Drawn!, a blog focusing on illustrators, is reporting the death of Stan Berenstain some time yesterday; no further details were available by the time I wrote this and went to bed late last night. Berenstain was the co-creator, with his wife Jan, of the Berenstain Bears, icons of young children’s literature I’m sure every reader of this blog recognizes. When the Berenstains moved their popular franchise from Random House to HarperCollins nearly three years ago, sales of their books were pegged at over 240 million in just over four decades, making for an average of six million books sold each year.
UPDATE: Confirmation via Reuters finally came around 4:30 this afternoon, although the report notes that Berenstain’s actual time of death was Saturday, not Monday. And I never knew that Dr. Seuss was their first editor…