Joan Walsh Anglund

Joan Walsh Anglund created a genre unto herself — the illustrated gift book as philosophical miniature. Her small-format volumes, beginning with A Friend Is Someone Who Likes You (1958), combined brief, aphoristic texts about friendship, love, courage, and childhood with delicate pen-and-watercolour illustrations of her signature figures: small, round-faced children with dots for eyes and no mouths, dressed in old-fashioned clothes and set in gardens, meadows, and tidy rooms. The books sold in astonishing quantities — over forty million copies in seventeen languages — and became the default gift for baby showers, christenings, and childhood milestones across America for three decades.

Life and Career

Joan Walsh was born in Hinsdale, Illinois, in 1926, the daughter of a schoolteacher. She studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the American Academy of Art, and married Robert Anglund, an engineer. She began her career as a freelance illustrator for magazines and advertising before publishing her first book in 1958.

A Friend Is Someone Who Likes You was an immediate bestseller. Its success was driven by its format — small enough to hold in a child’s hand, brief enough to read in minutes, and illustrated with drawings of such gentle sweetness that adults bought them as much for themselves as for children. Harcourt, Brace published a stream of sequels through the 1960s and 1970s: Love Is a Special Way of Feeling (1960), In a Pumpkin Shell (1960, an alphabet book based on nursery rhymes), Childhood Is a Time of Innocence (1964), A Cup of Sun (1967, a poetry collection), Morning Is a Little Child (1969), and Spring Is a New Beginning (1963), among dozens of others.

The Anglund Style

Anglund’s books were unique in their combination of visual simplicity and emotional directness. Her children had no detailed facial features — just dots for eyes and, in most drawings, no mouths at all — which gave them a universal quality: any child could see herself in them. The backgrounds were lovingly detailed, with flowers, trees, fences, and houses drawn with a precision that owed something to Beatrix Potter and something to folk art. The colour palette was soft — gentle greens, blues, pinks, and yellows that evoked the idealised world of the American picture-book pastoral.

Her texts were equally simple, but their simplicity was deceptive. “A friend is someone who likes you” is a tautology that somehow captures something real about childhood understanding of friendship. “Love is a special way of feeling” reduces a complex emotion to its experiential core. These were not great literary achievements, but they were effective — aphorisms that stayed in the memory because they articulated what children already felt but could not yet say.

Critical Reception and Legacy

Anglund’s work occupied an unusual position in children’s literature. It was enormously popular with the buying public — parents and grandparents — but largely ignored by critics and librarians, who found it sentimental and visually monotonous. The books never won Caldecott Medals or appeared on the Horn Book’s recommended lists. Maurice Sendak, whose wild and psychologically complex Where the Wild Things Are (1963) represented the opposite pole of children’s illustration, once dismissed the gift-book genre that Anglund exemplified.

Yet Anglund’s influence was real. She established the small illustrated gift book as a permanent category of American publishing — a format that was later adopted by writers from Susan Polis Schutz to Sandra Boynton. Her featureless children anticipated the “cute” aesthetic of Japanese kawaii culture. And her books provided genuine comfort to millions of children who found in their simple reassurances — you are loved, you are brave, friendship exists — exactly what they needed to hear.

Anglund continued working into her nineties. She also designed a line of dolls, fabrics, and stationery that extended her visual world into commercial products, and she created more than a hundred books over six decades. She died in 2021 at the age of ninety-five.

Collecting Anglund

First editions of Anglund’s books (Harcourt, Brace & World, later Harcourt Brace Jovanovich) are modestly collected. A Friend Is Someone Who Likes You (1958) in first edition with dust jacket is the key title. The books were produced in enormous quantities and are common, but first printings in fine condition with unclipped jackets are surprisingly scarce — the small format meant they were heavily handled, and the dust jackets were easily damaged. Signed copies and presentation copies are uncommon and command a premium.