See the Imaginative Illustrations on the Endpapers of Children’s Books Like ‘The World of Pooh’ and ‘Blueberries for Sal’
A new exhibition celebrates the often-overlooked endpapers of more than 50 works of children’s literature ranging from the mid-20th century to the present day
If you look inside the front and back of the nearest hardcover book, you’ll probably see colored or decorative endpapers holding the pages to the covers. More than structural necessities, these endpapers serve as prime real estate for maps, engravings and illustrations, particularly in children’s books.
The end of A.A. Milne’s The World of Pooh (1957), for example, depicts a drawing of the fictional Hundred Acre Wood, where readers can trace a winding river from “Where the Woozle Wasn’t” to “Rabbit’s House” all the way off the page, “To North Pole.”
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That illustration, by English artist E.H. Shepard, is on display at the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, in Amherst, Massachusetts. It joins the endpapers of more than 50 other children’s books in a new exhibition, “Open + Shut: Celebrating the Art of Endpapers.”
The exhibition was developed by guest curator Bruce Handy, a journalist, children’s writer and author of Wild Things: The Joy of Reading Children’s Literature as an Adult (2017).
“I was intrigued by the many ways artists were using [endpapers],” Handy tells the Guardian’s Veronica Esposito. “I was surprised at how much thought goes into [them].”
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Handy created the show with “no academic background,” he tells Literary Hub’s Brittany Allen. With help from associate curator Isabel Ruiz Cano and others from the Eric Carle Museum, Handy organized the dozens of endpapers into four categories: “The Decorative Tradition”; “Maps, Landscapes and Stage Sets”; “Before and After”; and “Wit, Wisdom and Surprise.”
One endpaper on display is from Love in the Library, a 2022 children’s book written by Maggie Tokuda-Hall and illustrated by Yas Imamura. The story is based on Tokuda-Hall’s grandparents, who met at the library in a Japanese internment camp during World War II. Imamura’s endpapers depict a Western landscape “that you might see in a John Ford movie,” with a row of barbed wire in the foreground, Handy tells Literary Hub.
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“It literally sets the scene for the book, but it sets the scene emotionally, too,” he adds. “You have this combination of beauty and pain, beauty and confinement. I just think it’s really powerful conceptually.”
Other endpapers in the collection include Jessica Love’s illustrations for her 2018 picture book, Julián Is a Mermaid, which are displayed in the “Before and After” category. The front paper depicts Julián swimming with his abuela and her friends, while the back endpaper shows the swimmers, including Julián, as mermaids.
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Quoting award-winning author and illustrator Brendan Wenzel, Handy tells the Boston Globe’s Victoria Wasylak, “When you only have 32 pages, you want to take advantage of every surface you have for storytelling.”
“I feel the same way,” he adds. “Why let this space go to waste?”
The Eric Carle Museum was founded in 2002 by Eric Carle, the author of the 1969 classic The Very Hungry Caterpillar, and his wife, Barbara. The museum collects and preserves picture book art, offering “audiences of all ages and experiences innovative ways to enjoy the picture book,” according to the museum’s website.
“I think reading and absorbing picture books helps give kids a kind of visual literacy,” Handy tells the Boston Globe. “That’s something that’s going to be increasingly important in everybody’s lives. We’re an increasingly visual society.”
“Open + Shut: Celebrating the Art of Endpapers” is on display at the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art in Amherst, Massachusetts, through November 9, 2025.