HIPPOS, BIRDIES, T. REXES, AND PIGS
Sandra Boynton built an empire ... and has won your child’s heart
Sandra Boynton lives on a farm in Connecticut. She works out of a converted barn, surrounded by pigs in overalls, frogs wearing cowboy hats and a few skeptical sock puppets.
Because this is Boynton’s world, and in Boynton’s world, animals do whatever she wants. The charming creatures have sold tens of millions of children’s books and hundreds of millions of greeting cards, recorded six albums, nabbed a Grammy nomination and costarred in a video with B.B. King.
She is both ubiquitous and anonymous. She’s one of the bestselling children’s authors and card designers of all time, yet is rarely recognized in her own town.
This year marks the 40th anniversary of her first kids’ book, and has released her latest record, Hog Wild! A Frenzy of Dance Music, which includes a Laura Linney/“Weird Al” Yankovich duet.
Boynton is 64. As a four-year-old in Philadelphia, she was hospitalized with encephalitis. She doesn’t remember much except it was scary, and Bruce, a slightly older boy, always looked out for her. But she knew, somehow, he wasn’t going to make it.
Somewhere around the same time, she illustrated a short paper book.
Her intention then? And now? “I think,” she says, “trying to create safety.”
Boynton grew up Quaker. Her mother was a 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 to become a theatre director. To help pay for university, she painted the cartoon-style animals she’d been sketching since childhood onto gift cards and sold them to shops.
Then she was introduced to the founders of a Chicago upstart called Recycled Paper Greetings. Mike Keiser and Phil Friedmann 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.
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 her.
Her bestseller was a twist on the birthday song: Hippo Birdie Two Ewes. Boynton’s designs made them all multimillionaires.
When Boynton was at Yale, her mother nudged her to take note of a classmate who’d won a bronze medal for slalom canoe in the 1972 Olympics. “I said, ‘Mom there are 1,200 people in my class,’ ” Boynton remembers. “And she said, ‘I’m sure he’s more interesting than all of them.’”
Boynton’s senior year, she wound up in an acting class with the handsome paddler, and by the end of the first semester, she and Jamie McEwan were in love.
Publishers passed on a children’s book she’d written, so in 1977, Recycled Paper Greetings published Hippos Go Berserk! It sold 50,000 copies and got the publishing world’s attention.
Boynton and McEwan married in 1978 and bought an early 18th-century farmhouse in the Berkshires, where McEwan could continue his training.
Here, for the past 35 years, Boynton has shifted attention between her great loves: Jamie, their four children, and those spirited little animals that keep scampering out of her psyche.
Read through a bunch of lists of “best books for toddlers,” and Sandra Boynton is, well, often not there. She’s not frequently mentioned in the same breath as Dr. Seuss or Maurice Sendak, who was one of her professors at Yale.
In Boynton’s books, there’s no overt moral messaging. There is only joy. But for parents of tiny humans — perpetually on the verge of collapsing into tears — joy is everything.
Darcy Boynton, Sandra’s youngest, says: “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.”
Sandra Boynton is warm and funny, with a throaty voice and a soft, easy smile.
Wendy Lukehart chooses children’s books for the D.C. public library. And to Lukehart, Boynton deserves a rank beside Seuss and Sendak. “I just think she’s brilliant. The wonderful thing about her books is that you can use them to develop children’s sense of humour.”
In 2015, The New Yorker published a review of Boynton’s works. The author, Ian Bogost, wrote that Boynton’s books are “rich works that all of us can and should enjoy far longer than the tiny sands that slip between crawling and preschool can measure.”
She’s said no to an awful lot: licensing agreements, television series, tchotchkes at grocery-store checkouts.
One idea she said yes to was making music. The list of names to appear on her albums is jawdropping: Meryl Streep, Alison Krauss, Ryan Adams and Kate Winslet, among others.
Jamie was always her sounding board, “just my best editor and check,” she says. He was also “the greatest person in the world.” Jamie died of cancer in 2014. She doesn’t believe in the idea of grief passing. “To me, for a healthy person it never ends,” she says.
For her, the act of creating feels like “a place of not existing — of being in a kind of zone.”
“I’m obviously creating a world that in certain ways is simpler and more benevolent than it can be,” she says. “Except I think that’s a kind of truth about the world, too. The world is so many things. Why not posit a kind of benevolence? And humour.”
The world is so many things. Why not posit a kind of benevolence?