Books with author Arthur Geisert

With a farm of pigs as his abacus, Arthur Geisert uses elements of a search and count game to bring Roman numerals to life in this unintimidating math-concept book. First, the seven Roman numerals are equated with the correct number of piglets. Then the reader may practice counting other items—hot-air balloons, gopher holes, and more—as the remarkable adventure unfolds. (And yes, there are one thousand pigs in the etching for M!)

Drawn from life, Arthur Geisert’s Pumpkin Island is the fantastical story of a real life town brought to a halt by a profusion of pumpkins. Elkader, Iowa, is the perfect picture of small town life―that is, until the pumpkins arrive. One pumpkin? Fine. Two pumpkins? Okay. But with pumpkins growing around every street corner, and over every building, what’s a town to do? In these pages, Geisert imagines the town of Elkader overrun by the pumpkins that grow on Pumpkin Island, which sits in the Turkey River, right outside his kitchen window.

A gorgeously rendered wordless tale of discovery and adventure that is meticulous in architectural detail and bursts with inventiveness. Arthur Geisert's ingenuity engages the child's imagination as well as the adult's through seamless storytelling and zany wit. Invested as always in his porcine universe, here Geisert tells the story of a community of pigs that is suffering from the heat. Rather than be sapped of energy and miserable, they go on an adventure in search of ice. The pigs' inventiveness and great can-do spirit create a joyful tale of change and adventure. The illustrations bring the action to life, making this a real page-turner and a great read-aloud book!Arthur Geisert's pigs are legendary in the world of children's books. They carve ice sculptures, teach Roman numerals, create ingenious machines and get up to all kinds of antics. Did Arthur grow up on a farm? No. He grew up in Los Angeles and claims not to have seen a pig until he was an adult. Trained as a sculptor in college, Geisert learned to etch at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles. Geisert has published just about a book a year for the past thirty years, and every one of his books has been illustrated with etchings. His work has appeared in The New Yorker and the Horn Book Magazine, and he has won The New York Times' Best Illustrated Award. A resident of Galena, a community in northwest Illinois, for decades, he now lives in a converted bank building in Bernard, Iowa.

Mama and Papa are firm: lights out at eight o’clock. But their little piglet is afraid of the dark. They say, “If you can figure something out, go ahead.” So the piglet devises an ingenious series of contraptions that allow him to obey his parents while still keeping the light on long enough to fall asleep. Dominoes, tricycles, bowling balls, and baseball bats play a part as each action and reaction leads gradually to the final tug on the lamp’s switch. Follow Arthur Geisert’s detailed etchings as they reveal each step of kinetic wonder leading gradually to lights out.

Thunderstorm follows the course of a storm through midwestern farm country minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour, from late morning into late afternoon. As always with Arthur Geisert, it is a meticulously executed and visually stunning piece of work. Other than the timeline that runs along the bottom border of the illustrations, there is no text, and the illustrations are continuous.Through keen observation, Geisert beautifully captures the nuances and details of a midwestern thunderstorm, from the ever-changing color of the sky, to the actions of the human inhabitants, to the reactions of the natural world to the wind and rain. America's heartland is somewhat unfamiliar territory in the realm of picture books, but in Thunderstorm, Geisert has provided readers with valuable, breathtaking insight into one of its most natural occurrences.Arthur Geisert grew up in Los Angeles, California, and claims not to have seen a pig until he was an adult. Trained as a sculptor in college, Geisert learned to etch at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles. Geisert has published just about a book a year for the past thirty years. Every one of his books has been illustrated with etchings. His work has appeared in The New Yorker and The Horn Book Magazine. In 2010 his book Ice was selected as a New York Times Book Review Best Illustrated book of the year. Geisert currently lives in a converted bank building in Bernard, Iowa.

Beyond the resourcefulness of its porcine citizens, there wasn’t much to recommend the small mining town of Rumpus Ridge. But even in such a hardscrabble place, they had created something they could be proud of: over the years they had collected the biggest ball of string in the world. Folks came from miles around to see it. But one night, a flood carries their prized string away and washes it ashore near the town of Cornwall. Rather than return it, the Cornwallians decide to keep the string for themselves. They start to make plans to dedicate the string in its new gazebo, but their celebrations could be short-lived, because, having discovered the deceit, those resourceful piglets from Rumpus Ridge have begun to make some plans of their own . . .

Oops! One morning, while a pig family was sitting down to breakfast, a little milk spills to the floor. That shouldn’t be any problem at all! And it wouldn’t, except that the milk seeps through a crack in the floor and drips down to the workshop below onto a tray that tips and flips the switch on the grinder whose spinning wheel catches the loose end of a clothesline which gets wound around the leg of a table saw . . . and that is just the beginning of a series of chain reactions that lead from a little spill on the table to a giant boulder in the breakfast room! With each disastrous step depicted as only Arthur Geisert could, a seemingly ordinary incident spills out of control. They say you shouldn't cry over spilled milk, but what if it destroys your whole house?

It’s bath time! All the little piggies have had lots of fun playing, and now they’re dirty, muddy, and covered in paint. But their mamas aren’t worried—they have just the machine to turn this Herculean task into an adventure. Anyone who has ever been captivated by the swaying brushes and spinning jets of soap and water at the car wash will be in hog heaven as Arthur Geisert’s intricate etchings reveal the inner workings of an enormous contraption that can lather and scrub a whole farm full of dirty little piglets in no time at all—and that’s not just a bunch of hogwash!

Mama and Papa are firm: lights out at eight o’clock. But their little piglet is afraid of the dark. They say, “If you can figure something out, go ahead.” So the piglet devises an ingenious series of contraptions that allow him to obey his parents while still keeping the light on long enough to fall asleep. Dominoes, tricycles, bowling balls, and baseball bats play a part as each action and reaction leads gradually to the final tug on the lamp’s switch. Follow Arthur Geisert’s detailed etchings as they reveal each step of kinetic wonder leading gradually to lights out.

On today's farm, B is for barn cat...E is for erosion...G is for grinding feed, and I is for...inoculate? In 26 beautifully detailed spreads, acclaimed illustrator Arthur Geisert takes readers on a literal journey following a real road in Iowa (County Road Y31) through the ins and outs of America's farmland. This isn't your grandfather's farm book. It still features pigs, hay, and other familiar farm residents, but you'll see a very different kind of quicksand and traffic jam here...Along the bottom of each page is a continuous panorama that totals nearly forty feet of art. Country Road ABC is a unique and funny look at America's present-day farmland.