WESTWOOD—Patrons of the Westwood Free Public Library—of all ages—are in for a treat with the library’s newly redesigned card. Interpreted by illustrator, cartoonist, and longtime library user Drew Panckeri, it’s a slim, pure piece of Westwood that does what a library does best: invite you in, then send you out with something new.
Panckeri delivered a colorful design featuring a cardinal—the dangly legs!—at home with a haul of books: a nod to the borough, the regional school district, and the joy of connection.
In announcing the winner of the contest, library director Catherine DiLeo said, “Huge thanks to Drew for this wonderful design—we’re so excited to start giving these out!” That sounded just right to fans of the library and Panckeri.
Jamie Savoy posted, “So Drew drew the new card? Awesome!” Sabrina Deutsch Krawczyk said, “Hey, I know that guy! He’s kind of a big deal on our block. Way to go Drew!” And Kate Stutzel said, “Beautiful!”
The contest rules: entrants used an official library card/key tag template, submitted one digital design per person, and followed standard print specs. The submission deadline was Nov. 1, 2025.
The winning design is now printed and distributed as the official library card. Patrons can turn their old one in if they want, and walk out with the latest edition. The library is at 49 Park Ave. and westwoodpubliclibrary.org.
DiLeo told Pascack Press, “When we voted, submissions were completely anonymous. We had the top three submissions, and staff voted in the blind—nobody knew whose design was whose. That was important, because we did have several really strong submissions.”
DiLeo said, “We’re really part of the community, so I wanted it to be something very Westwood, but also tied to the library in some way. That’s not easy to achieve. I also wanted one universal card. I didn’t want separate adult and children’s versions—just one design for everyone.”
The library ordered a smaller print run this time, compared to the most recent, “boring,” refresh several years ago, as there’s also a digital card in the Bergen County Cooperative Library System (BCCLS) library app. DiLeo said, “A lot of people use that instead of a physical card.”
She estimated the library boasts “5,800 cardholders at the moment. We probably issue 300 to 400 new or replacement cards each year, so this run should last about two years.”
Among those getting new cards: “Berkeley School does a kindergarten walking tour around town. They come to the library, the firehouse, Town Hall—it’s really sweet. When they visit the library, we do a short program and they get their first library card,” DiLeo said.
Panckeri, who since 2015 has published hundreds of single-panel cartoons with the likes of The New Yorker, MAD magazine, and WIRED, says that “drawing came naturally as a child, spending many days in school quietly concerned with the world inside a notebook, making friends laugh with MAD-style parodies, or the many other distractions that would keep [me] in trouble and off the recess field.”
He and DiLeo first met when he was promoting his early-reader graphic novel, “Duck and Cat Ride the Riverboat” (Holiday House, 2025), a Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection, “featuring a hapless duck, an anxious cat, and some very hungry crocodiles.”
DiLeo said, “Someone told me, ‘We have this really talented illustrator in town.’ And in Westwood, it feels like every month there’s someone with a great skill set—we have these great authors, too. So I reached out to Drew and invited him to do a storytime.”
She said, “We read from his book and then made sailboats as a craft, which tied into the story. It was a really nice event and we had a good turnout.”
As a children’s librarian, DiLeo also notices the publisher. “When you see a strong imprint like Holiday House, that tells you it’s a solid book. I knew it was the real deal.”
Panckeri told Pascack Press that the past year has been a welcome shift: after years drawing single-panel cartoons for magazines, he’s now leaning hard into children’s books.
The response has been encouraging—especially in reaching kids who don’t usually latch on to books. Panckeri said he recently received a note from a parent who wrote that their child, a reluctant reader, checked out his book from the library and would not stop reading it for about a month.
“You don’t get many interactions with your readers when they’re children,” Panckeri said. “So when I do get something positive, it’s really heartening.”
Panckeri moved to Westwood about four years ago from Philadelphia, where he studied web design at the Art Institute and stayed for roughly two decades.
He followed his heart to Westwood: He and his partner first met years ago while working in a library in Ocean County. “When we reunited, 15 years later, in different parts of our lives,” he said, his partner was living here. “That’s why I’m here in beautiful Bergen County.”
Although they have no kids, he has one niece; his partner has four. “We have plenty of young people around us.”
These days he’s focused on books and works part time at Closter Farm & Livestock Co. (closterfarm.com), helping at the market and in the fields.
