Caldecott Medal
The award is named for Randolph Caldecott, a nineteenth-century English illustrator. Rene Paul Chambellan designed the Medal in 1937. The obverse scene is derived from Randolph Caldecott's front cover illustration for "The Diverting History of John Gilpin" (Routledge, 1878, an edition of the 1782 poem by William Cowper), which depicts Gilpin astride a runaway horse. The reverse is based on "Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie", one of Caldecott's illustrations for the nursery rhyme "Sing a Song of Sixpence".
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.