Between the lines: children's picture books

You may not know Deirdre McDermott, but you will know Where's Wally?, Hooray for Fish!, Owl Babies, and Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!. Although McDermott didn't write or illustrate any of these books, she and her colleagues at Walker Books have been instrumental in creating these and many other well-loved books for more than 30 years.

A quick scan of the title pages of picture books in our home revealed that many are published by Walker Books, the leading independent publisher of children's books in Britain, or Candlewick Press, its equally successful sister company in the United States. The extensive stable of artists includes the wonderful Mo Willems, timeless illustrator Helen Oxenbury, latest sensation Jon Klassen and teen fiction writer Anthony Horowitz.

I didn't appreciate the role of publishers in the creation of a picture book until I attended a forum on the subject at the Taipei International Book Exhibition. McDermott spoke, along with a French book publisher and literary agents from Turkey and Spain.

Children's books are works of art, so I had always imagined writers and illustrators together presenting their final masterpieces to the publisher. In the way that an artist might take his paintings to a gallery and leave it to the gallery to promote them, I expected a children's book publisher's role in the creative process to be limited to cover art and font type.

It turns out that publishing houses do a vast amount more than simply print books and distribute them to booksellers. They lead the creative process from a very early stage. In McDermott's case, when she finds a proposed story that she likes, she will contact an illustrator whose style she believes will best suit the text. Unless the story is presented by an authorial illustrator who will do both the writing and the illustrating, it seems that writers and illustrators almost never sit down together to collaborate on a picture book. With the text and illustrations at hand, McDermott will then work with her team of in-house editors and designers to develop the important elements of placement, graphic emphasis and flow.