Typography for Children^157When Lewis Carroll painstakingly curled lines of hot metal type into the
shape of a mouse’s tail in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland( 1865 ), he engaged
in typeplay that would seldom be repeated in children’s books for another
fifty years, and would take another sixty to become the trend it is today.
Since children’s books offer many possibilities for creative play it is curious
that for so long children’s typography remained comparatively tame.
Certainly in the post–World War II period artists under the spell of
modern art liberated both style and content. Following the postwar baby
boom mainstream book publishers, particularly in the United States,
reconsidered their audiences and took risks with subjects, styles, and, to a
lesser extent, layouts. Ignoring librarians’ warnings against overstepping the
strict conventions that they had persistently maintained through choosing
what books to buy for their libraries, publishers allowed artists and writers
to push the limits of children’s book art by challenging taboos—like
allowing a snake to appear as a book’s main character for the first time in
Tomi Ungerer’s 1959 Crictor.