re: picture books, the ones I remember as favorites from my pre-chapter book days had cartoonish drawings. The ones I've purchased as an adult for my own pleasure have generally been the ones with "beautiful, elegant, rich illustrations" (eg, The Name On The Harp). I rarely note the illustrator's name, much less their gender.
I was sorting through the bazillion picture books we'd accumulated, trying to weed out the "non keepers", and asked my kids (then both in middle school) to pull out the ones they wanted to keep. They put almost all of the ones with simple illustrations or photographs in the "to keep" stack, and almost the ones with beautiful, elegant, rich illustrations in the "to go" stack. Go figure. To be fair, the ones with the beautiful illustrations were not the ones I read to them when they were small, as we read mostly board books together. Needless to say, few were eliminated.
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Picture books
Date: 11/10/07 04:50 pm (UTC)I was sorting through the bazillion picture books we'd accumulated, trying to weed out the "non keepers", and asked my kids (then both in middle school) to pull out the ones they wanted to keep. They put almost all of the ones with simple illustrations or photographs in the "to keep" stack, and almost the ones with beautiful, elegant, rich illustrations in the "to go" stack. Go figure. To be fair, the ones with the beautiful illustrations were not the ones I read to them when they were small, as we read mostly board books together. Needless to say, few were eliminated.