crayons – Philip Nel

Unboxing How to Draw the World!

An unboxing video that answers two questions: A dozen years ago, I began dreaming up a small book about Crockett Johnson’s Harold and the Purple Crayon. It would be a biography of a book, a succinct introduction to how picture books work, and show people what we gain when we look closely — especially at something

The Archive of Childhood, Part 1: Crayons

December 27, 2014Philip NelAutobiography, Childhood, crayons, Creativity, Crockett Johnson, Lewis Carroll, Marcel Proust, Memory, Nostalgia, RadiolabAutobiography, Childhood, crayons, Creativity, Crockett Johnson, Harold and the Purple Crayon, Lewis Carroll, Marcel Proust, Memory, Nostalgia, Radiolab1 Comment

We tend to imagine the self as an unbroken whole, but it might better be described as plural, a series of selves that, though temporally contiguous (and often overlapping) are not always the “same” self. That’s one of the conclusions suggested by Robert Krulwich in “Who Am I?,” a Radiolab podcast from 2007. It is