Momo celebrating time to read: Exhibition of End Papers at the Eric Carle Museum 2025

This piece is not part of the exhibition but it is from Australia!

SWOOP by Nicole Godwin, illustrated by Susannah Crispe

And it WON an Endies Award in 2022

Until November 2025 The Eric Carle Museum have an exhibition exploring end papers - boy oh boy I would love to see this!

“Every part of a picture book is meaningful, from front to back cover. If we simply begin to read where the story begins, without examining its cover, dust jacket, endpages, title page, and other front matter, we miss much meaning.” I would only add that we might also miss much delight. Dr. Lawrence R. Sipe and Bruce Handy - Eric Carle Museum End Papers exhibition

Here are some further quotes from this article:

What exactly, some readers may be wondering, are endpapers (also called end pages or end sheets)? In the narrowest sense, they are the pages pasted to a hard-bound book’s inside front and back covers. They serve a practical purpose, binding the rest of the pages to the cover (or “case,” to use the technical publishing term). But for artists and designers, endpapers can also be a gloriously blank canvas.

Endpapers can tell a story within a larger story; they can frame the main story, suggesting its narrative or even emotional sweep; they can serve as a warm-up act or overture; they can provide background information, almost like a visual forward or epilogue, they can comment on the action or crack a joke. Some do all that at once, and more.

Here is a partial list of exhibitors and you can read an interview with the curator:

Sophie Blackall, Ashley Bryan, Virginia Lee Burton, Eric Carle, Bryan Collier, Walter Crane, Ed Emberley, Julie Flett, Deborah Freedman, Ryan T. Higgins, Carme Lemniscates, Grace Lin, Jessica Love, Corinna Luyken, Robert McCloskey, Daniel Miyares, Jerry Pinkney, Christian Robinson, Daniel Salmieri, Dan Santat, Shaun Tan, Paloma Valdivia, Brendan Wenzel, Jack Wong

Here in Australia we have lots of illustrators who do make great use of end papers - the master of this is our wonderful Bob Graham. For example in Rose Meets Mr Wintergarten:

"The opening scene for this book comes on the end papers. Bob Graham is a master of this. He does not waste one page in his picture books. On this spread we see two houses side by side. One is large, grey and imposing with huge, barbed wire fences, a cactus garden and dark foreboding windows. The other is a little friendly yellowish house with green window shutters, freshly mowed lawns and large trees in the back yard. A new family are moving into the little house. The moving van has a rainbow on the side (we all know there are good things at the end of a rainbow!) and among the furniture and family members you can see a sheep and a chook!"

Take a few minutes to read this excellent article that explains some purposes of end papers.

Here are some endpapers I have shared on this blog (not from this exhibition):