The Vintage Reader

Recently my mother-in-law—mother of four, grandmother of seven, step-grandmother of four, and retired school librarian—decided to offload some of the stacks of children's books she's accumulated through the years, and Vintage Toddler was the lucky recipient. He and I both fell in love with one adorable Little Golden Book called I Can Fly, illustrated by Mary Blair (cover, as well as some other wonderful Mary Blair art, here). Mary Blair was a Disney animation artist, and helped define the style most of us think of as classic Disney; she worked on Cinderella, Peter Pan, and Alice in Wonderland, among others, and she designed the Disneyland "small world" ride, which I was completely obsessed with after visiting Disneyland at the age of five. But it's mostly her illustration style that I find completely appealing; every time we read I Can Fly I notice something in the illustrations that I haven't noticed before. The colors and shapes she used are the same ones I like in other midcentury design, but what makes her work so appealing to me is her subject matter—children and animals. I'm usually not big on artwork involving children, but I just love the way Mary Blair made them look.

So I was pleased to find this: ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive: Golden Book: Mary Blair's Baby's House. I particularly love it that without text, there's no telling whether "Baby" is a girl or a boy. I have no idea what the text says, and I'm not sure I care.

EDIT: Ever since I linked to the Baby's House post on the ASIFA web site, something has been bothering me, and I couldn't figure out what it was. There are links at the bottom of that post to another Mary Blair book: The New Golden Songbook. It looked a little familiar to me, but I didn't recognize the cover at all, so it took me a while to remember that this book was in our music cabinet when I was growing up. By the time I came along—15 years after my oldest sister, who would have been two when this book came out—the cover had been lost to the ages from being handled by lots of grubby little hands, but the rest of the book was reasonably intact. I might actually have to go ransack my mother's house today to see if I can find it.