What are you like?

This was the title of an exhibition, now closed, but the link explains the rationale:

45 people in the public eye have been invited to create a self-revealing artwork, illustrating their 8 favourite things from a list of 12: their favourite animal, book, item of clothing, comfort, food, pastime, place, possession, music, shoes, weather and pet aversion (the thing they love to hate!) The result is a delightfully idiosyncratic exhibition.

At the link, results are identified and you can see the resulting ‘self-portraits’ of, among others, Emma Chichester Clark, Lauren Child, Eric Carle, Mini Grey, Jan Pienkowski, Michael Foreman, Shirley Hughes, Sara Fanelli and Quentin Blake.

In the tradition of the blog meme (remember the Dawkins’ coinage explained in our Study Guide p48 ?) I’ve taken the idea:

:

Have you spotted my favourite (children’s) book?  What’s yours?

OpenLearn

The OU’s free course materials on its OpenLearn website are a continual temptation. No, don’t go there!  EA300 comes first!

But if you have a moment or are looking for a little more inspiration for the current assignment, here’s a link which offers a couple of Sara Fanelli pictures; and a reminder that Raymond Briggs’s picturebook Ethel and Ernest is addressed to an adult audience.

The book as beautiful object

Michelle Lovric passionately defends the work of all those who contribute to the book as object, not download. I was particularly struck by her description of her own new book:

The cover of The Undrowned Child is printed on paper so soft that it seems to have been aged by floating the book down the Grand Canal for a couple of centuries before being hand-dried by blind nuns in the shade of an ancient convent. Orion didn’t work with the usual stock photo of Venice. They commissioned brand-new cover art in unmistakeable Venetian colours. They gold-embossed the lettering in a font that perfectly recreates the 1899 setting. The flaps are satisfyingly – no, wantonly – wide. The pages are a classy cream. The boards are 3mm thick.

Almost none of the above can be experienced on screen or as a download.

And that’s not all. Inside, Orion gave The Undrowned Child marbled endpapers. There are illustrated chapter-heads. They added the luxury of a specially drawn map, on which I worked with the artist for many weeks. There’s factual endmatter that could be material for a school project. Nearly all of these extra values are also embedded in the paperback.

All of which is not to say that Ms Lovric despises the web. Far from it. This is all good book promotion, after all; and of  course she has a website too (with more book covers relating to Venice).

Reader response

Try this rewarding reflection by AS Byatt on how she remembers some of the books she read as a child.  For me, she captures some of the ‘childness’ in these books, and what a child may take from them. I’ve pulled out some plums.

On Alices’ Adventures in Wonderland:

The texture of reading Alice is a series of linguistic puzzles, contradictions and jokes… [Alice's] main emotion is trying to make sense against increasing odds.

Peter Pan, Treasure Island (among others):

Children in these books have a kind of emotional and moral autonomy which is new in literature. The child reader feels their problems, decisions and dangers differently from those of either children in real fairy stories (Hansel and Gretel) or children in novels who will grow up – Pip in terror by his parents’ gravestone,  Oliver Twist in the orphanage, David Copperfield tormented by the Murdstones, Jane Eyre in the Red Room, or furious, sulky Maggie Tulliver.

On The Secret Garden:

One of the most moving orphans is Mary in The Secret Garden… My childish responses to Mary’s attempts to make sense of the world were the opposite to my response to Alice. I felt protective towards her and, at the same time, I did see the world from inside her. I was embarrassed with and for her…Yet her own cussedness and capacity for tantrums turn out to be a strength when she meets the cosseted and neglected invalid Colin, another self-centred child- seen by the reader, I think, through Mary’s eyes as she hectors  him into ordinary life.

On The Wizard of Oz:

… Dorothy does not have much character – less than her three companions who nevertheless provide no niche for the reader’s imaginiation to hang on to… What is splendid about Oz is the detail of things – yellow bricks, emerald glasses, oilcans.

On Treasure Island:

[Jim's] is a first-person narrative, which is as often distancing as it is involving. But the smells, the fear, the effort, the attempt to read strange and dangerous faces, or deceptively mild ones, become part of one’s own consciousness…

Fear goes with evil beings, and with dangerous landscapes. Blind Pew, and smiling, treacherous Long John Silver taught me much about fear, about the possibility of real danger.

In particular, as we are currently focusing on illustration, read her comments about Disneyfication, and the one Disney film which for her did not kill the power of the original:

…Snow White.. added considerably to my experience of wonderful fear and terror, even though its heroine was a doll. This, I have been told, was because it was made by German refugees who had a sense of the darkness of the old stories.

Sweet treats

Dr Seuss cakes!

Sambo / Sam

It was a bit of a shock to see the crudely-executed 1899 illustration from Little Black Sambo in our course Study Guide (p.234).

I’d been saving up this discussion of the controversy around the book itself.  The story has its fans: see comments here for example.  Two of the illustrations below are the author’s own, as is the one in the Study Guide.  You can read the original text with the lovelier illustrations by Florence White Williams at Project Gutenberg.   Babaji (2003)  is a ‘Michael Jackson treatment’ of the story – see this Amazon review. There is another 2003  version of the story, using the original text but with illustrations by Christopher Bing “showing a smart, contemporary African kid in India”.

