I was having a hard time deciding which book to feature on this week's Illustrated Monday until I read a column, in The Horn Book Magazine, about reissues.
Apparently, new versions of Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books do not contain Garth Williams's drawings. Neither does his art appear on the covers. Instead, photographs are used.
Also, it seems that you have to pay US$2 more if you want the versions in which Williams' illustrations appear. However, you don't get the original black-and-white pictures: they've all been colourised, which some may prefer. I don't!
A five-in-one book called A Little House Collection (below, left) has also been released. It comprises the first five Little House books (Little House in the Big Woods, Little House On the Prairie, On the Banks of Plum Creek, By the Shores of Silver Lake and The Long Winter). I have no idea why they didn't include Little Town on the Prairie and These Happy Golden Years.
Says the columnist Terri Schmitz, "At 618 pages, with a whopping forty-dollar price tag, A Little House Collection is almost impossible to handle, and in order to accommodate all of the text every page is divided into two columns, 
with the art squeezed in willy-nilly. It's a shameful and unnecessary way to treat Mrs Wilder, whose books have given so much pleasure to so many children over the years. Her books deserve better than being reduced into a doorstop." Hear hear!
Anyway, after all that, this week's featured illustrations are by Garth Williams and from the Little House books.
I went to the HarperCollins website to have a look at those new Little House books. Well, what do you think? I say, "TACKY!"
The following illustrations are from the Puffin editions of Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House series, illustrated by Garth Williams (click on the thumbnails for bigger versions of the pictures):
from Dance at Granpa's, pg 88 in Little House in the Big Woods
from The House on the Prairie, pg 50 in Little House on the Prairie
from Runaway, pg 55 in On the Banks of Plum Creek
from Merry Christmas, pg 144 in By the Shores of Silver Lake
from Three Days' Blizzard, pg 81 in The Long Winter (that's Almanzo Wilder frying pancakes. Laura marries him in These Happy Golden Years)
from Working in Town, pg 26 in Little Town on the Prairie
from First Day of School, pg 20 in These Happy Golden Years
