Black and White
by David Macaulay
Summary
Black and White splits every spread into four quadrants and runs four stories at once: in "Seeing Things," a boy travels alone overnight by train and witnesses events that may or may not be real; in "Problem Parents," two children grow alarmed as their parents start behaving strangely, at one point dressed head to toe in newspaper; in "A Waiting Game," commuters stuck at a delayed train station fold newspapers into hats and paper airplanes to pass the time; and in "Udder Chaos," a text about a herd of escaped Holstein cows runs beside pictures that instead show a striped prisoner fleeing across the same landscape. A note on the title page warns readers that the book may contain several stories or only one, and recommends careful inspection of both words and pictures; Macaulay never resolves which is true, planting recurring details, a striped pattern, a scattering of newspaper, a particular cow, across quadrants that may or may not actually connect.
Each of the four stories is rendered in its own distinct medium, watercolor, pen and ink with captions, colored ink, and colored ink without outlines, letting a reader identify which story a given panel belongs to even mid page, even as the plots visually bleed toward each other at the edges.
This is a book built for repeated, active poring over rather than one straight read aloud; it suits children seven and up who can track four things happening at once, and adults tend to find themselves puzzling over its connections right alongside the children they are reading it with.
Historical Context & Significance
Black and White won the 1991 Caldecott Medal. The two Honor Books that year were Fred Marcellino's Puss in Boots and Vera B. Williams's "More More More," Said the Baby.
Initial reviews split sharply between praise for the book's invention and complaints that it asked too much of its intended audience, and the medal itself was debated at the time for rewarding a book that stretched what a picture book could be. David Wiesner later called it "structurally unlike any medal winner before it, or since" and praised how funny it manages to be underneath its puzzle box structure; later formally experimental winners, including Wiesner's own Tuesday the following year, are often read against the space this book opened up for the medal to reward.