In Erin and Philip Stead's follow-up to 2010's A Sick Day for Amos McGee, the fastidious zookeeper gets help from his animal friends to finish his chores, so they can go on an exciting outing.

Transcript

SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

In "A Sick Day For Amos McGee," a fastidious zookeeper takes the No. 5 bus at 6 a.m. to get to his job at the zoo where he visits his friends - the elephant, the tortoise, the penguin, the rhinoceros and the owl - until one day when Amos calls in sick. His animal friends have to overcome their fears and help Amos recover. Now that much-beloved children's book written by Philip Stead and illustrated by Erin Stead, who are married, finally has a sequel. And it's called "Amos McGee Misses The Bus."

PHILIP STEAD: We weren't sure at first if we wanted to reenter the world of Amos McGee and make a second book or a third book largely because we weren't sure what made it so popular in the first place. The first Amos McGee book, "A Sick Day For Amos McGee," came out in 2010. It was the very first book that Erin and I worked on together.

ERIN STEAD: And it was my very first book.

P STEAD: And we really didn't expect anybody to ever see the book. We really thought we were making a book just for one another, really. And so that really took a lot of the pressure off. The only pressure we felt is that we wanted to make each other happy.

E STEAD: And we turned it in. And everyone said, we really like this book, but it's very quiet, and no one will probably see it.

P STEAD: And the book really became very popular very quickly. I think its popularity definitely took us by surprise.

E STEAD: It's hard to really understand what you've made when you're the person who made it sometimes. But from what I've gathered over the last 10 years of watching it grow is that a lot of people pick up that book and feel like they've seen it before and feel like it's an old friend. And I feel that that was a really special thing we got to make for people. And so finally, after so many years - we had had a rough couple of years in a row, and the outside world seemed kind of rough, too.

P STEAD: Like it was getting, I guess, meaner and unfriendlier by the day. We're talking about 2016, 2017. And more and more, Erin and I wanted to spend time in a world that was the opposite of that. And the world of Amos McGee is very much the opposite of that. It's a world where caring and kindness are really the rule that all the characters follow.

E STEAD: And we just wanted to selfishly go live in this world again of Amos McGee, and we wanted to make this book for ourselves again.

P STEAD: It's really funny because they're tiny little books. But if you've done it right, you hopefully have created an entire world that a child can live inside of. And so a simple question like what is the book about is sometimes really hard to answer and sometimes makes the book sound quite boring.

SIMON: In "Amos McGee Misses The Bus," Amos stays up late to plan an exciting outing for his friends at the zoo. He's up so late that he misses the No. 5 bus the next morning. He gets to work late and isn't going to get all of his chores done in time for the adventures that he's put together. But his friends, who don't even know what Amos has planned, chip in to help him finish his work on time.

P STEAD: So it's not a complicated book. And the first book wasn't a complicated book, either. It takes a really simple problem and gives it a really simple solution. And, really, the book is about how these characters love each other and care for each other.

E STEAD: So I make most of my illustrations by doing woodblock printing and then drawing on top of those prints with pencil. And the way that works is I'll sketch what I'd like the page to look like and where all the characters go. And then any color you see on the page has been carved out of a woodblock and printed onto the page. I use oil ink, so it takes a couple of days to dry. And then after it dries, I am able to draw on top of those colors with pencil.

P STEAD: And pencils are very, very delicate. And so to add color can be very difficult 'cause the color can overwhelm her really delicate pencil. And that's why we ended up using woodblock printing as the main element for color-making because it was very, very soft and very gentle. And it set really, really well with Erin's delicate pencil work.

E STEAD: Also, I want to make books that you don't really know when they were made. They could have been made a long time ago, or they could have been made yesterday. I want children's books, the ones that I make, to feel multigenerational, to feel like grandparents can read it to their grandchildren, mothers can read it to their children, and that there's a feeling in there that is a familiar feeling that you got when you read a book as a kid as well. And so part of that experience that I try to make in my books comes from the palette. And I do use a limited palette, and the colors tend to be somewhat muted. I want them to feel familiar. I want them to feel like something you already know, or maybe it has even been sun-bleached on your shelf for the last 10 years.

P STEAD: Yeah, 14 years ago when we first started making the first Amos McGee, I remember talking about how the books that we loved the most often were books from the 1950s and '60s. And in that era, illustrators often could only use a certain number of colors - maybe two colors and black or three colors and black. And we didn't want to necessarily be that rigid, but we thought, you know, there's something very beautiful about working with limitations. It kind of sets parameters for your project and boundaries for your project. And because it was our first book and we could very easily go off course, I think it was appealing to us to set parameters even if they didn't need to be there.

E STEAD: The picture book, by its very nature, has limitations. Almost every picture book you see is 32 pages long because of the way that books are bound. And that limitation actually tends to make us better storytellers. And so I think limiting myself played into that, where I had only 32 pages to work with for the book. I have only 10 colors to work with for the book. And it's just part of how I solve the puzzle.

P STEAD: Working that way, I think, sort of feeds back into the characters in this case, so the - Amos McGee is a very sort of - he's a very kind man, but he's also a very rigid man. He does the same things every day. Even something simple like color choices, I think, sort of feeds back into that.

E STEAD: We were once speaking to college students. There was one question that I got, which was, what are the things you're trying to convey in your books? And I answered really quickly because it was simple. A kid isn't experiencing any different type of emotion than you are. They do experience loss. They experience love. They experience sadness. And so all I do in my art is try to tap into that emotion and build a bridge for them.

P STEAD: As a children's book maker, I think a lot about the difference between meaning and moral. And we try really, really hard not to have morals in our book. We don't want our books to impart some sort of lesson. But I do think the book should have meaning. And meaning is sort of infused within the entire book. And it's about what you get back when you are kind and caring to others, and what you get back is exactly what you've given.

And this is something that - when Erin and I were making the first book, our biggest concerns were just about making a book well. Meanwhile, we were creating something that had meaning, and we didn't really know it. And we had to watch other people interacting with the book to really understand the meaning that was developing inside of the book. And that, I think, is one of the most fascinating things about being a creator of anything, is that you don't necessarily have control over what it's going to mean to people. You have to watch it interact with the broader world to understand.

SIMON: Author Philip Stead, illustrator Erin Stead talking about their new children's book "Amos McGee Misses The Bus" for our series Picture This.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

Tags: picture books  children's books  Series: Picture This