100 years ago, Edward Bear — also known as Winnie-the-Pooh — also known as Pooh — went bump, bump, bump down the stairs for the first time.
Though he made an earlier appearance in the 1924 book of poems When We Were Very Young — "Our Teddy Bear is short and fat, Which is not to be wondered at" — 1926's Winnie-the-Pooh was author A.A. Milne and illustrator Ernest H. Shepard's first collection of stories about the honey-loving bear.
Now, a kids' book celebrates that anniversary and the relationship between Milne and Shepard. It's called How a Bear Became a Book: The Collaboration That Created Winnie-the-Pooh.
It opens with our narrator, Christopher Robin, asking the reader, "Would you like a story?" A translucent Pooh-shaped character appears ("Hallo?") and wonders, "But where did I come from?"
And so back, back, back we go through the pages of time.
"Alan Alexander Milne was an author," writes author Annette Bay Pimentel. "He wrote stories. One day he had an idea and wrote down some words about a bear." Then, our narrator explains, he waited for an editor to edit his words and an illustrator to turn his words into pictures. Meanwhile, the semi-solid bear character nudges the story along by asking, "Why? What do pictures do?"
"It was a very, very close working relationship," explains Pimentel. "Ernest Shepard was a sketcher and he always carried his sketchbook. And so he arranged to go to where A.A. Milne lived out near Ashdown Forest in the U.K., and he spent time with the Milne family, sketching Christopher Robin and sketching his toys. And then he went back to his studio, and … that's when he started adding imaginative elements." Like a doorway into an old tree and a rabbit hole with a functioning kitchen.
Both Pimentel and illustrator Faith Pray wanted to pay homage to Milne and Shepard in the text and illustrations in their children's book. "I tried very consciously to make Winnie-the-Pooh's voice echo Winnie-the-Pooh's voice in the books," says Pimentel. "So I spent a lot of time going back through the books trying to figure out okay, like, does he use contractions? What kinds of phrases does he use?"
Then there's the scene in How a Bear Became a Book that explains the part of the publishing process where Milne and Shepard were figuring out the page design for Winnie-the-Pooh. "Previously, when people printed, there would just be pages of words" and then separate pages of pictures, explains Pimentel. But Methuen Publishing was using a new technology called offset printing — and it allowed illustrations to be printed on the page with the text. "This was something that Milne and Shepard and the editorial team were playing with," says Pimentel. "And they did some beautiful, beautiful page designs where the page design mimicked the action of the story."
"They stacked words on top of each other, tall as the trees in the Hundred Acre Wood," writes Pimentel in her book. "They bounced words up and down, right off the line." In Pray's illustration, the words are piled on top of each other next to a tree — just as Shepard did in the original.
As the story in How a Bear Became a Book continues ("At last, the book was published and sent to bookstores,") Pray's see-through bear character becomes more and more solid. Where he began as a flurry of words, existing only in his author's head, by the end of the book he's a very recognizable Winnie-the-Pooh. Proving that, as Pimentel writes, "Sometimes words need pictures and pictures need words. When they find each other, characters spring to life."
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