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Tag: Kids Books

The Skull by Jon Klassen

Author and illustrator Jon Klassen recently announced that his new book The Skull will be available from Candlewick Press in July, 2023. A whopping 115 pages, and based on a folktale Klassen read in a library before an event in Alaska (a great story in itself!), it tells the tale of a girl who runs away from home and befriends a talking skull she finds alone in a house in the woods. It is as spooky and macabre as it sounds, and totally worth the wait!

Jon Klassen’s latest book with Mac Barnett, The Three Billy Goats Gruff, was published this month.

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The Little Wooden Robot and the Log Princess

Tom Gauld’s first picture book for children, The Little Wooden Robot and the Log Princess, is out this month! According to the publisher blurb, the book is inspired by a bedtime story he made up for his daughters:

“I was trying to make a book inspired by three different sets of books: The books that I remember enjoying as a child, the books that I watched my daughters enjoying, and the books I enjoy now as an adult. I wanted the book to have its own quirky feeling but also to function like a classic bedtime story.”

It looks wonderful.

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Ladybird by Design

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The Guardian‘s Kathryn Hughes visits Ladybird By Design, an exhibition of over 200 original illustrations from the golden age of Ladybird Books:

To enter Ladybird’s world again is to relearn a universe that is both strange yet uncannily familiar. Inevitably the books express the values of their times. In the Peter and Jane series (aka Key Words Reading Scheme), Peter tends to hang out with Daddy in the garage, while Jane helps Mummy get the tea. Fair-haired and blue-eyed, every one in the children’s world looks exactly like them, apart from Pat the dog.

Still, if Ladybird books were conservative on gender and race, they were positively brisk on class. The world of Peter and Jane – and all the other children who appear in the Ladybird universe doing magic tricks, going to the shops, taking batteries apart or learning to swim – is both modern and modest. As illustrated by Berry, Wingfield and Martin Aitchison, the children appear to live in one of the postwar new towns. Their home is probably privately owned but it could conceivably be a newly built council house. Their adventures involve going on a train or to the beach with Mummy and Daddy. There are no prep-school japes here, no solving of improbable mysteries or clifftop rescues.

Perhaps this achievable utopia was a compensatory fantasy for the illustrators who, born around 1920, had mostly known childhoods far harder than this. Busy providing a safe, stable environment for their own little Peters and Janes, men such as Berry and Wingfield showed a world where things were, on the whole, getting better. Modernity increasingly presses into the frame: Jane and Peter eat off a table that looks like knock-off Habitat, Mummy wears slacks and Daddy even starts to help with the washing-up. More disruptive changes, though, are kept at a safe distance. Carnaby Street, with all its troubling freedoms, has no place in the Ladybird world, nor does the cold war or Vietnam.

For those of you who didn’t grow up in the UK, Ladybird Books were slim illustrated hardcover books for children. They were educational, or at least ‘improving’, and so creepy that I think they’ve actually scarred the national psyche. If you are of certain age, the books trigger a shiver of queasy nostalgia — without Ladybird Books the horrifying weird of The League of Gentleman or Scarfolk is just inconceivable — and yet I still think of them fondly. Sort of.
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The exhibition, which opens later this week, takes its title from a forthcoming Penguin book called Ladybird by Design. Written by Lawrence Zeegen, Professor of Illustration and Dean of the School of Design at the London College of Communication, the book celebrates 100 years of Ladybird, and examines the social and design history of the publisher. It is sure to be smashing.

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Mac Barnett: Why a good book is a secret door

I’m all about the charming videos today… In this recent TED Talk, Mac Barnett, award-winning author of Billy Twitters and His Blue Whale ProblemExtra Yarn, Telephone and the forthcoming Sam and Dave Dig a Hole, talks about childhood and making stories come alive:

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Françoise Mouly on TOON Books

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At Mutha Magazine, Meg Lemke talks to Françoise Mouly, Art Editor of The New Yorker and co-founder of RAW magazine, about TOON Books, her line of comics for kids:

When I go to schools, even in very impoverished school districts, and I say that I’m here to read a book—it’s fantastic to see how kindergarteners and first graders love story time. They love being read to. I go to schools to see the actual response from the kids, not what I think they will say. Reading is a canvas that they use to construct their understanding of the world. Comics are great that way, even better than illustrated stories, because, in comics, the story is told sequentially in pictures, and you, the reader, make connections between the panels. It’s a truly interactive medium, where the story itself stays on the page but you are the one making up what happens between the panels, making it move in space and in time.

