Thankyou Very Much Captain Ericsson!
A good illustrator will go to great lengths to make sure what s/he draws is accurate and matches the words in the text. Andrew Glass, who illustrated Thank You Very Much, Captain Ericsson! (my picture book about the inventor of the Civil War ironclad ship the Monitor) had a particular problem: the Monitor was at the bottom of the ocean and all the drawings he could find contained contradictory details. At one point he was on the verge of taking up scuba diving so that he could get a good look at it. Our frantic editor talked him out of it.
Andrew will probably be overjoyed to learn that the original turret of the U.S.S. Monitor has been retrieved and is on display at the Mariners’ Museum in Newport News, Virginia. I suspect he will be one of the very first visitors and will arrive, picture book in hand, to check on the accuracy of his work.
Connie & John Ericsson, Washington DC
There’s just nothing like a good illustrator!
Related: A Brief Dry Spell for the U.S.S. Monitor by the New York Times