PZ: The market success that met this book as soon as it came out was amazing and I certainly hadn't anticipated it. I thought it would be well received, because as I said, from the dummy stage on, you could feel that it was working really well, but reception is one thing and sales are another. (Sadly, they are even less connected now than they used to be.) The Wheels on the Bus was introduced at the ALA (American Library Association) convention in 1990 in Chicago, and Dutton sent me there to sign it (which I guess was a sign of special expectations, because a pop-up book is not usually associated with library sales). I remember sitting at their booth with the book on a table--it seemed to draw people magnetically over to look, and then to want it. I was hearing stories of toddlers in strollers who saw the cover as they were wheeled by, and forced their parents to go back and pick up the book.
Actually, the publisher must have been anticipating great sales because I don't think there was any long gap of unavailability early on-- this has happened with other books of mine, where a first printing sold out and a second wasn't ready and waiting. In this particular case that gap could have been huge, because pop-up books are made by hand; it's much slower to put out a large printing of them, and then it will have to travel by ship from China, go through customs, etc.
After the book was published, I was told that demand was so strong that the printer was not even filling orders for individual printings, but just running the presses, printing and assembling copies as fast as they could, filling up containers and sending them off. So when we look now at the number of printings The Wheels on the Bus has gone through, there's an artificial and arbitrary aspect to whatever the number is.
As to why this happened, I'm very happy that it did, but I don't know why and I'm more comfortable not thinking about it. Is it possible to analyze reasons for a book's commercial success without wanting, even subliminally, to try to repeat the formula? That motivation is such an unhealthy one, responsible for so many books that shouldn't have been published. I believe that aiming for sales doesn't work anyway, though I'm probably wrong. I like to think that in the making of a book, the book itself has needs that may or may not match the needs of the marketplace, but the book's should be the ones that count.
JB: What are a book's needs? I never heard that concept before. Can you amplify?
PZ: I mean the needs of a book-in-progress. If it begins in a certain way it might need to proceed in a certain other way. It might need a speed-up here or a slow-down there, in order to make the effect it's producing stronger or purer. It might need a cool color palette, or it might need bright, bouncy colors, depending on the story. When you're working all of this out, you feel the needs of the work.
JB: Interesting. Since the huge and enduring success of The Wheels on the Bus , you've not been idle. Are you still juggling working on your own books and illustrating for other authors?
PZ: I have really been illustrating others' texts. I have a few ideas and am trying to work on them, but I must say that I've been so privileged over the years to have been offered manuscripts by such wonderful writers that it doesn't feel like the best choice to put them aside in favor of my own. I also have to say that when I work on a book's illustrations I don't feel a lower degree of interest or attachment if I didn't write the words. (Later, I do feel a certain difference, of course, when half of the royalties from a book's sales come to me, vs. the entire amount!)
JB: That makes sense. What haven't we covered yet that you'd like to talk about before we wrap this up?
PZ: Different books of mine look extremely different from each other and the better-known ones often don't get associated with each other except by people who pay attention to children's literature. So I personally am probably best known for my illustrated retelling of Rapunzel, because I was awarded the Caldecott medal for it, but Wheels on the Bus has been my best selling book by far. I understand that it has been popular in all of the major English language countries, such as England and Australia, and was also translated into a few other languages where I don't know how it works with the song (Dutch, German, Norwegian and Japanese).
I should keep better track, but I know that as of twelve years ago there were over 3.5 million copies in print worldwide.
People started asking me as soon as The Wheels on the Bus came out whether I would make more books like it. I thought for many years that I wouldn't, because I didn't have an idea that seemed remotely as apt for a moving-parts book. Then eventually I did, and had the incredibly interesting and wonderful experience of developing a second movable book, this time in direct collaboration with a brilliant paper engineer, Andrew Baron (he's worth looking up). My involvement was so hands-on that I even got to supervise the book's printing, in Shenzhen, China, because it was so complicated that only I could know what decisions in the printing process would keep colors constant on the many split-up parts of the same objects.
Knick-Knack Paddywhack was a book I was immensely proud of. It was published in 2002 and remained in print for a respectable number of years. I am now immensely sad that it has gone out of print, not because it was selling badly, but because a book so expensive to produce could only be reprinted in a quantity that couldn't be justified by its rate of sale. Maybe someday, robots can be trained to assemble pop-up books at low cost, and that book and other sadly departed movables can come back into the world. Meanwhile, I am nothing if not grateful for the continued life of Wheels on the Bus.
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