Welcome to Looking at Picture Books

where Jon Klassen and Mac Barnett explore how picture books work

Looking at Picture Books is a Substack about how picture books work, made by two award-winning, bestselling children’s book authors, Jon Klassen and Mac Barnett. That’s us! Jon is on the left.

Picture books are real literature. The best ones are artworks as great as any books humans have made. But like all children’s literature, picture books are misunderstood and undervalued, a centuries-old problem we expect to have fixed after two or three posts.

Who is this for?

People who love picture books.
Including but not limited to:

• people who write picture books.

• people who want to write picture books.

• people who read picture books to kids.

• people who read picture books for themselves.

(If you know someone else like that you can tell them about Looking at Picture Books by clicking the button below.)

We hope Looking at Picture Books gives you a deeper understanding of the medium. Also we hope Looking at Picture Books gives us a deeper understanding of the medium.

What to Expect

Often, we’ll do a close-reading of a great picture book and try to figure out how it works. We’ll examine all aspects of picture book storytelling, including writing, illustration, and design. We’ll also talk about how picture books make us feel and what we think they mean. Inevitably, we’ll wind up discussing the philosophy and practice of making books for children.

We’ll be focusing on older books here—well-known classics and under-appreciated treasures. This isn’t because we don’t believe there aren’t interesting picture books being published today. (We even believe that we make some of them!) It’s just because that’s what we feel like doing.

It’s free to subscribe, but paid subscribers will get more posts, where we discuss more books and answer reader questions. Paid subscribers can also comment and read the full archive of past posts. We’re going to try out the video and audio stuff Substack offers, maybe this new “Live” function. We’re excited.

About Jon Klassen & Mac Barnett

We make children’s books. Here are the ones we’ve made together:

Mac’s other books are here. For Jon’s, you can look at his Wikipedia, because he doesn’t have a website.

We were called “the picture book kings” by the New York Post, a newspaper that, to our knowledge, has never been wrong about anything.

Every book we’ve made together is a New York Times bestseller, except for one, Triangle, which is the one Jon likes best. Oh well!

Collectively, we have won two Caldecott Honors, a Caldecott Medal, a Kate Greenaway Medal, New York Times Best Illustrated awards, Society of Illustrators medals, E.B. White Read-Aloud Awards, Canadian Governor General's medals, and several other international prizes. Jon has received the Order of Canada. Mac is not Canadian.

We are also friends. The first time we met, at a party, we spent hours discussing picture books, and we’ve been talking about them ever since. Now you can eavesdrop on our conversations, legally and ethically.