Hard as it might be to imagine now, there was a time when Goodnight Moon (1947) was a controversial storytime pick, when the idea of putting your name on a children’s book was considered an embarrassing frivolity for a serious artist, when the thought of classes devoted to kid lit was laughable. But, as children’s book historian Leonard S. Marcus makes clear in Pictured Worlds: Masterpieces of Children’s Book Art by 101 Essential Illustrators From Around the World (Abrams, March 28), kid lit has transformed radically over the last few centuries.

The book isn’t “meant to be the last word” on the topic, Marcus, 72, told Kirkus via Zoom from his Brooklyn home. And he admits that spotlighting just 101 artists and their works is “an impossible task.” Indeed, he hopes his choices—among them Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1901), Ezra Jack Keats’ The Snowy Day (1962), Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are (1968), Brian Selznick’s The Invention of Hugo Cabret (2007), and Yuyi Morales’ Niño Wrestles the World (2013)—spark debate among readers. Rather than presenting an exhaustive list of artists and titles, he strove “to identify books that…represented seminal moments in the development of the illustrated book for children and to show that as wide-rangingly as possible across the world and over time.” Mission accomplished—his beautifully designed volume is both a love letter to children’s literature and a portrait of a rich and evolving field.

The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

One theme that pops up is the tension between the New York Public Library and the Bank Street School of Education—in your entry on Goodnight Moon illustrator Clement Hurd, you note that author Margaret Wise Brown was a protégée of Bank Street’s Lucy Sprague Mitchell and that the NYPL refused to purchase the book until 1974.

At Bank Street, they were paying attention to what people like William James and John Dewey had observed about childhood and the new understanding of developmental psychology, whereas the librarians were coming out of a time when most publishing for children was very commercial. And so the librarians were inspired by the Romantic writers and artists of the 19^th century. They wanted beautifully produced books, well-told stories that would work at story hour, whereas the Bank Street people were interested in kids being messy and getting down on the floor and feeling like they were collaborators in their own storytelling. It was less important for them to present the children with a well-made completed aesthetic object than it was to give the children a sense of agency.

It resulted in two different kinds of books for young children. And ultimately, the two traditions came together. And, in my opinion, if you look at Goodnight Moon, what’s in the Great Green Room, that’s where it comes together, because you have all the ordinary things of everyday life like clocks and socks in the room. But you also have the cow jumping over the moon, the fantasy that the librarians love. And I think Margaret Wise Brown in her subtle way was saying, we both have half the story. Let’s put it all together.

Are there any other themes that emerge throughout your book?

You see a change in ideas about what a children’s book should be like and what it should do. If you look back at two books from the 1840s—the one by Edward Lear, A Book of Nonsense, and the book in German called Struwwelpeter, or Slovenly Peter—they came out within a year of each other. They were both made at home, originally just as a gift to the author’s own child, and published anonymously. It shows there was a time when, if you made a children’s book, you wouldn’t necessarily want to be associated with it. It might be sort of embarrassing if you were a doctor or serious botanic naturalist illustrator, as Lear was. So it was before children’s books as a commercial entity or as a cultural venture had respectability.

And yet both of those books became sensationally popular. So they represent a moment when attitudes were changing in a very dramatic way. And both books were saying to children, we can laugh together. Your books don’t have to be about how to be a good child or how to behave well. It didn’t end the tradition of didactic books for children. But it made a strong case for books that were not that way.

Now it’s quite the opposite—celebrities who may not have actually written a children’s book want to stick their name on it.

Everybody wants to have their name on books now. But when I started writing about children’s books as a history major in college, it was unimaginable that there would be a museum devoted to children’s book art, and now there are museums of that kind all around the world.

One of the first questions I asked as I switched from being interested in historical children’s books to contemporary ones was: Why does none of this beautiful art ever get shown in an art museum? I realized there are always pecking orders in the art world. Painting is better than drawing, and drawing is better than illustration, and illustration for a magazine is better than illustration for a children’s book. That’s really how it was for a long time. So what we’ve seen in the last 30 years, and not just in this country, but in many countries, is a revaluation of children’s books and children’s book art.

There’s a strong emphasis on international artists in your book. You’ve been vocal about your belief that the Caldecott Award should expand to encompass artists outside the United States. Can you speak to that?

In the ’30s, when the Caldecott Medal was created, and in the ’20s, when the Newbery was created, America was still culturally dependent on England. And one of the motives for creating these awards, which could only be given to an American, was to inspire artists and writers here to create a literature of our own, which was a valid goal. But now we’re at the point where we’ve, to a degree, dominated the world. It’s a kind of globalization that American books have made it out into so many different languages around the world, particularly over the last 40 or 50 years. And that has had reverb effects, where people in many other countries have decided they want to have their own children’s books. So we’re moving more toward an international style or approach to picture book–making. I don’t think we’re quite there yet. But there are signs of that. The circumstances have changed so dramatically that I think the award should be reconsidered on that basis.

What misconceptions about kid lit do you see your book dismantling?

That it’s mostly an Anglo-American phenomenon. Or even an Anglo-European phenomenon. I think that wherever you have a growing middle class, people at least consider the possibility of having children’s books that will encourage kids to love reading. It’s happened in so many different parts of the world that are culturally unlike each other. You have it in Mexico, you have it in China, you have it in Cameroon. It looks like a pattern, doesn’t it? This is something that is likely to happen almost anywhere in the world.

Mahnaz Dar is a young readers’ editor.