I was born in Pittsburgh, the oldest of six children, in a family of readers. Even when I was very young, I felt blue when a good book ended, as if a close friend had moved away and left no forwarding address.  Luckily, our Mother had been an art major at Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie Mellon) and the house brimmed with art supplies, as well as books. Under my careful direction, she made pencil drawings on heavy art paper of my favorite characters. I colored Anne Shirley, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, et al with my own treasured soft lead colored pencils, then drew shoeboxes full of outfits for the paper doll heroines’ new adventures.
When that palled, I began researching the thick historical novels I favored.  By then the family had moved to Cleveland. After I sighed and closed the last page, I went off to the public library to look up wives of Henry VIII, Toussaint L’Ouverture, the Silk Road, tidal waves, and bubonic plague. I started out merely curious wanting to know more and often grew annoyed at historians when their dry point of view differed from the romantic ones of novelists.

Do I need to say that these interests were not the road to popularity at a large Midwestern junior high school? Unless it was going to be on the test, my friends didn’t care about Henry VIII. Unfortunately. Looking back on it, I can only say that those friends showed remarkable tolerance for my geekiness.

To my rescue came the local public librarian, a sympathetic abettor of my preoccupations. She suggested that since I loved reading, perhaps a career as an editor in publishing would suit. What an amazing idea! Books had editors? People were paid to read? School became endurable, because my secret future lay elsewhere. One day I would grow up, move to New York City, and work in publishing.  Not that there weren’t moments when I considered becoming an artist, an architect, an archeologist, or a backup singer for Ray Charles. But I always came back to my first love—books.
After graduating from Simmons College, I moved to New York and thought it was destiny when I found my dream job in children’s books. The work required more typing and filing and less reading than I had imagined, but it was heaven. The office was congenial—after all everybody else read all the time too—and I was surrounded by talented writers, artists, designers and other people who shared my passions. In publishing I met my husband (a partner in a small, excellent children’s book company), and it also was in publishing that I met Jan, after I found her first novel in the Farrar, Straus & Giroux slush pile and signed it up. 

About fifteen years after Jan’s first book came out, I left publishing for a new challenge--a photo essay of my own.  I was spending twelve hours a day in the darkroom, but made time to attend a stunning exhibit of Edgar Degas’s paintings at the Metropolitan Museum.  Jan went to the same exhibit, and our social lunch to ‘catch up’ turned into an animated discussion of Degas’s use of space. She had an idea for a children’s book on color and space, but her publisher wasn’t interested, I knew one who would be, she said only if you’ll write it with me--and so it began. Out of that conversation came the first of our books together, The Painter’s Eye published by Delacorte Press in 1991. Fourteen books and more than twenty-five years later we’re still going strong. My love for researching off beat information at last has found a useful outlet.

Sandra has been a children’s editor at Thomas Y. Crowell Company, editor in chief of Children’s Books at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, senior editor of adult books at New American Library, and one of the founders of the U.S. branch of Orchard Books.  She lives on the West Side of New York City in an apartment her family refers to as the Book Midden.