Strunk and White, illustrated

By ROBERTA SMITH
The New York Times

Around 2002, the artist, illustrator and writer Maira Kalman came across a copy of William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White’s The Elements of Style in a yard sale and decided this legendary if sometimes contested guide to grammar and clear writing needed visual accompaniment.

So she provided some, making 57 illustrations inspired by sentences and phrases selected from the book. All these images Ms. Kalman rendered in gouache in a delectably colored figurative style indebted to David Hockney and Florine Stettheimer. They were then sprinkled throughout a 2005 version of Elements based on its fourth edition, covered in exuberant red.

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