Babar the Elephant and other creatures at the Building Museum

How many English speakers in America, born in the 1930s, remember The Story of  Babar the Elephant?   My copy was too big for me to carry up the stairs of my grandmother’s house when I was three. 

This giant Babar edition is displayed in the fantastic new exhibit at The Building Museum in Washington, DC. which opened in January 2024. The book sits open at my favorite double-page spread,  where Babar is driving his open car through the French countryside, beside the river with animals and flowers all in glorious color. 

I ‘ve been enthralled by picture books since I could walk, saving all my children’s books,  collecting them for storytelling gigs since before my children were born, greedily volunteering at blueberry festival book sales for thirty years, bringing home armful after armful, mostly but not only, from the golden age of children’s books in America, the early forties through the seventies. 

Picture books and middle-grade books fill shelves and stand pressed between vintage bookends on the floor in the children’s bookroom, an extra 10 x 7′ room stuck onto the house beside the dining room. This room in my house once served as the  Roque Bluffs Post Office.

After I  came, the room belonged in turn to the youngest grandchild. Now it is the rainy day lending library for the neighbors ‘ visiting children during Maine summers.

Back to the Building Museum Exhibit;  an experience for all ages.  I spent hours there, surrounded by hundreds of the best, most adored children’s books of three generations, displayed in a multi-dimensional exhibit that took Curator Leonard Marcus, children’s literature historian, and his team five years to put together. 

 There are pop up books, famous favorite first editions under glass, including Leonard’s copy of THE LITTLE FUR FAMILY illustrated by Garth Williams with the real fur cover!  Our family copy was loved to pieces long ago. 

Central to the show is a book about Rome, a pigeon’s eye view, illustrated in black and white and built inside the exhibit by the artist David Macauley, and most exciting of all, dozens of his original folded paper black and white dummies in every size and shape, covering an entire wall.

There are reading corners and plenty of books to read – books that will be replaced during the ten year life of this extraordinary sculptural exhibit, with nooks and crannies to explore and curl up in and continuing live programs, and puppet shows. 

Image used Copyright National Building Museum https://www.nbm.org/