Sam and the Tigers (1996) is, according to its author Julius Lester,

A retelling of Little Black Sambo which is more a reconceptualization than a retelling. I made it a coming-of-age story set in a mythical place where animals and people live on equal terms and everyone has the same name.

Click on the ‘Look inside’ at the Amazon link -  the pictures are charming but the text extract just isn’t on a story-telling par with the original.

Picturebooks

There’s a useful broad-sweep/fascinating-detail Guardian review article by Jenny Uglow on ‘The Lure of illustrated children’s books” .  For instance, I like this:

It is bracing to read [Quentin Blake's] quick note on all the things an illustrator has to bear in mind, from identifying with the characters, whether they are mewling infants, giants, witches, or assorted “crocodiles, dogs, mice, monkeys, goats, elephants and insects”, to the technical requirements. Where in the text should a picture fall? What role will colour play? What will the readers’ reaction be? And even “what implement to draw with (there are a lot to choose from)”. Behind apparently spontaneous images lie deep thought and hard labour.

She is not quite in step with our course definitions, though:

Experts distinguish between “illustrated books”, where the picture complements the text, and “picture books”, where the pictures come first. But in reality the two often overlap, and words and pictures cast a combined spell. The relationship is subtle, and the role of the artist varies.

She is reviewing Julia Eccleshare’s 1001 Children’s Books You Must Read Before You Grow Up and Illustrated Children’s Books which has essays by  Peter Hunt and Lisa Sainsbury – small world, children’s literature?

Mind the gap

Anthony Browne is being blogged throughout his Children’s Laureateship.  I like his introductory words about  ‘a tantalising gap between the pictures and the words’ :

‘I hope to encourage more children to discover and love reading, but I want to focus particularly on the appreciation of picture books, and the reading of both pictures and words. Picture books are for everybody at any age, not books to be left behind as we grow older. The best ones leave a tantalising gap between the pictures and the words, a gap that is filled by the reader’s imagination, adding so much to the excitement of reading a book.‘

I’ve picked up a couple more links from the site – to a penetrating article by Sarah Crown on an interview with Browne which points to his ‘darkness’

Browne’s greatest strength is his willingness to let the darkness in. His work traces a line back through the threat and promise of Jan Pienkowski, Maurice Sendak and, ultimately, Lewis Carroll, marrying surrealist wit with real, honest-to-goodness menace in drawings in which kettles sprout ears, faces scream out of tangled branches and shadows bulge and slide and unpick themselves from their owners. It is the resultant atmosphere of ambiguity – the implication that nothing, not even what’s before our eyes, can be relied on – that lends his work such complex and enduring appeal

In the interview Browne also relates his father’s death, in front of his own 17 year-old eyes; and how he got bitten by a gorilla.

More cheerfully, the site includes a useful link to the Book Trust’s Big Picture website with its delicious illustrators’ gallery.

Nostalgia

I have moved house a couple of times since my children have grown up. A lot of the books went to friends, charity shops, and – yes, it had to be done – the skip.  Don’t tell my daughters.  Bookshops, and libraries, have to change their stock and move with the times too.

So it was tantalising to learn that there is a Penguin archive – see an article, with a  comment about ‘mere paperback form’,  about a visit to the Puffin shelves

But it was fiction that became the real business of Puffin. High up, I can see the red-and-white bands of the first Puffins, published in 1941 by the original editor, Eleanor Graham, who had to work hard to convince publishers – and authors – to let her sell their work in mere paperback form. She began with five books that included Barbara Euphan Todd’s Worzel Gummidge and Mrs Molesworth’s The Cuckoo Clock. Eve Garnett’s The Family from One End Street was published the following year, its cover decorated with author illustrations as sweet and strong as the book itself; they are used to this day.

And for those of us who grew up with Ladybirds, there are recent obituaries in the Telegraph and the Guardian of John Berry, who illustrated many of them:

His pictures for the 20 books of the Ladybird People at Work series form a complete visual record of British industry in the early 1960s – an age of industrial prosperity where potteries, coalmines and car manufacture were flourishing, while obliging porters carried suitcases at railway stations and the only equipment a smiling customs officer required was a torch to shine into ladies’ handbags.

Do you still have old copies of children’s books? At a recent tutorial, some enduring favourites emerged, having been passed down the generations. I’m reduced to searching for them on bookmooch, a book swap website.

Some illustrations to enjoy

First, be warned of bad language in this cartoon. But a good thinking point – a definition of poor fantasy? Our hero learns stuff that blows his  mind, with No Relevance At All to his real life.  (Sorry, Lyra, but his/her is so awkward).

Now, some luscious links.  There’s a website devoted to Shirley Hughes’s Alfie. Shirley Hughes is a national treasure.

And in further homage to illustrators, here’s a website to get lost in – ‘Hey Oscar Wilde! It’s Clobberin’ Time! (found via The Guardian linklog). Start clicking down the list of subjects, on the right of the page, and you could be gone for some time.

And here is a photograph that seems powerfully anti-illustration: book display in a Spanish bookshop with children’s books spine out, completely uniform, showing age-banding not cover illustration (or anything else).  What do you think?  After my first shock, and reading Charlie Butler‘s  measured comment, I can begin to see the appeal.

But no. It’s too reading-scheme for me.