tour, which runs through September 29. Though he is now working on an illustrated adult book for Bloomsbury—about the genesis of some family names—he notes that he “wouldn’t say no to doing another Madeline book at some point.”
Carrying on his grandfather’s—and Madeline’s—legacy, Marciano says, is “very rewarding. For me, the best part about having done Madeline and the Cats of Rome is meeting people who know my grandfather’s books well and say they love this book, too. And I really hope my book drives people back to the original Madeline stories. Having spent so much time studying them, I probably know better than anyone how incredible they are.”
Madeline and the Cats of Rome by John Bemelmans Marciano. Viking, $17.99 ISBN 978-0-670-06297-3
