On Children’s Books,
Their Makers & Their Houses

“It takes a whole life to learn to draw like a child.”

— Picasso, quoted by Manceau

Three distinct creative streams define his work: phonemic wordplay (the Poule series, where entire books are built on a single vowel sound), appearance/disappearance games (the Didier Jeunesse trio, where faces lose their parts and must be rebuilt), and graphic minimalism (Fusée, where a rocket is constructed from ten shapes and then destroyed — because construction and destruction are the same joy).

His Merci le vent — seven colored shapes rearranged into different animals, then blown to the reader by the wind — is one of the most widely used picture books in French preschool pedagogy. Prix des Incorruptibles (twice), Prix Libbylit 2014, Prix Sorcières 2015.

Over 100 books in 13 languages since joining L’école des loisirs in 1990. Known for extraordinarily detailed illustrations, dream-like narratives, and an invented vocabulary (“tristifier,” “splitcher,” “sclaquouiller”) that children understand instantly because it sounds exactly like what it means.

Created Le Muz, an online museum of children’s art. Prix Sorcières Spécial 2006 for lifetime achievement. In 2025, at age 76, he launched the Olie-Boulie series — deliberately feminizing French grammar itself, making the feminine form default.

“Lewis Carroll-like.”

— Libération, on Ponti

The comparison is apt: both use nonsense as a portal to philosophical wonder.

The “Bon pour les bébés” collection (28 titles, Seuil Jeunesse) was born from collaboration with librarian Marie-Paule Fontano and tested in crèches for eight months. Its radical premise rests on three research findings: babies see high contrast better than color; babies prefer books as large as they are; babies need the music of varied language — not simplified speech, but nursery rhymes, tongue twisters, haikus, and even Cyrano de Bergerac.

Format: 38 × 28 cm, strictly black-and-white, 12 pages. The most important French book collection designed specifically for newborns.

His artistic lineage runs through Dalí, Magritte, and de Chirico — surrealists who proved that photographic realism applied to impossible premises creates a more powerful effect than stylization. His work proves that pictures don’t need text to tell stories of profound complexity.

“You read the pictures, and there are no air quotes around ‘read.’”

— David Wiesner

Received the Order of Canada (2018). His technique — hand-made textures scanned and digitally assembled — produces illustrations where characters’ eyes betray everything the text conceals.

The Barnett-Klassen partnership (Shapes Trilogy, Extra Yarn, Sam and Dave Dig a Hole) is the most consequential author-illustrator collaboration in contemporary picture books: two Canadians making deadpan philosophical comedy that reads as perfectly in Brooklyn as in Winnipeg.

The early gouache naturalism of I Am a Bunny and The Rooster Struts (both 1963) — botanically precise, contemplative, almost Beatrix Potter-esque — and the later Busytown pen-and-ink maximalism, where cats, pigs, and worms drive cars, fly planes, and construct buildings in compositions so dense they invented the “busy page” that every seek-and-find book since has drawn from.

“I am a bunny. My name is Nicholas. I live in a hollow tree.”

— Ole Risom, I Am a Bunny

I Am a Bunny, written by Ole Risom (a Danish-American WWII Monuments Man who became VP of Golden Books), may be the most perfect opening in board book literature.

Babar en famille was published posthumously in 1938; his teenage son Laurent continued the series for decades. François Poulenc composed a piano piece inspired by Le Voyage de Babar. The Metropolitan Museum holds a first edition.

A career of fewer than seven years that permanently expanded what a picture book could physically be.

The Pigeon books channel a decade of television comedy writing into a single crayon-line character on warm ochre paper; Nanette’s Baguette abandons that entirely for handcrafted cardboard-and-paper 3D dioramas, photographed and digitally composited.

Proof that Willems can reinvent his visual language as completely as he reinvented children’s comedy.

Sold 50–80 million greeting cards per year at the height of her card career before bringing her cartoonist’s instinct for the perfect punchline to the 24-page board book format.

“But Not the Hippopotamus is her board-book masterpiece.”

