If you’d tiptoed to the attic of an old farmhouse in Mundelein a few sweltering weeks back, you could have peeked inside some of the magic of the Chinaberry Book Service.
There, erasing like mad at a drawing table draped with twinkling lights in a dormer where the thermometer was pushing 100 degrees, Louise Popoff, the artist who has been doodling and drawing for all the Chinaberry catalogs since Issue No. 2, back in 1982, was fast at work on the cover for Christmas 1994.
Nothing short of magic could have moved Popoff to produce a little bit of Christmas on a day when the humidity was causing her paper to curl, a bulldozer at the next-door tree farm roared from morning till dusk, and the only thing keeping the drawing table breezy was a single standup fan.
“I spent the whole day erasing,” Popoff says with a sigh. But, still, she was trying every trick: “I put Christmas lights around the dormer and all around the garden outside. You should see the cucumber vines have tendrils that curl around the lights. I’ve got my Christmas music in the tape player, and all the dolls I’ve made for my girls are sitting under a feather Christmas tree I made last year reading books, the Nutshell Library.”
At long last, after a couple of weeks of 12-hour days, the cover was complete, right down to the last snowflake. It has been shipped off to California, where it will hibernate till November, when it will then wend its way into a quarter-million mailboxes around the planet.
“I try to always have something magical in my art, because children always find it,” says Popoff, the mother of 11-year-old twins Aurora and Amanda, who first bumped into Ann Ruethling, Chinaberry’s founder and publisher, when they were living in the tiny town of Port Orford, Ore.
And she has been putting the face on Chinaberry ever since, in watercolors that only in the last six years have made it into print in a full range of colors. A kitchen-table operation in its early days, Chinaberry grew up unprecociously-especially in the art department. “One time the cover went out upside down,” says Popoff, who for the first year was paid for her work in Chinaberry books, a currency that couldn’t have more delighted her girls.
“After years and years of bugging them, they finally went to two colors, then three, and six years ago they went to color separation. It finally looked not like hand-made.”
But, says Popoff, who grew up outside Milwaukee, and once lived the pioneer life in a logging camp in the Colorado mountains that hadn’t yet been hooked up to electricity, anti-gloss is what Chinaberry’s all about.
“Chinaberry tries to preserve that magic in children, and to help parents see it in their child and not let it be drowned out by all the academics and practicalities. Everything in this world is excel, excel,” she says. “In my art I try to preserve the magical quality of childhood that seems to elude us as we grow up.”