Delicate worlds

Peter Parnall is an American artist who has written or illustrated over 80 

children's books about animals and nature. I am not yet familiar with the volumes, 

but I am quite fond of the covers' airy and delicate pen and ink cover illustrations 

and wanted to share them. I discovered these beauties at www.pagebooks.net.

Here is a bit of bio as told by Parnall himself in an interview on the Cornell Lab of Ornithology website:

"I went to Cornell in 1954 because I wanted to be a veterinarian, but I had a little too much fun. 

Got pneumonia when I took my mid-terms in freshman year and flunked them all. After I left Cornell, 

I went out West to train horses. Came my father’s birthday, so I drew him a picture of a horse. 

He hung it on his wall and told me I should go back to school and be an artist. So I got in the car 

and went down to the Pratt Institute with the picture of the horse. They’d already given the entrance exam 

so I saw the dean of admissions and told him, “You might as well let me in because I’m coming here anyway next year. 

Why waste a year of my time?” I went there for two years. Got a little bored, so I quit. The first job 

I got was art director of a little magazine called Travel Magazine. Meanwhile, I had a freelance business

 in advertising. Advertising was fun. Great fun. My clients included Mr. Potato Head, G.I. Joe, restaurants, 

and all kinds of things. But later I got tired of convincing people they should buy stuff they don’t need."