ABSTRACT
Both in the East and the West, the picture book market is dominated by story picture books, while science picture books are relatively marginalized, and widely acknowledged masterpieces are rare. Science picture books take scientific knowledge as their subject matter, and differ from illustrated handbooks of scientific knowledge in their imaginative and often complex interaction of verbal information and illustrations that aspire to be both artistic and scientifically accurate. As art has its exciting attractiveness, so does science. Rabindranath Tagore, the first winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in the East, excelled in literature and art. Nevertheless, he praised science highly. Even science picture books that focus on in-depth popularization of scientific knowledge contain humanistic feelings almost without exception. Different from story picture books, which are apt to cultivate domestic settings, science picture books are responsible for inspiring children's desires to explore the universe.