When you talk to teachers, you will hear words such as making inferences and connecting and finding the context. It’s elaborate thought but it’s congenial to kids—they do it naturally. They’re always trying to make sense of the world around them. Nobody has ever had to teach a child how to find Waldo—they intuitively get it, and they find Waldo far quicker than most literate adults. Comics take advantage of the thing that children know how to do, of what their strength is, and puts them in the driver’s seat of reading.

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Quentin Blake Beyond the Page

“I want everything I do to look spontaneous. It’s not that I think illustration should necessarily be like that, but this is what I can do.”

In this short interview for the Tate, illustrator Quentin Blake talks about his new book Beyond the Page. Written by Blake, it chronicles his projects over the past ten years, including his works for the walls of hospitals, galleries and other public spaces:

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Midweek Miscellany

Survival Training — Colson Whitehead, author of Zone One, on watching horror flicks and b-movies, in science fiction edition of The New Yorker:

It was survival training. “A Clockwork Orange,” which I saw several times on HBO before I was ten, taught me more about not opening my door to strangers than a hundred school-assembly lectures. I never talked much in educational settings, so it is unlikely that I asked my mother, “What are they doing to that woman?” during my introduction to Stanley Kubrick, but, had I inquired, I’m sure she would have said, “It’s a comment on society, son.”

See also: Laura Miller on the first fictional space aliens, William Gibson on science fiction and Tomorrow, and cover illustration by Daniel Clowes (pictured above).

And on a related note: Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman talks science fiction at Wired.com:

I read Foundation back when I was in high school, when I was a teenager, and thought about the psychohistorians, who save galactic civilization through their understanding of the laws of society, and said “I want to be one of those guys.” And economics was as close as I could get. Those are pretty unique novels — they really are structured nothing like even the great bulk of science fiction, because they are about how social science can be used to save humanity.

Terrifying French children’s books.

And finally… An interesting interview with The New York Times media columnist David Carr (and star of the documentary Page One) at Talking Points Memo:

The tools of production are at hand for everyone. I used to hire a lot of young people when I was the editor of Washington City Paper, and you used to have them show you the clips and see where else you worked. Show me what you’ve made with your own bare little hands. That, I think, is super important. People say, “You should’ve been here for the good old days.” I think that’s crazy. Yeah, it’s a little harder, but you have so many more tools at your disposal to story-tell. It’s cool to be in a business where you still learn. You don’t have to be able to code yourself, but you have to know what coding is. You should be able to work in Final Cut Pro. WordPress should be second-nature. I think, in generational terms, being able to produce and consume content at the same time.

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Rob Ryan: Beauty in the Everyday

London-based paper-cut artist Rob Ryan talks about his work and his recently released book A Sky Full of Kindness in this short film for to Etsy:

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Aaron Renier’s Mathilda

Based on Roald Dahl’s Matilda and Quentin Blake’s illustrations, cartoonist Aaron Renier has created a wonderful comic about the joy of books and libraries. Read the whole strip at Unshelved.

(via Drawn | The Ephemerist)

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Something for the Weekend

Blinders — Charles Burns, author of Black Hole and X’ed Out, interviewed at Full Stop:

I’ve never really – and this sounds stupid because I’m working in a commercial medium – but I’ve never thought about an audience, or written for a specific audience, per se. I’m just trying to pull together my ideas in the best possible way, and I’ve never tailored those ideas for a particular audience. I bet I could do a pretty good teenage vampire story, for example. It would have plenty of romance, and just the right amount of titillating sex, but I think I’d wind up out on the Ben Franklin Bridge looking down at that water and thinking it looked pretty good down there [laughs]. I’ve really tried to put blinders on and just tell my stories the best way I can.

Book designer Stefanie Posavec at 10 Answers.

And thanks to MobyLives for pointing me to this 2008 article from The FontFeed: Top Ten Typefaces Used by Book Design Winners.

