I can’t say when I first became obsessed with endpapers, but I know the exact moment I realized they could be the subject of a terrific exhibition. I was visiting the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, in Amherst, Massachusetts, not long after Carle’s death, in 2021. A memorial retrospective included six of his glorious endpapers for books such as The Very Quiet Cricket and Baby Bear, Baby Bear, What Do You See? No mere visual addenda, they held their own on the walls alongside the rest of his exuberantly colorful work. Bingo, I thought. More, please.
Happily, when I pitched the idea of an endpapers show, the Carle said yes and even allowed me, an enthusiast but no expert, to guest-curate it (with the essential support of the museum’s skilled and imaginative curators, designers, and researchers).
Even more happily, we soon learned that a lot of wonderful picture-book artists—among them, Caldecott winners and honorees Sophie Blackall, Christian Robinson, Brendan Wenzel, and Grace Lin—were eager to lend their endpapers and highlight this often overlooked aspect of picture book–making.
Speaking of overlooked, some readers may be asking, Um, what exactly are endpapers? Answer: the pages pasted to a hardbound book’s front and back covers. Often, they’re blank, but picture-book illustrators have long used them as spaces for extra art, sometimes framing or commenting on a story’s main action, sometimes simply adding more wit and/or gorgeousness. Think of endpapers as roughly the picture-book equivalent of a movie’s opening and closing credits or—if this is an acceptable metaphor when discussing children’s books—an aperitif and a digestif. Salut!
“Open + Shut: Celebrating the Art of Endpapers” is on at the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, in Amherst, Massachusetts, until November 9
Bruce Handy is a journalist and the author of Wild Things: The Joy of Reading Children’s Literature as an Adult