On a frigid Wednesday afternoon, sunbeams poured into Maurice Sendak’s studio in Ridgefield, Conn., crisscrossing one another with the precision and warmth of the children’s books that were born in this room.

Sendak died almost 12 years ago, but his studio is exactly as he left it. There are his pencil cups and watercolor sets; there’s his final manuscript, for a book called “No Noses.” And there, glowing like a ripe tomato, is his red cardigan, draped over the back of an empty chair.

Standing among Sendak’s books, art and ephemera, it was easy to imagine that he’d stepped out for his daily three-mile jaunt down Chestnut Hill Road. Surely he’d come back, pop in a Mozart CD and get cracking on a new project. There were his walking sticks by the front door; there were his poster paints, wearing price tags from an art store that closed in 2016. There was his stereo, labeled with homemade stickers marked “power” and “volume.”

The place might be frozen in amber — and a bit long in the tooth technologically — but the vibe on the eve of the winter solstice was future-focused and upbeat. The countdown had begun for a third posthumous Sendak book, “Ten Little Rabbits,” which comes out from HarperCollins on Feb. 6.

It has big shoes to fill: Sendak’s previous books have sold more than 50 million copies. With their unique potion of humor and forthrightness, the most famous ones, “Where the Wild Things Are” and “In the Night Kitchen,” are as unforgettable as the Pledge of Allegiance or “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.” Sendak’s minutely crosshatched, freewheeling pictures are as familiar and mysterious as the contours of your childhood bedroom in the dark. He was the rare adult who looked under the bed and drew what he saw.