"The Silver Button," by Bob Graham At 9:59 in the morning, in a seaside city somewhere, a little girl named Jodie is about to draw the final silver button on her picture of an elegantly dressed duck. She pauses for a minute to consider her work. That short span of time is all it takes for Jonathan, her baby brother, to take his first steps. And throughout the multiracial, multiethnic town, other important things happen in that same time frame. An ambulance speeds past, a soldier says goodbye to his mother, a grandfather plays a funny game of leaf houses with his granddaughter. A homeless woman pushes her belongings down the street in a grocery cart. A baby is born, and two friends, Belle and Vashti, pop seaweed on the beach. Bob Graham, an Australian artist, has won a number of big prizes over the years, including a Kate Greenaway Medal for "Jethro Byrde: Fairy Child" and a Unicef Bologna Illustrator of the Year award. His long experience in book illustration shows here in the expert pacing and variation of his scenes. There's just enough of a narrative, simply expressed, on each page to keep a child's attention. The littlest lap-readers may ask to have the structure explained to them the first time they hear the book. Interior pictures are juxtaposed with bird's-eye views of the city, all detailed, but none chaotic. This is a busy town, but there's a leisureliness to Graham's portrayal of it, conveyed by broad white pages with soft-toned watercolors, that makes it very different from Richard Scarry's action-packed "Busytown" series. Some of the details Graham includes are truly witty and a pleasure for grown-up readers: Jonathan takes his first steps under a painting of an ape moving forward on both hands and feet, Graham's hint that walking upright is indeed very significant - not just to Jonathan, but to mankind. Visual nods to the Renaissance painter and engraver Albrecht Dürer bring a sense of deep historical context and culture to the contemporary moment. A calendar showing his "Young Hare" hangs in the family's kitchen. The children's cropped-haired, penny-whistle-playing mother loves the picture "so much, she hadn't changed it in three years." And Graham has decorated the end pages of "The Silver Button" with a sketch of a patch of grass, with weeds sprouting this way and that, strongly reminiscent of Dürer's "The Large Piece of Turf." Just as the 16th-century master studied an ordinary cross section of sod, and saw great, if unconventional, beauty and variety there, so Graham, in showing the range of activity in a city over the course of a mere minute, shows something unconventional but precious about life and time. It's rare for such an admirably simple children's book to suggest so much that's profound. "The Silver Button" is indeed something very special, a book that speaks to the old and the young at their own levels, but says the same thing to both.