“We grow all sorts of vegetables. We’re actually one of the few certified organic farms here in Bergen County, and we grow kale, lots of lettuce, arugula, all sorts of root vegetables; and in the summer, all sorts of crops: tomatoes… You name it.”
Panckeri said he became a familiar face at the Westwood library right as he began teaching himself a new market. “As the librarians there can attest, I was in and out every week, picking up a stack of children’s books,” along with interviews and memoirs from creators he admired.
Asked if there was some place in the Pascack Valley where he goes to work or for inspiration, he said, “I’m usually at home drawing. But I do love walking around the town. I take tons of reference photos. … I get ideas and reference from all over.”
He noted he’d been working on a book idea tied to Westwood’s former pet store, Westwood Pets on Westwood Avenue, and its beloved, venerable tortoise, Soupy.
When the library launched its card design contest, Panckeri said staff regularly urged him to enter. After he submitted, he spoke with DiLeo, who told him the voting would be blind—so no one would know which design was his when staff chose a winner.
For the design itself: “I was looking for something that would indicate the library and Westwood all in one image,” he said. “So ultimately I decided to go with the Westwood Cardinal.”
Beyond the mascot, he said he sees cardinals “especially in the wintertime,” and the bird felt like a natural fit perched on “the stalwart of the library,” a stack of books.
There was no “prize” in the contest, he said—“Just the recognition and the satisfaction, knowing that there’s not many times for an artist to really be part of the community or contribute. And this was one small way that I felt like I could actually use my skills and give back to the library and to the town.”
Panckeri told us his kid-facing visual language comes from what he loved early on.
“I love Richard Scarry,” he wrote, praising Scarry’s “funny little animals going about their daily business with a smile, and occasionally totally messing up.”
He also cited the cartoons that were peppered in on “Sesame Street,” “Schoolhouse Rock!,” and Chuck Jones’ “Looney Tunes.”
Among books, he named “Frog and Toad,” “Curious George,” and “The Black Lagoon” series, but singled out James Marshall’s “George and Martha”: “The subtle humor, the coziness of his little stories, his funny drawing style—it all just clicked for me.”
He read MAD as a kid, and loved Gary Larson’s “The Far Side.” “I grew up reading those in the newspaper,” he said. In MAD, he resonated with Sergio Aragonés, known for the tiny, wordless gag drawings running rampant in the magazine’s margins. “They just fed into my imagination,” Panckeri said. “I’d be sitting in class and I’d be doodling in my margins just like he was.”
Panckeri describes his first title as an “early graphic reader (aka comic)” — books in the series meet the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) in Reading Standards: Foundational Skills, and in Reading Standards for Literature — and said he’s pitching comics and traditional children’s books.
“The basic mechanism is the same,” he said. “I want it to look like it was hand-drawn, I want the art to be clear and understandable, and most of all I want to entertain the person reading.”
That clarity is a discipline he traces to years of cartooning and marketing. “Economy is the name of the game in cartooning, just like copywriting,” he said. “I learned to strip away any extraneous words and the same goes for the visual.”
Panckeri’s single-panel cartoons have appeared in The New Yorker since 2014, after years of submitting into a fiercely competitive pipeline. He said he first learned about the magazine’s old open-review sessions—“Look Tuesdays”—from a “60 Minutes” segment, then made the trip from Philly to show work in person.
“I took the bus to New York and went and saw Bob Mankoff,” he said. “He reviewed my cartoons — which is a little bit of a stressful situation. He doesn’t really laugh … so he looks at them kind of analytically.”
Panckeri kept submitting, he said, because that’s what it takes: “They run, like, 15 cartoons a week and they get hundreds of submissions every week, so you’re fighting for very little ground.”
Books, not content
He shared his views on print vs. the attention economy: “I much prefer languidly looking at a book, a newspaper, or a magazine over social media. It’s like taking a sip from a water fountain versus an open fire hydrant.”
He said, “Most of the online platforms we have at our disposal are designed for rapid intake and quick reactions, and everything is ephemeral – it’s consumed at a glance and forgotten just as quickly. So, I prefer to make books instead of content.”
He said word of wonder from an early reader “makes the untold hours behind the scenes worth it, not the quick double tap of a heart.”
For more on Panckeri, visit panckericartoons.com, where you can subscribe to his “Fresh Donuts” substack. For more local author spotlights, visit thepressgroup.net.