New York is Book Country was an annual street festival held in Manhattan from 1979 to 2010. The festival featured an array of booksellers and literary events centered around Fifth Avenue, which was closed to traffic for the sprawling occasion. Indie bookstores setup shop alongside antiquarian booksellers, author book signings, and established publishers. The event was organized by a non-profit that sought to promote and cultivate a love of reading and writing amongst the denizens of New York, a city with an undoubtedly profound literary legacy.

Each year, organizers commissioned an artist to design a promotional poster for the event, with select contributors including Edward Gorey, Charles Schulz, Richard Scarry, and Keith Haring. Maurice Sendak was tapped to design the poster for the festival’s inaugural year. The result is a dynamic composition that features one of his famous Wild Things at Godzilla-scale wrapped around the Empire State Building and engrossed in a copy of Charlotte Bronte’s Villette.

Maurice Sendak is widely considered the most important children's book artist of the twentieth-century. His artwork has captivated our imaginations for decades with its evocative and unsanitized imagery, which is perhaps best exemplified in his most famous work: Where the Wild Things Are (Harper & Row, 1963). Artistically, he found inspiration in idiosyncratic artists such as William Blake, and his output demonstrates a similar artistic tension: it is at once menacing and beautiful, melancholy and warm, suspended between states of consciousness.

Artwork featuring Sendak's trademark characters, the Wild Things, are highly prized by collects ors and increasingly scarce on the market. The present work is further distinguished by its larger scale, which is not typical of the artist.

Copyrights in original artwork created by Maurice Sendak are owned and controlled by the Estate of Maurice Sendak.