Continuing from yesterday's post....
The endpaper is like an invitation to the other world that is a picture book.
I've photographed a few here from the children's Christmas books - blue predominates, and snow effects and Brian Wildsmith's gold endpapers in A Christmas Story have a feel of magic to them. (I think you can tell how much the children in this family have liked the gold by the number of little fingerprints all over it!)
I love to pause slightly on these special pages when reading a book to children.
In the absence of special endpaper, (or beginning paper) the first illustration can set the scene for what is to follow.
Just as the opening sentence of a novel is considered very important, so, I believe, is the first picture in a picture book.
Often the illustrator achieves a special effect, a hint of mystery, by minimal means as in the one small parcel in the big expanse of snow here in Santa's Littlest Helper Travels The World by Anu Stohner and Hennrike Wilson. How did it come to be there, you want to know....
Your curiosity is aroused by the single loose balloon in Mog's Christmas by Judith Kerr..
and where can this lone hedgehog be heading, so determinedly, nose sniffing the cold air? The Winter Hedgehog by Ann and Reg Cartwright.
Beautiful, and clever!