April 3, 1953

There was a time when Sandra Boynton's (April 3, 1953) claim to fame was the coffee cups she decorated. Now her children's books, records, and cartoons are so many I may be the only one who remembers the cups.

According the Keillor's Writer's Almanac:

Sandra Keith Boynton [was]...., born to Quaker parents in Orange, New Jersey ..., one of whom was an English teacher. She went to Yale where she majored in English. She became a designer of humorous greeting cards. It was she who designed a Happy Birthday card with a hippopotamus, a bird, and two sheep on it that said: "Hippo Birdie Two Ewes" which sold 10 million copies.

The New Yorker celebrates the artistic depths of Boynton's art.

The best children’s stories, whether they take the form of books, television shows, movies, or something else, are also loved by adults. They are not just tolerated or long-suffered but truly loved, and beyond the vicarious joy we might feel while reading them in the presence of children. ...

Then there’s Sandra Boynton, a name that many parents of kids born since the late seventies will know well. Boynton has published dozens of books that have sold millions of copies, all featuring her hand-drawn animal characters—hippos and cows and chickens and dogs and mice, creatures that she first created for a massively successful line of greeting cards....
Art becomes great when its potential meanings multiply, breaking free of obvious uses and even creators’ intentions. On the millionth reading, great children’s books can still offer us something new. They become old friends bearing new secrets.....

And where does this magic happen? We quote the New York Times:  Sandra Boynton's workspace overlooks a bucolic landscape in a restored barn at her home in Connecticut. [According to the cartoonist]:


My office is in rural Connecticut, in a barn 60 yards from my house. It’s an echo of a barn that was here for 120 years. The original was termite-infested, so it’s a 20-year-old building the same size as the original. My husband works across the hall.....

I normally come to the office around 8:30 a.m., and aside from taking a long walk or yoga and eating, I will be at work until midnight or 1 a.m. I work all the time because I really love what I do, as trite as that sounds. My children are all grown now, and in a sense, after years of raising four kids and working around when they were asleep, I now have this luxury of time that is exciting to me.....
...We have terrible Internet here, because we live in a valley. So I often have to send things to people on thumb drives. I decorate the thumb drives with frogs. The frog looks upset and says, “data,” like he is yelling at you.
.....

One side of her office:

This is where she draws, among other things, her cartoon cats.