The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick (Scholastic) won the 2008 Caldecott Medal on Monday, and its journey from the germ of an idea to award-winning, um, picture book, shares many of the serpentine turns of Hugo's plot. Selznick started in the children's book field as a bookseller at the former Eeyore's Bookstore on Manhattan's Upper West Side. His first book was The Houdini Box, edited by Anne Schwartz at Knopf (1991). But we first met him when he published his first, shall we say, traditional picture book, Doll Face Has a Party! by the late Pam Conrad (HarperCollins/Geringer, 1994). Here Shelf Awareness's Jennifer M. Brown speaks with Selznick, who reflects on the events of the past few days and how, in some ways, he's come full circle.
Congratulations! How do you feel?
I have no idea how I feel. [Laughter.] I feel great.
Did you ever think a 500-plus page book about a boy and a French silent filmmaker could win the Caldecott Medal?
I love that the committee was willing to take this chance and say this is a picture book. Someone started joking with me early on about how this is a 555-page picture book. It's amazing that [the committee] went with it and opened up the criteria in that way.
But it didn't start out as a 500-plus page book, did it?
No, it was going to be a 100-page traditional novel about a kid who met Georges Méliès, with maybe a drawing per chapter. But I kind of knew I wanted to do something different with the pictures. In good picture books, the plot is advanced when you turn the page. In Where the Wild Things Are, you move through the wild rumpus without any language. In Fortunately by Remy Charlip, every time you turn the page, there's a huge laugh because a joke has occurred when you turn the page. I thought, what if I could do that in a narrative, and use the page turns in the same way?
Then I thought, what if the book unfolds like a film so that the pictures aren't just showing what you're learning in the text, but they're giving you information that's not in the text. So the story in language picks up from [the wordless images] and moves forward. I had a hope that readers wouldn't remember what they saw and what they read, but just remembered one narrative arc.
You act as somewhat of a film director in these spreads--the cutaway view from the toymaker's eye, to the clock face, to Hugo's eye peering out from his hiding place behind the clock, then Isabelle's face as a near mirror image of Hugo.
I wanted [the book] to flow and move like a movie. I was thinking about edits and close-ups and the camera panning across something, and I was very conscious of that with the sequences.
When you mirror something, you make an immediate connection between those two things. I wanted to make a connection between Hugo and Isabelle, and [I used examples from] films by Truffaut, and René Clair and Hitchcock, and how the camera tells the story by what it shows you and how it moves.
In your first book, The Houdini Box, the boy hero gets to meet Houdini. Was it your own fantasy to meet this magician and pioneer filmmaker, George Méliès?
The idea for The Houdini Box came directly from wanting to meet Houdini. He was my hero when I was a kid. But I didn't learn about Méliès until later. I can't say that it was that I wanted to meet Méliès--although I'd love to. I was thinking of using that idea of a kid meeting Méliès the way the child met Houdini. But I didn't want it to be just like The Houdini Box--Houdini Box II! I was waiting to see who the kid would be and what the story would be.
So the germ of the idea was planted some time ago. How long did you work on this book?
The germ of the idea came from seeing [Georges Méliès' film] A Trip to the Moon in college. So it sat in the back of my head for all these years, while I did all my other books. Every now and then I'd learn more about Méliès. I'd find out he was a magician, his parents owned a shoe factory, and he hated shoes. Even the old films he made, he sold [because he was so poor], and someone melted them down and made them into shoe heels! A huge percentage of his films were lost. Everything in his life was perfect for a story.
Then when I found out about the automaton, I thought, that's the story. A kid finds it and wants to fix it. That happened about three-and-a-half years ago.
You began your career as a bookseller. Do you think that helped you connect with your readers early on?
I think everything about being at Eeyore's was completely important to everything I do now. I still feel like I'm a bookseller. You want to get the right book into the right person's hands.
I was there two years, I think. Not only did I learn everything about books from Steve Geck, the manager [who's now an editor at Greenwillow Books], he'd send me home every night with bags of books to read. One kid would come in and say, "I love horse books," and another was into adventure stories, and I'd give him adventure stories. Most of the time they liked the books, and I'd give them other books. That experience was incredibly helpful. Oh, and painting the windows! I'd do these paintings that had to look good from across the street--great practice for a book cover, which had to look good from the shelf and also in your hand.
I had several years when all the books I made went out of print, but luckily that turned around. I hear about a kid who liked Hugo, and I think about being a bookseller at Eeyore's and feel a sense of satisfaction about giving the right kid the right book. That's what the whole point of this is.