Jon Klassen, left, and Mac Barnett share a laugh outside a book reading in Seattle on Monday.Chona Kasinger/The Globe and Mail
To get a sense of just how big a deal Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen are in the world of kids books, consider this: Reciting a list of their collective accomplishments and accolades will take longer than reading all four of the new board books they’ve just written together. And that’s assuming you’re doing it with a toddler who keeps wanting to turn the page back to the cat in the window.
Individually, they’re impressive: Oakland, Calif.,-based Barnett has won the highest American honour in picture books, the Caldecott Medal, twice, and has sold seven million copies of his books – which range from graphic novels for tweens to picture books – and seen them translated into 30 languages. Winnipeg-born Klassen, who now lives in the U.S. too, was named to the Order of Canada in 2018 for contributions to children’s literature, and just became the first Canadian to win the $750,000 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award. I Want My Hat Back, his 2011 classic about a bear politely in search of his hat, was a No. 1 New York Times bestseller; its follow-up This Is Not My Hat earned him a Caldecott Medal too. In under three years, those two books alone sold over a million copies.
Together, they’re even more of a force: Long-time collaborators, Klassen and Barnett join forces for droll, surprisingly subtle, minimalist even – in both words and picture – stories that, bar one, have all become bestsellers. Their latest collective effort is a series of four board books with a twist: The text is the same across all seasons of the Now I See… quartet, but the pictures change with each season’s passage. In Now I See Fall, that cat in the window is shadowed in early October twilight; in Now I See Winter, his big round eyes are barely visible over snow piled up on the windowsill.
Related: Books we’re reading and loving in May
The Globe and Mail spoke to Barnett and Klassen – separately in their homes, but actually meeting up later that day – about minimalism for kids, why adults routinely underestimate children, and the highest compliment they’ve received.
The text is the same across all seasons of the Now I See… quartet, but the pictures change with each season’s passage.Chona Kasinger/The Globe and Mail
It struck me that these are the perfect board books for the person who has that Scandi nursery, who says, ‘My child will not play with plastic, there will be no bright colours, just elegant minimalism.’ How do you feel about that?
Mac Barnett: The board book is one of the few precious pieces of art that we actually give to kids to be their own. We labour over the production of these. They are printed like art books. These are for the very youngest humans who exist, so they need to be durable and safe to be chewed on. But they should be chewed on! There’s something exciting for both of us making, on my side, considered text and then Jon makes beautiful images. But then, we want these to be part of kids’ daily lives, and we want them to own them and do whatever they want. It’s very flattering when we see them lined up on a shelf and posted to Instagram, but I always hope that a kid is chewing on that book two seconds later.
Jon Klassen: We also understand that the books exist in context, like a kids bedroom or a toy store. There is a lot of loud stuff made for kids, visually and tonally. It’s meant to grab attention. For both of us, these were done to give a quiet moment, but hopefully not without a bit of interest. You don’t want to rest on your tonal laurels. It can’t just be an exercise in style.
Barnett: John’s popularity as an illustrator, especially among kids, is beautiful proof that kids are actually sensitive to good design. Adults will appreciate good design, and then it’s very important for them to communicate to other adults that they appreciate good design. Kids do not have that. None of that messy social capital stuff gets into our readers, definitely with board books. If they like a book, they like a book. They don’t care what it means if somebody saw them reading this book on the subway, they’re not going to labour over what favourite book they’re going to be putting in their profile. It makes it so much more comfortable to talk to our readers, because when they show up and they like your book, they don’t care about meeting you. They’re like, ‘I’m here because I like that book.’
Winnipeg native Jon Klassen is best known for his children’s book series about a bear and his hat.Chona Kasinger/The Globe and Mail
Sometimes we read stuff to score cool points. I love the idea of creating something just because you think, ‘Kids are going to like that.’
Klassen: These books are a good example. There is no narrator or paragraph explaining what the mechanism is. That was part of why I really wanted to illustrate it. When Mac showed me the idea, the challenge was to let them in on the idea without ever explaining it. In order to do that as cleanly and quickly as possible, you have to be minimal in your design. It suits my tastes, but it also has a reason. Good design tells you what it wants you to do with it.
