The company also stood at the core of a phenomenon in local book illustration, assigning contracts to recognized artists such as Sandu Florea, Val Munteanu, Lívia Rusz and Eugen Taru.

[3] Writer and translator Adrian Solomon argued that, "with a few obnoxious exceptions", Editura Ion Creangă mostly published works which generally avoided or went beyond the propaganda characteristics found in Eastern Bloc literature aimed at adults.

"[6] Enlisted by Utan, Rusz contributed drawings to reprints of classical works for children in Romanian literature, such as Nicolae Constantin Batzaria's Povești de aur ("Golden Stories") and Creangă's collected fairy tales and Childhood Memories.

[3] After 1971, the company also issued Caseta cu bucurii ("A Caseful of Joys" or "My Bedtime Library"), the main works for children by Emil Gârleanu, with illustrations by Ileana Ceaușu-Pandele.

[14] Also noted were its luxury edition of Gargantua and Pantagruel, issued in collaboration with the Sibiu typography Arta Grafică,[15] and a 1978 version of Ugo Scotti Berni's La promessa sposa di Pinocchio.

[16] The company also ran a special paperback series, Povești nemuritoare ("Immortal Tales"), which, in addition to Romanian folklore, introduced the public to samples of foreign legends, including Turkish ones.

[18] A notable series inaugurated by the company was the Jules Verne "yellow covers" reader, published as a set of 40 volumes bound in boards and illustrated with copies of the original French lithographs.

[2] She also analyzed the relative liberalization that had occurred in the meantime, noting that the new version was more accepting of Verne's references to religion, and lacked the "ridiculous footnotes" which encouraged the reader to interpret the text from a Marxist-Leninist perspective.

"[21] O poveste cu un hobbit featured original illustrations by Rusz, who relied exclusively on her imagination for depicting the main characters, as the lack of Tolkien editions in Romania made it impossible for her to find other points of visual reference.

[22][23][24] Ion Creangă, Kriterion, Albatros, Facla publishing houses were especially active in fulfilling the growing need for German-language books, in particular by presenting special awards to German authors and translators.

[24] These activities also incorporated a political aspect: a 1975 official report on cultural policies, which listed Ion Creangă alongside Editura Dacia and Kriterion as the year's most significant contributors to the program, explained the role it had in the "communist education of readers".

According to Arina Stoenescu: "By the end of the communist era, when the poor quality of paper and print made the pictures in fiction literature almost unintelligible, the strong colors and powerful black and white illustrations managed to reach the children and offered them a friendlier and happier sight of the world.

[30][31] The Securitate secret police oversaw further punitive measures, forcing the early retirement of Editura Ion Creangă's chief manager Viniciu Gafița and moving proofreader Doina Mandaj, stripped of her political position, to the Albatros group.

[31] In the short interval before Întîmplări de pe strada mea was withdrawn from shops, rumors spread about the irritation it caused to communist authorities, and, as a consequence, sales increased significantly.

[35] Comparing the book illustration scene at Ion Creangă with the post-1989 situation, Cristiana Radu contended that new publishers resorted to "traditional, tame and descriptive variants" or "the Disney solution", while the public was left without "visual education".