Picturing Canada: The changing face of children's book illustration in Canada (Lecture)

Presented at the 11th annual Sybille Pantazzi Memorial Lecture, Toronto, Canada (October 17, 2017). In the lecture, “Picturing Canada: The Changing Face of Children’s Book Illustration in Canada,” Dr. Gail Edwards and Professor Judith Saltman explore change and continuity in the history of children’s publishing in Canada by looking at the picture books that the publishers have issued, and consider the challenges and rewards of publishing for children in a rapidly evolving global environment, focusing on the ways that image and text in Canadian picture books provide Canadian children with the opportunity to see their everyday lives and communities, and introduce them to ideas about region, about place, about history, about identity and belonging in a diverse, complex country. The first part of the lecture was based on research for Picturing Canada. Individual titles were located and present mini case studies in the evolution of the communications circuit of children's publishing in Canada over the last 150 years. The final section of the lecture was an informal dialogue about the transformation of the children's publishing industry in the last decade in response to changes in the retail book trade, new digital media, increasing globalization based on current individual and joint research. Accompanying the lecture was a PowerPoint presentation that incorporated visual material from the book, Picturing Canada as well as book covers and illustrations from more recent publications. Due to copyright the PowerPoint presentation is not available. The book Picturing Canada is available in the Douglas Library collection.