TON

Industrial workers variously lift, push, hoist and pull girders, cement, bricks and other material from 50 pounds to one ton, and beyond, in a graphically simple illustration of relative weight. With one simple black horizontal forming a continuous base, the workers and materials operate atop this line against an all-white background; the clean, simple shapes of the figures are echoed by the stencil-like typeface, which grows in size as the weight moved increases, page by page. The text is as minimalist as the illustrations, indicating the poundage but nothing else. The simplicity of presentation is reminiscent of Donald Crews, and a six-page sequence of railroad cars (“20 ton 5 ton 10 ton . . . ”) is a highly pleasing homage. This leads to a double-gatefold of a 10,000-ton container ship (mystifyingly labeled “World Tanker”) in a restrained celebration of sheer weight. A significantly wordier coda goes into some depth on the difference between English and metric measurements and provides the metric equivalents of all the weights depicted. Altogether, it nicely gives some realistic context to the phrase, “This weighs a ton!” (Picture book. 3-7)