Animals of the Bible, A Picture Book
by Dorothy P. Lathrop
Summary
This picture book gathers passages from the King James Bible and pairs them with the animals that move through its stories, from the creatures boarding Noah's ark to the lions that share Daniel's den and the ravens that feed Elijah in the wilderness. Helen Dean Fish selected and arranged the scripture passages herself rather than writing new text, and Dorothy P. Lathrop illustrated each one in black and white drawings built from fine, exact linework rather than broad strokes. Her animals are not decoration around the verses; they are the subject, drawn with close attention to fur, feather and the specific weight of each creature's body, so that a ram looks like a ram and not a generic four legged shape standing in for one.
Reading it aloud works best a page or two at a time rather than start to finish, since the King James language is older and denser than most books written for children and benefits from a parent slowing down to explain a phrase here and there. Younger children will likely respond to the pictures well before they follow the text, drawn to the specific animals, the ark's crowded deck, the still watchful lions; older children being introduced to Bible stories for the first time, or families reading scripture together at home, get more from the pairing of verse and image than a picture book aimed at a purely secular audience would offer. It is a quiet book rather than an exciting one, closer to a gallery of careful drawings than to a story with a clear beginning and end, and it asks patience of a reader used to faster picture books.
Historical Context & Significance
Animals of the Bible won the very first Caldecott Medal, given in 1938, the year the American Library Association's new award was first presented. Its two runners up, the term used for what would only be called Honor Books starting in 1971, were Robert Lawson's Four and Twenty Blackbirds and Boris Artzybasheff's Seven Simeons: A Russian Tale.
Lathrop had already built a career illustrating fantasy and fairy tale, working with authors including Walter de la Mare, and she also wrote and illustrated books of her own; The Fairy Circus earned her a Newbery Honor in 1931, making her one of a small group of illustrators recognized under both medals. She was elected an Associate Academician of the National Academy of Design in 1949, and animals stayed her defining subject across a career that ran from 1919 into the 1960s. Being first has kept Animals of the Bible a fixture of Caldecott history even as its scripture based text and quiet, gallery like format have kept it a less read entry than the medal's later, more narrative winners.