Philip Stead had a problem. He was designing the cover for his new—and first ever—middle grade novel and nothing felt right.

The book, A Potion, a Powder, a Little Bit of Magic: Or, Like Lightning in an Umbrella Storm (Holiday House/Neal Porter Books, features out-of-order chapters, 24 morals, and the author as a character. While Norton Juster has been a constant influence on Stead’s work, the author said that specific inspiration for this book came from Jules Feiffer’s middle grade debut A Barrel of Laughs, A Vale of Tears (1995) and the classic movie The Princess Bride (1987).

But the title was, um, long—and there was even some discussion, he said, of whether the whole thing should go on the cover. Stead knew it had to. “It’s an unusual book and I wanted the cover to convey both the humor and strangeness you’ll find.”

That title meant the cover design had to accommodate a lot of type, and he spent “a ton of time” trying to find one. Every typeface he tried “seemed too grown up or too stiff” for the book’s improvisational feel.

Then inspiration struck, close to home—literally.

“I asked my then seven-year-old daughter, ‘Can you write out an alphabet from A to Z?’ ” Stead recalled. He paid her $5 for every page she filled with alphabets, and by the end, he’d spent about $50.

From those pages of her handwriting, Stead created a typeface, drawing on his training as a graphic designer. The lettering was elevated with embossed gold foil in the final production process.

The timing proved crucial—not just in terms of the book’s production, but also his daughter’s motor skills development. “We caught her in the exact window, at the end of the second grade, when her handwriting was very legible but hadn’t lost the idiosyncrasies in the way that kids write, like filling in a letter, the flourishes, the little loops.” By the end of that summer, when he asked her to do a few more alphabets, “her handwriting had gotten too good.”

Author-illustrator Stead is well known for his meticulousness, and this novel was no exception. “To a fault, I tinker as long as they’ll let me,” he admitted. After completing the text, he handled all the interior layouts himself. Given its structure, he wanted every chapter to end on the same side of the page and set up the next chapter to help readers navigate the book—much as his work as a picture book artist relies on controlling the page-turning experience.

Rather than pad the text, the solution was more illustrations—a lot more of them, and he expanded the original scope of 12 to more than 75. “It added a lot of time to the process,” he said, “but it makes the book warmer.”

“Phil is very precise about what he delivers when he delivers any final book,” said his editor, Taylor Norman. “I think it would have been really hard for someone not as precise to deliver a book like this, because the form and function and story are one and the same.”

A New Challenge

Stead’s path to becoming a middle grade author started with transforming Mark Twain’s unfinished notes for The Purloining of Prince Oleomargarine (2017) into a book, with his wife and frequent collaborator Erin Stead as illustrator. “It allowed me to open up my use of language,” Stead said. “It was the first long-form thing I had done, and it was that experience that made me wonder if I could extend it even further.”

Norman, a longtime admirer of Stead’s writing, had been encouraging him to try long-form. “I was saying you have to do a novel,” she recalled, “because your sentences will get more attention. I wanted him to be in the spotlight for that skill.” When she stepped up her encouragement at the Mountains and Plains booksellers conference in 2022, the timing felt right to Stead—his 40th birthday was approaching, and he was ready to try something new.

What he’d envisioned was ambitious: a book that almost existed as a puzzle, and he didn’t know the ending. “I told her I’d love to do this; you’re going to have to trust me that I can just do it—even though I’m not sure I could trust myself to do it.”

A one-year project stretched into three years—and pushed Norman’s editing to a new level as well; she likened working on it to a scavenger hunt. But she sees this as “the beginning of the next step of Phil’s career, a new avenue of his talent and mind and skills.”

Stead said that he misses picture books, but has signed up for another middle grade project: a three-book detective novel series with friend and Caldecott Medalist Matthew Cordell. As for the world he created with A Potion, A Powder, Norman said, “Phil has very carefully mentioned the possibility of a sequel to me.”

A Potion, a Powder, a Little Bit of Magic: Or, Like Lightning in an Umbrella Storm by Philip Stead. Holiday House/Neal Porter Books, $18.99 Apr. 7, 2026 ISBN 978-0-8234-5809-7