Picture book

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Peter Rabbit and wife being asked for cabbages by Benjamin and Flopsy Bunny in The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies

A picture book is a popular form of illustrated literature—more precisely, a book with comparatively few words and at least one picture on each of its openings—popularized in the 20th century Western world.

The illustrations in picture books use a range of media from oil painting to collage to quilting, but are most commonly watercolor or pencil drawings. Picture books are most often aimed at young children, and while some may have very basic language especially designed to help children develop their reading skills, most are written with vocabulary a child can understand but not necessarily read. For this reason, picture books tend to have two functions in the lives of children: they are first read to young children by adults, and then children read them themselves once they begin to learn to read. Some picture books are also written with older children in mind, developing themes or topics that are appropriate for children even into early adolescence.

Most often, the author and illustrator are two different persons--an editor chooses to publish a picture book text and then selects an illustrator to assign to it; but sometimes the author also produces the illustrations himself or herself. This happens most often when an illustrator has achieved enough success illustrating texts by others to persuade a publisher to be allowed to illustrate his or her own text. Some of the best-known picture books include Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Peter Rabbit, Robert Mccloskey's Make Way for Ducklings, and Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are. All these have texts written by their illustrators.

While pictures are iconic representations, resembling in some way the objects they depict, words are arbitrary signs, with no actual resemblance to the things they refer to. As a result, words and pictures convey different kinds of information, and the words and the pictures in a picture book communicate different aspects of the stories they tell together. They tend then to have an ironic relationship to each other--one tells or shows what the other is silent about. Competent illustrators often use these differences to create surprisingly complex stories out of relatively simple texts. Commentators have suggested a range of ways in which illustrators use aspects of pictorial representation to add complex information about the characters and situations outlined by the simple verbal texts of picture books: the size, shape, color and position of visual objects both on the two-dimensional plane of a picture and in the three-dimensional space it implies; the cultural and symbolic implications of the visual objects depicted; the use of a repertoire of visual styles to express specific attitudes towards the subjects being depicted; the relationship of the pictures to each other.

The precursors of the modern picture book were illustrated books of poems and short stories produced by English illustrators Randolph Caldecott, Walter Crane, and Kate Greenaway in the latter years of the nineteenth century. These had a larger proportion of pictures to words than earlier books, and many of their pictures were in color. The first book with something like the format picture books still retain now was Potter's The Tale of Peter Rabbit, first published in 1902. The Caldecott Medal, named for Randolph Caldecott, is given each year by the American Library association to the illustrator of the best illustrated American book of that year.