— The New Yorker

And they were right: under sixteen words per spread, Boynton constructs a complete emotional arc about belonging, with a structural twist ending worthy of Beckett.

Influences: Roland Topor, Robert Crumb, Saul Steinberg, James Ensor — all artists known for satirical work. Le Saux’s children who love the naughty images see something different from adults who see the gap between text and picture as social commentary.

His deliberately “ugly-beautiful” characters come from press caricature, not cute illustration.

“Le roi des papas.”

— Livres Hebdo obituary headline

“J’emballe les livres et les livres m’emballent”

— Pierre Marchand

Over nine years he rose from the warehouse floor to Fleurus’s management committee. In 1971 Marchand and journalist Jean-Olivier Héron co-founded the sailing magazine Voiles et Voiliers. It failed spectacularly. To pay off their debts, the two pitched a children’s publishing project to Gallimard. In October 1972, the first four titles of the “1000 Soleils” collection launched what would become Gallimard Jeunesse. Without that sailing magazine’s financial collapse, France’s largest children’s publisher might never have existed.

“On ne naît pas lecteur, on le devient”

— Pierre Marchand

Marchand’s philosophy was rooted in his typographer’s training and his contempt for condescension: through “the first reading, that of the image. You must give children beautiful images.” When a university scholar delivered a 400-page manuscript for the Découvertes encyclopedia, Marchand erupted in what the scholar called his “Homeric laugh” and demanded it be condensed to fifty pages — scientifically exact, in constant dialectic with the illustrations.

“He liked to upset and destroy, in order to build again... He couldn’t suffer an error of visual taste or the sin of banality”

— Colleagues on Marchand

“Tourner une page, c’est comme jouer à cache-cache”

— Gallimard pedagogical guide

The spiral binding — unusual for children’s books — lets each book open completely flat, essential for the overlay to register. The 150 × 175mm format with its hidden spiral and heavy cardboard demanded expensive multi-language co-editions: this economic necessity accidentally pushed Gallimard Jeunesse into genuinely global publishing early. English editions appeared via Moonlight Publishing within a year. Over 40 million copies sold in 30 languages across 200+ titles.

Under Marchand, the children’s division grew to represent 30–35% of all Gallimard revenue and employed over 120 people — making the former warehouse worker responsible for roughly a third of one of France’s most prestigious publishing houses. Marchand left Gallimard in 1999 and died on April 4, 2002, at sixty-two. After his death, Gallimard Jeunesse published Si... (2009), Kipling’s poem “If—” illustrated by twenty-one of the house’s major artists, dedicated to Marchand and his first grandson Ugo.

Publishing was in her blood: her father Howard Peter Bedrick had risen from Schocken Books’ sales staff (the house of Kafka, Buber, and Arendt) to publisher, then founded Peter Bedrick Books in 1983 with her mother Muriel. Enchanted Lion launched in 2003 — the name a riff on the Red Lion Inn in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where the family summered. But Peter Bedrick died of an inoperable brain tumor in December 2004, barely ten months after the press’s first list. That death fundamentally redirected the house from illustrated nonfiction toward the translated picture books that define it.

“I didn’t come into children’s publishing with any love for it, honestly.”

— Claudia Zoe Bedrick

What she built instead was arguably the most critically celebrated small children’s press in America.

“I’m a bit of an Aristotelian and care about remaining true to the phenomena while engaging volition and action.”

— Bedrick

She looks for vitality of line, the presence of an active imagination that engages the “what if?,” and a manifest love of reality through which to discover wonder, sacredness, and a beauty beyond what is there.

“Americans are suspicious of beauty”

— Big Five marketing director to Bedrick

On American publishing’s discomfort with visual sophistication, she relayed a devastating anecdote: “In 2009, one of the marketing directors at one of the big houses told me that the beauty of the books we were making hampered sales.” She has been repeatedly told her books are “too European” — a label she considers a euphemism for unsellable.

