Children’s picture books are a unique record of social evolution: in gender roles and racial politics, as is much discussed, but also in fashion and interior design. Children’s books deal in idealized worlds, so they’re a document of how our notion of ideal worlds has changed over time. Reading the great picture books of the past few decades is as instructive a lesson in evolving notions of design as looking at the archives of House Beautiful.

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From the excerpt Richard Scarry's Best Storybook Ever(1967): The silhouettes of the sofas in the living room and the attic den are similar. This is not a home of ostentatious decorative gestures, but one of comfort, a faith in the modern culture (the television, the record player, a single book, from the Book of the Month Club, no doubt, left out on the coffee table). We see the home at the start of the day: one son lacing up his shoes, mother working on breakfast. The house is awake, alive with an optimism about what the day, the decade, the century holds for the people who live here, the people who live like this.......Continue Reading

Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown; illustrated by Clement Hurd (1947)

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