Side by side Book

This is an excellent and very well written book about the creative process and about collaborative teamwork.

I love behind the scenes type tours, and that’s what this book is.

I might have enjoyed it even more had other/more writer-illustrator teams been included.

The 5 teams featured are:

Arthur Yorinks and Richard Egielski: Louis the Fish

Alice Provensen and Martin Provensen: The Glorious Flight

Jon Scieszka, Lane Smith, and Molly Leach: The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales

Julius Lester and Jerry Pinkney: Sam and the Tigers

Joanna Cole and Bruce Degen: The Magic School Bus Explores the Senses

Each of the teams has a section where they talk about how they came to be a team, details about their style of working together, work in progress is shown, some information about their lives in general is given, and at the end a partial list of their books is given, so the reader sees those too, not just the most featured book. The work in progress pictures are fascinating.

There is also a short, but useful, glossary in the back of the book, and an index too.

I’d love it if Leonard S. Marcus created other books such as this, with other picture book teams, and I’d love to read more such books either by other authors or about other types of collaborative efforts.