Wanda Gág, Free to Imagine
Monday, November 18, 2013 at 8:23PM 
According to my long-ago children’s literature professor, Wanda Gág’s Millions of Cats was the first children’s book to use a repeated refrain throughout. (You know it, right?: “…hundreds of cats, thousands of cats, millions and billions and trillions of cats!”) It was a technique used in oral versions of folk tales, but it hadn’t made its way into books before Wanda Gág wrote this one. It was also the first children’s book to use a double-paged spread and hand lettered text.
People thought of Wanda Gág as a “free spirit”, and her work is unique and innovative, but she was hardly free. She was a Minnesota native, the oldest of seven children, and only fourteen when her father died of tuberculosis. His last words to her were “what Papa has left undone, Wanda will have to do.”
And so she did. It was her work doing odd jobs illustrating magazine articles, greeting cards, and calendars that made the money that kept the family together. She graduated from high school in 1912, but didn’t feel free to accept her scholarship to art school until the next two sisters had graduated, too, and were established as teachers.
