Day and Night - Roger Duvoisin

Day and Night by Roger Duvoisin / ISBN 9781681377940 / 40-page hardcover reprint (from 2024) from the New York Review Children's Collection

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A classic picture book about the special friendship between an owl and a dog, written and illustrated by a master of children's literature.

Day and Night is a classic Duvoisin tale about two unlikely friends with similar interests but impossibly different lives. Day is a dog and Night is an owl. While Day the dog plays and eats and barks, Night the owl sleeps. While Night flies and hunts and hoots, Day sleeps. Night lives alone in the forest and Day lives in a house with his family, the Pennyfeathers. Day and Night are determined to stay friends, even if they have to hoot and bark all day and night in order to communicate. But how can anyone get the sleep they need? Luckily little Bob Pennyfeathers has been watching and listening, and he has an idea that just might save the day, and the night!

Roger Duvoisin (1900–1980) was born to a French Swiss family in Geneva. He graduated from the École des Arts et Métiers and the École des Beaux-Arts in Geneva and early in his career worked as a mural and stage-set painter before settling on textile design. In the late 1920s, he immigrated to the United States, where he soon began writing and illustrating children’s books. The author of more than forty of his own books, Duvoisin also collaborated with many writers, including his wife, Louise Fatio Duvoisin, and Alvin Tresselt, with whom he won a Caldecott Award for White Snow, Bright Snow in 1948 and the Caldecott Honor Award for Hide and Seek Fog in 1966. Today he is best known for Petunia, the story of a not-so-silly silly goose.