The author of picture books and middle grade novels, Diane Muldrow is editorial director of Golden Books, an imprint of Random House, where she edits the Little Golden Books--and has gleaned enough wisdom on romance to author Everything I Need to Know About Love I Learned from a Little Golden Book (Random House, December 2014). Muldrow also edited Golden Legacy: How Golden Books Won Children's Hearts, Changed Publishing Forever, and Became an American Icon Along the Way by Leonard S. Marcus (Random House, 2007); together they co-curated "Golden Legacy: Original Art from 65 Years of Golden Books," an exhibition of original Golden Books illustrations that is currently touring the country. Muldrow lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.
On your nightstand now:
I'm enjoying Elsa Schiaparelli: A Biography by Meryle Secrest. (I read a lot of books about fashion, and recently finished The Lost Art of Dress: The Women Who Once Made America Stylish by Linda Przybyszewski). I also pick up Frank O'Hara's Lunch Poems from time to time--the 50th anniversary edition that I picked up at City Lights this past June. On my iPad is Dickens's The Old Curiosity Shop and Anjelica Huston's A Story Lately Told.
Favorite book when you were a child:
Louisa May Alcott's Eight Cousins--I thought Rose Campbell had the most wonderful adventures! And I felt her emotions so deeply. I read and re-read all of Alcott's books. Our parents constantly dragged us to antique stores, so I sought out and collected old editions of Alcott's books, including out-of-print ones like Silver Pitchers. I loved old children's books--the art was always so much more detailed. Even as a kid, I appreciated the quality of those antique volumes with the embossing and beautiful endpapers and bindings. I loved the musty smell of my old books!
Your top five authors:
Mark Twain, E.B. White, Robert Louis Stevenson, Jane Austen, Flannery O'Connor.
Book you've faked reading:
I'm pretty sure I never finished Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in high school... do a lot of people have that same answer?
Book you are an evangelist for:
Erik Larson's fascinating The Devil in the White City, for one, along with Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief. Also Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle, which I really wish I'd discovered as a young person.
Book you've bought for the cover:
I buy lots of books with pretty cakes on the cover! But a book that comes right to mind is a cookbook called Pot Pies: Comfort Food Under Cover by Diane Phillips. The appealing cover photo of a pot pie just out of the oven, in a white ceramic baking dish resting on a striped dish towel, its juices bubbling over the golden crust, was irresistible. I've made lots of the pot pies in that book, I'm happy to say, and they are always delicious.
Book that changed your life:
Let's just say--my own!
Favorite line from a book:
As a kid I devoured poetry. I remember being intoxicated by the romance in Tennyson's "Come into the Garden, Maud." Here's the first stanza, which I've always remembered:
Come into the garden, Maud,
For the black bat, night, has flown,
Come into the garden, Maud,
I am here at the gate alone;
And the woodbine spices are wafted abroad,
And the musk of the rose is blown.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Charlotte's Web. I want to inhabit that world again.