My son had all four books in front of him the first time we showed them to him. He opened one, read it and he was fine. And then he opened the next one, and then he closed it really quickly after the first page, and he looked at all four of them. And he got it. That was the test. It wasn’t, this is pretty. And there we go, that’s the cleanliness paying off, the minimalist design. It took him one page to get it.
If you don’t spend a lot of time with kids, you might think, ‘This is way too high concept.’
Barnett: The thing that excited me most about this is that profound point about the picture book as a form. It’s something that’s going to be understood and kind of funny to a two-year-old. The game of this book hinges on their immediate understanding. Knowing that laugh, that little two year old giggle, that furrowed brow…
Klassen: The furrowed brow should not be underestimated. One of the first bits of feedback I’ve heard was a kid who told me that he didn’t like that the red wagon had been left outside in the wintertime. That was what he remembered. I love that. He said, ‘It stressed me out.’ That’s what these things are for too. Those reactions, they’re so sensitive to them. We dull them down as we move through so much media all the time, but they’re still just letting it all in.
Mac Barnett: ‘There’s a general reading crisis going on culturally, but kids are actually faring far better than adults.’Chona Kasinger/The Globe and Mail
There are a lot of headlines about how kids don’t read any more, and parents don’t read to kids any more. What is your take on that?
Barnett: I feel so much more optimistic than the headlines are. Kids across the board are excited to talk about books. There’s a general reading crisis going on culturally, but kids are actually faring far better than adults. Kids are reading less for pleasure than they have before, but more kids read for pleasure every day than adults by a factor of three. Adults reading to kids is at such a huge low. Those numbers are abysmal.
I am a screen-using adult. I get a notification every Sunday about how much I am blowing up my life. And my kid says, ‘Dad, put your phone away.’ It makes me feel terrible, but I’m also marvelling at how he still wants to be in the world. So much of it is evidence of this adult habit of blaming kids for our own failures. They are reading so much more than we are, they are so much better at reading than we are. They are willing to engage with a book that requires effort. They notice things adults don’t. They are open to new forms, new ways of telling stories. They are a far better audience for fiction than adults.
As for screens, here’s this device that we adults have designed to be maximally absorbing of human attention. We then buy these and hand these devices to our kids, and then we say, ‘These kids love their screens.’
Klassen: It’s like: ‘I didn’t buy the frog-shaped iPad!’ There’s an underestimation of kids. Adults don’t necessarily know more, or are smarter in important ways than children are. If there’s a crisis with adults, the knee-jerk reaction is to be, ‘The kids must be doing terribly! They’re dumber than we are.’ So much of kids writing is, ‘We’re going to tell you some things you don’t know yet because we’ve been around longer. This book is going to help better you.’ And that’s a dangerous place to start with storytelling for kids. You have to see them as level opponents and collaborators. It’s what makes the work so interesting.
Barnett: You see that in ways that adults generally engage with kids. I see grown ups do this all the time. You get really loud, really bright. ‘Hey there little buddy!’ There is a visual equivalent of that screaming adult with a weird clownish smile. I see that book on the shelves all the time. You also see the remote adult who just wants to say, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up? Have you started a savings account yet?’ That is trying to improve the kid. We’ve both found that if you have something to say, kids will listen – and if kids get the sense that you’re interested in what they have to say, they will really listen.
The Now I See... series is not the first time Klassen and Barnett have collaborated.Chona Kasinger/The Globe and Mail
You’ve won all the prizes, had all these laurels, but what is the best compliment for you?
Barnett: I love hearing that a joke or a line from the book becomes ‘That’s what our family says when something goes wrong,’ or ‘That’s what our family says when something surprising happens.’ Being incorporated into a family lexicon, the way these people are making sense of the world and binding themselves together – is the best.
Klassen: We’re aware that we just get a chance to be part of that period in their lives. We are one of the things in the house. When they bring you the book and it’s all messed up, and they say, ‘This was his first word,’ you got to be there with them. That’s really the best one.
This interview has been condensed and edited.