McLimans, David 1948-

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McLimans, David 1948-

Personal

Born 1948; married (divorced); children: Hannah. Education: University of Minnesota, B.A., Boston University, M.F.A.

Addresses

Home and office—2803 Ridge Rd., Madison, WI 53705. E-mail—[email protected].

Career

Graphic designer, author, and editorial illustrator.

Awards, Honors

Award of Excellence, Society of Newspaper Designers; Certificate of Excellence, Print magazine; New York Times Book Review Ten Best Children's Books designation, 2006, and Caldecott Medal Honor Book designation, 2007, both for Gone Wild: An Endangered Animal Alphabet.

Writings

SELF-ILLUSTRATED

Gone Wild: An Endangered Animal Alphabet, Walker (New York, NY), 2006.

Contributor of editorial illustrations to periodicals, including Progressive, Time, New York Times, Washington Post, Atlantic Monthly, and Harpers.

Sidelights

David McLimans had plenty of success as an illustrator, graphic designer, and political cartoonist before creating his first children's book, Gone Wild: An Endangered Animal Alphabet. The title, which received a Caldecott Medal Honor in 2007, started McLimans' new career as a children's book illustrator with a bang. Talking about the switch from magazine work to children's literature with Prairie Wind interviewer Tina P. Schwartz, McLimans explained: "When I worked for Harper's [magazine] I'd have approximately a week to ten days to come up with articles. I got burned out from editorial work. I wanted a project that took longer to plan and conceptualize. Also, I wanted my work to last much longer."

Gone Wild pairs the twenty-six letters of the English alphabet with correlating images of twenty-six endangered animal species. The book took three years to conceptualize and create, and "started with my concern for the environment," as McLimans told Schwartz. Spending much of his free time out of doors as a child, the author/illustrator later worked as a teen camp counselor, living during this period in a "shed in the woods without lights, electricity or running water," as he recalled to Melanie Conklin for the Wisconsin State Journal. This experience, combined with McLimans' graduate thesis project designing a typeface, became the inspiration for Gone Wild.

Reviewing McLimans' picture-book debut, a Kirkus Reviews contributor described the black-and-white, mixed-media art in Gone Wild as "26 page-filling, dramatic letter forms in silhouette." Julie Leibach, reviewing the work for Audubon, noted that "a glossary at the back of the book provides greater detail on the animals featured," a fact that underscores the book's message that the earth needs to be protected, according to the critic. In School Library Journal Kathy Piehl called "the letters … far from ordinary," and predicted that Gone Wild will be an effective consciousness-raiser on environmental issues as well as a starting point for graphic-arts projects. Another School Library Journal critic described McLimans' typeface as "large, graceful, [and] stylized." Susan Perren, writing for the Toronto Globe and Mail, concluded that the book's appeal will extend beyond children to "people everywhere … who mourn the imminent demise of too much of this world's wildlife."