Finders Keepers
by Nicolas Mordvinoff
Summary
Two dogs, Nap and Winkle, both dig up the same bone on the same afternoon and immediately fall into an argument over which of them actually found it first, an argument neither can settle alone. Rather than fight it out directly, they carry their dispute from one judge to the next, a farmer, a goat, a haircutter, each of whom offers an opinion that fails to end the disagreement, until a bigger dog simply walks off with the bone while they are still arguing. In the end it is neither authority nor argument that settles things but a common enemy: the two of them team up to win the bone back from the big dog and discover that it belongs to both of them, a blunt little moral delivered with a shrug rather than a lecture.
Nicolas Mordvinoff illustrated the dispute in bold, flat shapes and a tightly limited palette of yellow, red and black, a graphic, poster like style that looks strikingly modern next to the softer, more detailed picture books that were winning the medal around it. William Lipkind wrote the text under the name Will, and the partnership, credited on their books by first names only as Will and Nicolas, produced several picture books together built around the same dry, comic tone. It reads quickly and works well for children who enjoy an argument escalating for its own sake, and the sparse, geometric pictures hold a young reader's attention through repeated readings in a way busier, more detailed illustration sometimes does not.
Historical Context & Significance
Finders Keepers won the 1952 Caldecott Medal for a book published in 1951, credited to Will and Nicolas, the joint name William Lipkind and Nicolas Mordvinoff used for their collaborations. That year's runners up were Marie Hall Ets's Mr. T. W. Anthony Woo, Marcia Brown's Skipper John's Cook, Margaret Bloy Graham's All Falling Down, William Pène du Bois's Bear Party and Elizabeth Olds's Feather Mountain.
Lipkind led an unusual double career, earning a doctorate in anthropology from Columbia in 1944 and spending two years doing fieldwork in Brazil before turning to children's books; he published his scholarly linguistic work, including a grammar of the Winnebago language, under his own name while keeping Will strictly for picture books written with Mordvinoff. Mordvinoff's flat, saturated color style, developed across their partnership, stood apart from the softer illustration common among their Caldecott contemporaries and helped Finders Keepers stay recognizable at a glance even decades after its win, in a period whose picture books can otherwise look fairly similar to one another.