Clement Hurd drawing, Ferrisburgh, Vermont, 1939.
FIRST published in 1939, Gertrude Stein’s The World Is Round has a fresh, modernist feeling that is seldom found in children’s books today and remains avant-garde in its precocious notions of what such books can be.
Is The World Is Round really a children’s book? Do children adore it? Many find its radical use of language a difficult read, as I did when I first opened its pages at age ten, although I loved the brilliance of the solid rose-is-a-rose-is-a-rose-is-a-rose pink pages as well as the intensity of the deep blue type and my father’s illustrations. There was a mysterious quality to the art unlike any I had seen before.
When you hear The World Is Round read out loud and really listen to it, it’s music: an edgy composition with unexpected twists and backtracks of sound and sense. Experiencing the book this way, you feel the richness of its language, with its gorgeous juxtapositions of words and phrases, its surprising rhymes and repetitions, and a sense of humor that shines through at unexpected moments.
Over the years there have been several reissues of the book. The first came about on a single summer afternoon in Vermont in the 1960s, the result of a rethinking of its layout and design by my father, Clement Hurd, and the original editor and publisher, William R. Scott. My father redid the illustrations, which he had originally created in pen and ink, this time using linoleum blocks and driftwood to create a looser look. The solid pink pages and blue type were discarded in favor of white pages and more readable black type. Some of the mystery of the art was lost in this translation, but my father’s new illustrations show a more relaxed interpretation of the story.
Clement and Edith Hurd, North Ferrisburgh, Vermont, 1949.
In the 1980s, Andrew Hoyem, the founder of Arion Press and a good friend of my father’s, decided to create a fine press version. The book itself was round, housed in a pink square paper box, with a second, square book nested below it. That book contained the essay “The World Is Not Flat,” written by my mother, Edith Thacher Hurd. Her essay explains the story of how The World Is Round came to be, discusses the collaboration between my father and Gertrude Stein, and includes some of their correspondence.
With the current edition, The World Is Round has come full circle: it’s sized in the same proportions as the original book and replicates its typography, design, and color exactly. That beautiful intense pink, a rose of the most seductive hue, paired with Stein’s favorite deep blue re-creates the book exactly as she and my father envisioned it, but also includes my mother’s essay from the Arion edition.
The World Is Round proved to be one of the high points of my father’s career. His work on this book was really only matched by his collaboration with Margaret Wise Brown (who was much influenced by Stein’s writing) in creating both The Runaway Bunny (1942) and Goodnight Moon (1947).
My father created the illustrations for the book in his studio in the village of North Ferrisburgh, Vermont, where he had bought an old farmhouse for $600 in 1936. When my parents moved in, there was no electricity or running water, but they slowly renovated the place, transforming it into a cozy home with wide pine floorboards, a Victorian potbellied stove in the living room, and a copious vegetable garden. After they had lived there for a few years, a friend from nearby Lake Champlain gave them a small, old barn, which arrived in pieces. My father reassembled the structure and had it moved to a hill behind the house, and used it as his studio year-round.
As a young child I used to climb the hill to visit him when he was working, and I reveled in the smell of paints as well as the profusion of papers and paintings everywhere. That primal experience of seeing my father work deeply influenced me, and I later decided to become an artist. My parents also collaborated on many children’s books, which my mother wrote and my father illustrated. There was a feeling of creativity and aliveness in the house that was irresistible to me.
My father worked singlemindedly on the pictures for The World Is Round in that musty studio; he was inspired by Stein’s imaginative story, and eager and excited to create something fantastic, to make the most of an unusual opportunity with Stein, the often-called “Mother of Modernism.” This project gave him a chance to develop his ideas and explore in depth the styles of painting he had learned during the several years he had spent studying in Paris with Fernand Léger, among others.
In 1986, years after my parents had moved away, my family paid a visit to the North Ferrisburgh house. My father was too ill with Alzheimer’s to join us, but my mother, my wife, Olivia, our children, some friends, and I traveled down the winding dirt road to the house, where it sat in the middle of a field, its wide front lawn leading down to the river where I had swum happily as a child.
Mrs. Rowe, the woman who had bought the house from my parents in 1954, graciously showed us around. The kitchen had been remodeled a bit, but as we walked through the rest of the house we were amazed to see that most of it hadn’t been touched: it was as if my parents had moved out the day before.
On the second floor, a watercolor of my father’s hung exactly where it had when I was a child. In the bathroom, the walls were still covered with the brilliant pink wallpaper that had been created based on The World Is Round illustrations. A pink bathroom all around, with Rose and Willie splashed across the walls.
Edith, Thacher, and Clement Hurd, 1949.
Thacher and Clement Hurd, Berkeley, California, 1983.
My father had also wallpapered the front stairwell with large proof sheets from his books from the 1930s and 1940s. One of them was a full proof sheet from Goodnight Moon, looking a little the worse for wear, as if a mouse had chewed off one of the lower corners. Mrs. Rowe had papered over the tear with the cover of a magazine for cat lovers.
The visit was magical—a glimpse into my father’s world, perfectly preserved as if it were in a museum, a window into the creative life that brought forth the art that complements Stein’s imaginative text. Today, more than seventy years after its first publication, The World Is Round lives again in all its freshness and original beauty.
—Thacher Hurd