The finances are precarious. Books must retail at $16.95–$17.95. There is “no budget to wine and dine librarians.” COVID nearly sank the operation; a Kickstarter and government assistance kept it alive. Big Five publishers have reportedly tried to acquire them — unsuccessfully. Bedrick’s mother Muriel still helps organize the office.

Schoolman articulated the founding impulse against a specific political backdrop: “At this moment when xenophobia is so freely expressed, the windows these children’s titles provide onto other worlds fill a lamentable void.” The imprint launched with three titles: Claude Ponti’s My Valley, Jostein Gaarder’s Questions Asked, and Roger Mello’s You Can’t Be Too Careful!

“We are more interested in books that ask questions rather than provide answers.”

— Kendall Storey

The catalog, roughly three to five titles per year, spans French, Norwegian, Portuguese, Chinese, Finnish, Estonian, Persian, Spanish, Polish, Dutch, and Japanese. Recurring relationships define the list: five books with Roger Mello (the 2014 Hans Christian Andersen Award winner from Brazil), four-plus with Claude Ponti, and the first comprehensive English-language edition of Quino’s Mafalda — the Argentine comic strip that sold over 20 million copies worldwide but had never been properly translated. Five hardcover volumes are planned, translated by Frank Wynne.

“Unfortunately, the timing is great for American readers.”

— Daniel Alarcón

As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, revenue comes from book sales, donations, grants, and annual art auctions of original illustrations. A $100 membership delivers the next four published picture books. The entire operation — Archipelago and Elsewhere combined — runs on three full-time employees. Three Batchelder Honors in six years of publishing, from a three-person nonprofit, represents one of the more remarkable critical records in recent American children’s publishing.

The Assumptionist order remains the sole owner today. It operates on a nonprofit basis — all profits reinvested, none distributed to the order. Many lay employees reportedly don’t even realize they work for a company owned by monks.

“Un journal pour les petits n’est pas un petit journal”

Within a year, 100,000 children were waiting for it monthly. Petit Ours Brun, the character now synonymous with the magazine, didn’t appear until March 1975 — created by literature professor Claude Lebrun, who was tired of reading classic tales to her own children, and illustrated by Danièle Bour. Popi (1986) pushed even younger, targeting ages one to three. J’aime lire (1977) remains the most consequential: a “novel-in-a-magazine” for ages seven to ten, each issue containing a complete original short novel. Of 400 manuscripts received annually, only twelve are published. The magazine claims to be read by one in every two French children.

With the 2004 acquisition of Milan Presse, the group controls 27% of the French youth press market. The current Superior General of the Assumptionist order — sole owner of a global media group with 2,000 employees, 200+ magazines, and 5 million subscribers — is Benoît Ngoa Ya Tshihemba, a Congolese priest elected in 2023. The order founded to fight French secularization in 1845 now runs one of the world’s largest children’s media operations from a distinctly post-colonial vantage point.

They became a children’s publisher almost by accident. In 1994, the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes asked them to produce a facsimile of Cent comptines, a legendary 1926 collection of nursery rhymes illustrated by the Surrealist painter Pierre Roy — a book that had become so rare and expensive it was essentially lost. Roy had coined the word comptine itself, defining it as “a living genre, perhaps the only truly spontaneous and disinterested literary genre that exists in France,” and he had collected the rhymes “always from the mouths of children” — mainly in western France. To reproduce the tactile quality of Roy’s original, Morault and Mestrallet printed on a typographic letterpress and hand-painted ten thousand cover balls by hand.

“À l’insu de notre plein gré”

— Morault, on how they became children’s publishers — against our will, essentially

From that accidental beginning, a philosophy crystallized: MeMo would be a workshop, not a publishing house. They do photogravure and layout in-house. They use direct-ink spot-color printing rather than standard four-color process, mixing individual inks before printing so that colors land as flat, saturated tints free of halftone grain. All books are sewn, never glued. The paper is thick, uncoated offset stock close to drawing paper — Morault calls it their signature. Mestrallet refuses decorative fonts and dislikes serifs; for one book he sourced the British Railways typeface through an English compositor working in Paris. For André Héllé’s Drôles de bêtes (1911), they decomposed the colors layer by layer — nine separate passes for the cover alone. For the Lebedev and Marshak constructivist picture books of the 1920s, they applied twenty separate color passes to faithfully reproduce the original lithography. When scanners could not capture the subtle nuances, the team resorted to manual photogravure on rhodoid sheets.

