ANGELS GENIUS ILLUSTRATOR

JOHN BURNINGHAM, who wrote and illustrated scores of books that took generations of young children on fanciful journeys full of surprises and heart, died on Jan 4 in London. He was 82.

Francesca Dow, the publisher's  managing director, called him ''a true original, a picture-book pioneer and an endlessly inventive creator of stories that could be by turns hilarious and comforting, shocking and playful.''

Mr. Burningham had quick success in the children's book, ''Borka : The Adventures of a Goose With No Feathers,'' won the 1963 Kate Greenaway Medal, a British prize that recognizes outstanding children's book illustration.

The story involved a featherless goose who, left behind by her migrating
siblings, finds a place in the world nonetheless.

He won the same prize in 1970 for ''Mr. Gumpy's Outing,'' in which the title character, about to take his boat out on a river, accedes to request from his children and series of animals to come along, with cheerfully waterlogged results.

Mr. Burningham liked to mix line drawings and ink washes in small scenes but also would throw in, several times in each book, a larger, more arresting paintings to startle and captivate the 7-and-under crowd.

The artwork though, always retained a simple, even childlike quality, in contrast to the more overwhelming imagery of other children books.

''Sometimes you see a lot of pattern and color in picture books.'' he told the Bookseller in 2003, ''and it masks the inadequacy of drawing or text.''

In his storytelling he liked to start off quietly, then draw his young readers into the realm of imagination.

There was, for instance, ''Where's Julius?'' in 1986, in which Mr. and Mrs. Troutbeck wonder why their son hasn't come down to lunch - it's because, as most every child has done, he has made a little fort in his room out of a curtain strung across a couple of chairs.

As the book progresses, Julius doesn't come to subsequent meals because he is riding a camel up pyramid of Egypt or climbing a mountain in Tibet.

The World Students Society, for every subject in the world, thanks author and researcher Neil Genzlinger.