I am six or seven years old, sitting in a stone stairwell that makes me think of a castle turret. A prickly sweetgum ball, swiped from the sidewalk on the short walk from the car, is poking my thigh through the pocket of my navy polyester shorts, and rainy light from a tiny leaded window at my shoulder falls on a page of the book lying open on my lap.
This book is propped on top of two others—three is all I will be allowed to check out today—and in this stairwell I am trying to skim through it fast enough to decide whether to swap for another before my mom comes to collect me. I’m guessing that she is down her own library rabbit hole (Elizabeth Goudge? Mary Stewart?) so I still have some time.
The books in my lap: Ed Emberley, Ed Emberley, and Ed Emberley.
I am the perfect age to lose myself in the magic of Emberley’s how-tos.
Maybe a year or two later, I am standing at a square table in the art room of my elementary school. It is recess, and I and three friends have opted to stay inside and work on a special project: making custom Ginsfortwoozellfimm posters, inspired by Emberley’s Big Purple Drawing Book.
We are all deadly serious as we contemplate our poster board. A few of my Ginsfortwoozellfimms are daringly different (some even have multi-colored hair) and one friend openly admires my creativity. We trade fat, colored markers back and forth between art tables; we carefully space bubble letters to title our work; we listen to a classmate spoil the shocking twist of The Empire Strike Back.
Decades later, doing a Google search for something just on the edge of memory, I stumble back upon Emberley. Recalling how scrupulously I studied his books, I feel a little silly, but digging deeper, I discover the man’s incredible body of work. The spirit of artistic exploration and discovery has been the hallmark of his life. I’m a six-year-old fangirl again.
Along the way, Emberley has nudged others in the same direction he has taken—his books were the training wheels for generations of kids who needed a safe way to test their creativity. How many must later have ditched the training wheels and pedaled madly off into the wide-open spaces of art!
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Ed Emberley is still active on Instagram and Twitter.
I wish I had known about the latest exhibit at the Eric Carle Museum in time to visit, but I have at least loved discovering Caleb Neelon’s interviews with and talks on Emberley. Neelon describes well, I think, why I loved Emberley so much myself:
When you draw Spiderman, anything that deviates from the Stan Lee way of doing Spiderman was wrong and everyone could see it. But Emberley’s drawing books don’t privilege flawless reproduction. Everyone—you, me, and Emberley, it turns out—can draw his recipes differently every single time. And they look better that way.
Another excellent read is Eric White’s piece in Juxtapoz magazine. Not for nothing, in it Emberley makes this observation [cough]:
We hear people tell us that they got our books from the library all the time when they were kids. Kids of course can’t really buy the books on their own. They might influence an adult to buy one, but libraries and teachers were the most influential.
New to my wish list is a Neelon/Todd Oldham collaboration that is the “definitive monograph on the wide repertoire of Emberley’s life’s work.” You might be interested too:
Of course, Emberley might also just inspire you in his own words...
And if you enjoy discovering beautiful libraries that create formative memories for children, here’s the beautiful West Chester Public Library in which I perched in a stairwell with a stack of Ed Emberley books. (But by the time I was there, the library was in color.)
Artist Inspo: Ed Emberley
When I was about 14 years old, a librarian offered me a copy of A Thurber Carnival, by this guy James Thurber. Who he? I was soon reading The Night the Bed Fell and crying real, but silent (shhhhhh!), tears of laughter at my desk in the reading room. The librarian tiptoed over to me and asked, with alarm: “Peter, are you alright?” In fact I’d never been better.