“MeMo, ce n’est pas juste des papiers, des méthodes d’impression, du temps passé, des compétences de photograveur; c’est avant tout un ensemble de tout ça. C’est un atelier.”

— Christine Morault

Morault describes herself as a “slow” editor, taking three times longer than competitors to print. The press operates without a marketing department — “on heartfelt conviction” rather than commercial trend-chasing — and publishes roughly twenty titles a year, with a catalogue of over three hundred. It is the only major French children’s publisher based outside Paris, at 5 passage Douard in Nantes. Morault advocates for décroissance — degrowth — in publishing: producing and selling less while improving quality. She has publicly criticized large bookstore chains whose automated systems mark returns for destruction. MeMo itself has never pulped a single book. Damaged or unsold copies go to Biblionef, schools in the Nantes priority education network, migrant assistance associations, and Secours Populaire.

“Rééditer, ce n’est pas recopier. C’est réinventer.”

— Christine Morault — Reprinting is not copying. It is reinventing.

The reissue programme extends beyond the European avant-garde. Under the collection “Les Grandes Rééditions,” MeMo has brought to French readers Margaret Wise Brown and Garth Williams, Crockett Johnson’s Harold books, Dorothy Kunhardt, Walter Crane, Kate Greenaway, and Frédun Shapur. Under “Classiques étrangers pour tous,” Karel Čapek, Shel Silverstein, and Lewis Carroll illustrated by Themerson. In 2015, the Maurice Sendak Foundation chose MeMo to reissue out-of-print Sendak titles in French — thirteen books so far under the collection “Les Trésors de Sendak,” including Kenny’s Window (Sendak’s first as author-illustrator, 1956) and five Ruth Krauss collaborations. The translator for the entire series, Françoise Morvan, was awarded the IBBY International Prize in 2018 for the work. From 2024, MeMo is doing the same for Paul Cox — reissuing his sought-after, long-out-of-print children’s books alongside a deluxe reedition of their 2018 monograph.

Morault’s phrase for this entire enterprise is precise: “MeMo a mêlé, dès le départ, les œuvres d’avant et celles de maintenant pour qu’apparaissent des continuités littéraires et artistiques” — MeMo has mixed, from the start, the works of before and those of now, so that literary and artistic continuities become visible. The contemporary catalogue — Émilie Vast’s botanical precision, Anne Crausaz’s Prix Sorcières–winning Raymond rêve, Mélanie Rutten’s layered narratives, Junko Nakamura’s quiet domesticity — exists in deliberate dialogue with the reissues. The heritage and the living list illuminate each other.

“Un bon livre jeunesse, c’est celui qui s’ouvre quand on le referme.”

— Christine Morault — A good children’s book is one that opens when you close it.

MeMo’s archives were deposited in 2019 at the Fonds patrimonial Heure Joyeuse — the Médiathèque Françoise Sagan in Paris, home to the great historic collection of illustrated children’s books. They are the only living publisher whose archives are held there. A major exhibition, Lire l’enfance avec les éditions MeMo, ran from November 2022 to March 2023. In 2014, the Tate Gallery and Victoria and Albert Museum commissioned MeMo to print Anne Bertier’s Mercredi — institutional recognition of a production standard that no amount of commercial logic can quite explain. In October 2025, the Italian group Simone Edizioni acquired a majority stake, joining MeMo with Topipittori of Milan in a small network of artisan children’s publishers that can share printing costs and paper purchasing while preserving editorial independence. Morault’s daughter Yara Nascimento entered the capital to maintain family continuity. The workshop, for now, endures.