A sinking ship in a bottle, a card trick, and a riff on "Cinderella" are among the 13 picture stories that play out separately but simultaneously in Thirteen by Remy Charlip and Jerry Joyner. Originally published by Parents’ Magazine Press in 1975 and long out of print, the picture book is being reissued this week by New York Review Books as part of its NYR Children’s Collection.

The author-illustrators met in 1963, when Joyner, who had graduated two years earlier from California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, moved to New York City to pursue a career in design and illustration. Though Charlip had described to Joyner his concept for a book that would become Thirteen, and the two had traded ideas about possible storylines, almost a decade passed before the friends actually began collaborating in earnest.

In the meantime, Joyner worked at Esquire and Push Pin Studio, spent a good deal of time traveling and living in Europe, and illustrated Mary Ann Hoberman’s The Looking Book for Knopf. Charlip (who died in 2012) was busy writing and illustrating children’s books—he created close to 40 during his lifetime—and working as a dancer, choreographer, and a theater director, set designer, and producer.

In 1973, the two rendezvoused in Paris, where they sketched, wrote and edited, cut and added to the book. From there, they traveled to Greece and spent three months painting the final art, sitting, said Joyner, "at desks facing each other. Remy bought a package of artist paper, and we hung every spread on the walls."

Their collaborative process was as diverse as their work locales. "We did it all different ways," Joyner recalled. "We each wrote some separately, we each illustrated some, and we worked on some together." And then, to create the final story, they turned to improvisation, with each painting an image on a separate piece of paper, trading papers, and painting a visual response to the other’s images: "We went back and forth, taking turns and surprising each other every time. And that finally tied the book all together. It was a magical time!"

A Well-Deserved Return to Print

Noting that "Remy was a huge art of my life," Joyner said he is "so very excited" about the reissue of Thirteen. NYRB senior editor Susan Barba, who acquired rights to the book from Jacqueline Ko at the Wylie Agency (representing Charlip’s estate and Joyner for the title), shares Joyner’s enthusiasm about having the picture book back in print.

"These 13 tableaux tell stories in a way that is so original and unique, and the art is so beautifully painted," she observed. "The book begins on spread 13 and ends on spread one, but it can be read from the end to the beginning or from beginning to end—or be read from the middle. It shows the metamorphosis of one thing becoming another, but it is more cyclical than it is linear. In every aspect, Thirteen stands the typical picture book on its head." Barba added that the NYR Children’s Collection will reissue another iconic Charlip work, Arm in Arm, in 2019.

In a blurb on Thirteen’s front flap, Brian Selznick recalls the picture book as a "personal childhood favorite" and describes it as "an experimental vision of what picture books can do." Asked to elaborate, Selznick told PW that Charlip "loved what books were capable of," and referenced an essay that Charlip wrote, entitled "A Page Is a Door." In that piece, Selznick said, "Remy talks about the endless possibilities a book’s form offers an artist. Every turn of the page is a new opportunity for a surprise, to be explored endlessly. A thrilling picture book not only makes beautiful single images or sequential images, but also allows us to become aware of a book’s unique physical structure, by bringing our attention, once again, to that momentous moment: the turning of the page."

In Thirteen, Charlip and Joyner pay homage to—and exemplify—the art of the page turn. In Selznick’s words, "Each page turn is a new revelation, and their idea to tell 13 simultaneous stories on each spread seems to be a way of saying, 'See, you can do anything on these pages!' Then, in a kind of master stroke, they show us, in the bottom right hand corner of each spread, what is going to appear on the next spread (and inside that you can see the next and the next and the next spreads), making the book itself the 13th story."

Selznick also drew an analogy between Thirteen and Orbis Pictus, which he described as the first illustrated children’s textbook. Published in 1658, that book, he said, "proposed that the entire universe can be reduced enough to fit into a book. And 317 years later, Charlip and Joyner seemed to propose the opposite—that a book is big enough to contain the entire universe. They showed us that there are endless possibilities between the covers of a book, and if that’s the case, they seem to argue, then the possibilities must be endless in life, and love, as well."

Thirteen by Remy Charlip and Jerry Joyner. New York Review Children’s Collection, $17.95 May ISBN 978-1-68137-230-3