How author Sandra Boynton built an empire and won your child’s heart
Her characters create joy for kids everywhere
Adapted from a story by The Washington Post’s Ellen McCarthy.
Sandra Boynton is one of the best-selling children’s authors and card designers of all time. And in her world, animals do whatever she wants. And what she wants them to do, mostly, is make her smile.
They’re not slackers, these furry and feathered friends. They always do their job — they make Boynton smile. Then they go out into the world and do the same for untold multitudes of kids.
It helps that these charming creatures have helped Boynton sell tens of millions of children’s books and hundreds of millions of greeting cards. With these animals, the children’s book author has recorded six albums, nabbed a Grammy nomination and co-starred in a music video with B.B. King.
This year marks the 40th anniversary of her first kids’ book, “Hippos Go Berserk.” This month she’ll release her latest record, “Hog Wild! A Frenzy of Dance Music,” which includes the Laura Linney/“Weird Al” Yankovich duet the world has been waiting for.
Perhaps you’re so intimately familiar with Boynton that you can recite her books by heart. Bow to the horse. Bow to the cow. Twirl with the pig if you know how. Or perhaps you’ve never heard of her.
The author has been creating her own world for 60 years.
As a 4-year-old in Philadelphia, she was hospitalized with encephalitis. She doesn’t remember much except that it was scary, and that Bruce, a slightly older boy in the same ward, always looked out for her, but she knew, somehow, that he wasn’t going to make it.
Somewhere around the same time, she illustrated a short paper book. Here’s the text: “Once there was a funny animal. He had a birthday party. All the animals came. They did not like it, so they left. The end.” Thematically, it’s not that different from the 50-odd books she’s published since.
Her intention then? And now? “I think,” she says, “trying to create safety.”
In Boynton’s books, there’s no overt moral messaging. There is only joy. And for parents of tiny humans — perpetually on the verge of collapsing into inexplicable tears — joy is everything.
Sandra’s daughter, Darcy Boynton, reads all the private messages to her mother’s Facebook account.
“We hear a lot from parents whose kids have been really sick or who had really tough times as babies and young children and talk about how my mom’s books helped them get through that time,” she says.
Boynton grew up Quaker. Her mother was a pointedly funny homemaker, she says, and her father a brilliant English teacher and headmaster of the school she and her three sisters attended. She enrolled at Yale with dreams of becoming a theater director. To help pay for college, she painted the cartoon-style animals she’d been sketching since childhood onto blank gift cards and sold them to specialty shops. Over the next two years she water-colored 60,000 cards by hand.
Just before heading to graduate school in drama in 1976, Boynton swung an invite to a greeting card trade show. Company buyers were interested, but they wanted her to give the characters names and distinct personalities.
“They were basically trying to turn me into ‘Peanuts,’ ” she recalls. “I said, ‘That’s not what I’m doing.’ ”
She was introduced to the founders of a Chicago upstart called Recycled Paper Greetings. Mike Keiser and Phil Friedmann liked her animals and offered to pay her $50 a design. “I want a royalty,” she remembers saying. “They said, ‘It’s just never done.’ ” But in the end, they agreed.
Keiser recalls that when Boynton signed on, the company was doing about $1 million a year in sales. Within five years their annual revenue topped $100 million, almost all because of Sandra Boynton.
“What a genius,” says Keiser. He remembers walking into a Marshall Fields store and watching customers react to Boynton’s cards. “They’d say, ‘Oh, aren’t these cute. And they’re witty!’ Women would buy clutches of them.”
Her best seller was a twist on the birthday song: “Hippo Birdie Two Ewes.” To Keiser, “it’s probably the best greeting card ever conceived by man.” Er, woman. At any rate, Boynton’s designs made them all multimillionaires.
Boynton isn’t much of an advice giver. But there’s one bit of wisdom she does like to dole out:
“You need to know what to say no to.”
She’s said no to an awful lot: licensing agreements, television series, Boynton-themed trinkets at grocery-store checkout counters. The few products she has sold have been kept completely under her control.
“It’s all her,” says Suzanne Rafer, her longtime editor at Workman Press. “She’s very serious about her work and pays extreme attention to every detail.”