Picture book
In 1938, the American Library Association (ALA) began presenting annually the Caldecott Medal to the most distinguished children's book illustration published in the year. The Caldecott Medal was established as a sister award to the ALA's Newbery Medal, which was awarded to a children's books "for the most distinguished American children's book published the previous year" and presented annually beginning in 1922. During the mid-forties to early fifties, honorees included Marcia Brown, Barbara Cooney, Roger Duvoisin, Berta and Elmer Hader, Robert Lawson, Robert McCloskey, Dr. Seuss, Maurice Sendak, Ingri and Edgar Parin d'Aulaire, Leo Politi, Tasha Tudor, and Leonard Weisgard.
A Very Special House
A Very Special House, written by Ruth Krauss and illustrated by Maurice Sendak, is a 1953 picture book published by HarperCollins. "A Very Special House" was a Caldecott Medal Honor Book for 1954 and was Sendak's first Caldecott Honor Medal of a total of seven during his career. Sendak won the Caldecott Medal in 1964 for "Where the Wild Things Are", which he both authored and Illustrated. "A Very Special House" was re-issued by HarperCollins in 2001 in hardcover format as part of a project to re-issue 22 Sendak works including several authored by Ruth Krauss.
The story, written by Krauss, is told in present tense from the little boy's point of view (a first-person narrative) and takes the form of a rhymed poem of 62 lines opening with "dee dee dee oh-h-h" and ending with "dee dee dee oh / doh doh doh-h-h-h" and has several lines with words that repeat three times such as "chairs chairs chairs" and "ooie ooie ooie". Nonsense words and phrases and phonetic misspellings of words (or mispronunciations) are scattered throughout the poem. The illustrations by Sendak, which also precede and follow the text, include occasional supplementary words and phrases.