Book signing

Dear Friends,

I will be traveling to Massachusetts next month and visiting with friends and family. And on Sunday, August 23rd at Noon, I will be making my annual appearance at The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art to sign books and say hello to visitors.

For more information about this event as well as many other happenings at the Museum, including an exhibition that has recently opened of my friend Tomie dePaola's work, please visit the Museum's web site.

I hope you will join us!
Eric Carle

End Sheets

The colorful patterns on the inside covers of my books are called end sheets or end papers. An end sheet is like a theatre curtain in that it appears at the beginning, before the play starts, and at the end, after the play has finished. I pay great attention to the design of my end sheets; they often reflect something about the book and set the tone for the story.

I am especially fond of the end papers in The Very Hungry Caterpillar, pieces of colorful paper with holes in them, because they remind me of how the book started: from punching holes with a hole puncher.

For me, designing the end sheets for each book is part of the challenge and the pleasure of creating a book.

Here are some examples:

From Head to Toe



Papa, Please Get the Moon for Me




1,2,3 to the Zoo



Baby Bear, Baby Bear, What Do You See?

Farm Summer

In the second year of the Second World War — I had just turned 12, my maternal grandmother remembered from her youth a farm girl she had known. Off went a postcard: could Eric spend the summer vacation with her? Yes, came the reply. A small suitcase was packed. I traveled 4 hours by train and walked another 2 to a tiny village consisting of perhaps 8 farms. Maria, my grandmother’s friend, was an elderly unmarried woman living with her 90 year old widowed father, whom I called Grandfather.



Their living quarters, barn and stables were all in the same building, under one roof. They owned 3 cows, 2 pigs, a dozen chickens with a proud rooster and several bee hives in the abutting garden. In the garden grew all their vegetables and fruit that they needed.



There was no indoor plumbing. There was a water pump inside the kitchen. No hot water, no bathtub, no water closet, no cars, no refrigerator. I had a guest bed in the old man’s room. I still remember him snoring dreadfully and getting up in the middle of the night to use the chamber pot that would be emptied in the morning.



Maria worked until midnight baking bread, darning socks, washing and cleaning and then getting up at 4 in the morning to take her old bicycle and pedaling to the nearby forest to pick mushrooms or berries. Not for us, these were washed and carefully packed and delivered by her on the bicycle to the nearest city to be sold to the “rich city folk”.



My summer vacation with Maria and Grandfather will remain one of the most glorious experiences of my youth. Learning to milk a cow. Watching the bees around their hives in Maria’s garden. Searching for eggs in the barn. Picking wild blueberries and cranberries. Feeding noisy pigs. Quietly spending hours in an abandoned stone quarry where I watched frogs and salamanders in puddles of water. Observing the local cheese maker making cheeses. And, of course, enjoying the robust, yet delicious meals.

All this and more in this sheltered and pastoral place while a murderous war was ravaging Europe.

-Eric Carle

Pictures from Portugal

I received many lovely e-mails and letters this spring including these beautiful photographs of pictures from a book created by school children in Portugal.

I hope you will enjoy these too!
Eric Carle

Turning 80

Dear Friends,

Here I am with my mother in 1934 in Syracuse, NY. I was 5 years old when this photograph was taken, and now I am 80 years old.

Many things have happened between then and now, but I feel a strong connection to the child I once was, the child that is still inside. I can still remember while on a walk with my father, holding a lizard in my hands - the way it moved and pushed its head against the insides of my cupped hands; sitting in my Grandmother's lap and understanding her German words but not being able to respond; the support and kindness of my mother who encouraged my creative interests; I remember the light streaming in through the windows of my classroom, which I've thought of as my first experience of beauty.

There are so many moments that have stayed with me, or that come back if I scratch the surface of my memory by looking at an old photograph.

Eric Carle

A Quintet of Books

Sometimes, readers ask me why a number of my books have the word "Very" in the title. After The Very Hungry Caterpillar had been published I wanted to create a “Very” quartet. Why a quartet? I liked the idea of a group. But also, I must admit that I had been taken by the sound of The Alexandria Quartet, written by Lawrence Durrell, which I read a long time ago. The story of which I cannot much recall, but the sound of these three words, The Alexandria Quartet have remained with me. Ideas, or a speck of an idea, come from the darndest places! I proceeded to write and illustrate Spider, Cricket and Firefly and completed my quartet. But what should happen? A tiny voice whispered to me “quintet” And so the Click Beetle was born.

However, each "Very" book came about in a different way. The Very Hungry Caterpillar had a sort of accidental beginning in that I was punching holes into a stack of papers. I knew right away that the spider in The Very Busy Spider would be the hero, but it took me a long time to come up with the idea of a raised web. (In the first book the hole was the given - the caterpillar followed. In the second book, the spider was the given - the raised web followed.) With The Very Quiet Cricket, my third Very book, I knew from the beginning about the insect and the sound. In my fourth Very book, The Very Lonely Firely, I knew I wanted a different kind of surprise at the end. And with The Very Clumsy Click Beetle, the fifth book in my quintet, the theme of perseverance, that one must try and try again, was where I began.

Now I have a complete quintet. Five movements exploring a theme. I sometimes feel like a composer of music - and why not!

I hope you have enjoyed these thoughts on my Very books and my musings on how these compositions came to life. Be it crickets or humans, we can only make music when the circumstances are right. I didn't invent that, I only observed it.

Eric Carle

All the Colors

Dear Friends,

A recent burst of color in my neighborhood!

Eric Carle