From the Golden Gate Bridge to a Texas rodeo to Cape Canaveral to the Statue of Liberty, a new picture book from Universe Publishing revisits some of the landmarks spotlighted in Miroslav Sasek’s many whimsical travel guides to American sites. Released this month, This Is America: A National Treasury compiles information and watercolor pictures from the U.S.-themed travelogues that Sasek (1916–1980) originally published during the 1960s – This Is New York, This Is Texas, This Is San Francisco, This Is Washington, D.C., and This Is the Way to the Moon – which Universe has reissued in recent years, along with children’s guides to an array of cities and countries around the globe.
Born in Prague, Sasek was trained as an architect, since his parents allegedly did not approve of his aspirations to be a painter. He studied for some time at l’École des Beaux Arts in Paris before escaping from Prague in 1948 when the Communist Party came to power. Settling in Munich, Sasek worked for Radio Free Europe during the 1950s – until he discovered a new calling when a three-week vacation in Paris sparked the idea of creating illustrated travel books for children.
This Is Paris, his inaugural guide, was released in 1959. Sharing a child’s view of 1950s Paris, this and subsequent travelogues (closed to 20 in total) enabled Sasek to combine several of his talents. In fact, a reviewer for the New York Herald Tribune Book Review observed, in the issue of May 10, 1959, that This Is Paris’s “beautiful watercolors of buildings have an almost architectural accuracy. We love it.”
Robb Pearlman, Universe associate publisher, explained that he and his colleagues compiled This Is America (a companion to the house’s 2014 amalgam of Sasek’s books, This Is the World: A Global Treasury) with the goal of “making each section as full and complete as we could. Of course we had space limitations, but we wanted to capture the best flavor of each book and each location.”
Associate editor Joe Davidson, who helped select the material included in This Is America, found it a welcome task. “We culled through each previous single volume and chose our favorite spreads – and included things we thought others would most like,” he said. “We were careful to calculate how many pages we could use from each book without cannibalizing any of them.”
The production process, Pearlman explained, was a bit trickier, given the age of Sasek’s original art. “Because the books are so old, there were no digital files involved,” he said. “We had to purchase original copies of the books and have the spreads scanned. My third-grade teacher would be horrified, since she was very strict about not writing in books or tearing pages out! But we cleaned up the art if necessary, and reset the type, and the spreads in This Is America appear just as they did in the original books.”
Noting that Sasek’s travel guides, as well as Universe’s calendars based on their art, continue to sell well in the trade and in museum shops internationally, Pearlman attributed the books’ ongoing popularity to the author’s ability “to present information in an incredibly digestible and entertaining way, as well as his knack for creating art with a remarkably broad appeal. Both children and adults love it.”
He added that Sasek’s series, with its timelessness and “perfect marriage of art and type,” exemplifies the quality production values that his company demands. “These books are quite often the standard by which we judge other children’s submissions,” Pearlman said. “When we look at titles that might fit on our list, we ask, ‘How would it look next to a Sasek title on a bookshelf?’ We want to do Sasek proud – and to do ourselves proud.”
This Is America: A National Treasury by Miroslav Sasek. Universe, $19.95 Sept. ISBN 978-0-7893-3258-5
