From Publisher’s Weekly (8/4/11) :
Brian Selznick follows his 2008 Caldecott Medal-winning novel, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, with Wonderstruck, which clocks in at 640 pages, 100 pages longer than Hugo, and looks like it’s going to be just as big a hit, having already received four starred reviews. Bookshelf spoke with Selznick to talk about where the story itself came from, and if he is being paid by the pound.
Hugo Cabret was a thick book, but you’ve outdone yourself with Wonderstruck. Will we need wheelbarrows for your next work?
I guess Wonderstruck does make Hugo look slimmer. There are 100 more drawings. But I think the size may have maxed out with Wonderstruck. I actually do feel bad, especially about kids lugging these books around.
A hundred more illustrations! Did you do them in the same miniature style as Hugo?
The illustrations are the same size as they were for Hugo Cabret – one-quarter the size of what you see in the finished book. In Hugo, that was a function of the ending – they were the size of a picture the automaton could draw so at the end you would learn that the whole book had been drawn by the automaton, but I liked the technique. When you enlarge them it loosens everything up, as opposed to the artwork of somebody like Chris Van Allsburg who paints these huge illustrations and then has them shrunk down to fit in a book. That has the effect of really concentrating his artwork and it’s glorious. This does the opposite, but I like what that does for my drawings.