A Step Behind Where They Needed To Be — Peter Osnos on what went wrong at Borders for The Atlantic:

Borders stores took on a generic quality as executives and investors lacked the knowledge and patience to address the chains’ mounting problems. I’m sure there is more to this story (especially in the financial and real estate areas) than I know, but what really hurt Borders from the perspective of a book person like me was that the chain was no longer in the hands of true book retailers… Whatever else Borders does in the months ahead, it needs to recover its belief that real book-selling is an art (with all the peculiarities that entails), as well as a viable business.

And finally…

A look inside Seasons, the new book by the amazing French illustrator Blexbolex, published by Enchanted Lion Books:

(via Printeresting)

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Something for the Weekend

The stunningly beautiful book design work of FBA, a graphic design consultancy based in Coimbra, Portugal, seen at Cosa Visuales.

The Cosa Visuales post also introduced me to Spined, the design blog of Spanish graphic designer Álex Durana. Worth a look.

Wall of SoundAlex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker and author of The Rest is Noise and Listen to This, talks about his workspace at From The Desks Of…

My study is stereotypically overstuffed with books and CDs. On the desk I keep well-thumbed reference works—the Chicago Manual of Style, Strunk’s Source Readings in Music History, and Paul Griffiths’s Penguin Companion to Classical Music—together with two books that my spirits when sagging: the Wallace Stevens collection Palm at the End of the Mind and William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience. I leaf through Stevens in search of a fresh word or rhythm I can apply somewhere on the page: for me, he’s the supreme magician of the modern English language. I look to James for philosophical guidance—he shows the way out of ideological traps and abysses.

Also of interest: Designer Jarrod Taylor, shares an annotated photo of his desk in the art department of HarperCollins, New York.

But speaking of The New Yorker… James Surowiecki on what we can learn from procrastination:

The idea of the divided self, though discomfiting to some, can be liberating in practical terms, because it encourages you to stop thinking about procrastination as something you can beat by just trying harder. Instead, we should rely on what Joseph Heath and Joel Anderson, in their essay in “The Thief of Time,” call “the extended will”—external tools and techniques to help the parts of our selves that want to work. A classic illustration of the extended will at work is Ulysses’ decision to have his men bind him to the mast of his ship. Ulysses knows that when he hears the Sirens he will be too weak to resist steering the ship onto the rocks in pursuit of them, so he has his men bind him, thereby forcing him to adhere to his long-term aims. Similarly, Thomas Schelling once said that he would be willing to pay extra in advance for a hotel room without a television in it.

And finally…

Jackasses and pirate-loving Monkeys — Author and illustrator Lane Smith talks (apparently to himself) about the charming It’s a Book (via The Second Pass):

I like arranging and rearranging books on my bookshelves. In other words, I am a nerd.

Not to say that I’m not excited by the new technologies and reading devices introduced (it seems) nearly every month, I am. But I’m sure on some level I’ll always be a traditional book guy. Then again I’m the kind of guy who still watches silent movies and listens to vinyl.

Unlike Grandpa (me), today’s kids are whip smart and tech savvy. I know eventually everything will be digital and kids won’t even know from a regular old book book and that’s fine. Truthfully? The reason I made the book? Certainly not to “throw down the gauntlet” as one critic has stated. Naw, I just thought digital vs. traditional made for a funny premise.

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Something for the Weekend

There are two new books about designer Alvin Lustig available this month — Born Modern: The Life and Design of Alvin Lustig by Steven Heller and Elaine Lustig Cohen (Chronicle Books*) and Purity of Aim: The Book Jacket Designs of Alvin Lustig by Ned Drew and Paul Sternberger (RIT Cary Graphic Arts Press).

The Death of the Book has Been Greatly Exaggerated — Tech columnist Christopher Mims on the “irrational exuberance” around e-books (via MobyLives):

Tech pundits recently moved up the date for the death of the book, to sometime around 2015, inspired largely by the rapid adoption of the iPad and the success of Amazon’s Kindle e-reader. But in their rush to christen a new era of media consumption, have the pundits overreached?

I’m calling the peak of inflated expectations now. Get ready for the next phase of the hype cycle – the trough of disillusionment.

The Secret Life of Shepperton — A photo essay on Shepperton, the suburban town south west of London where author J. G. Ballard spent most of his adult life. The photographs are accompanied by text from Ballard’s own novels, autobiography, interviews as well as observations about the town and its history (via 3:AM).

And finally…

The Wonderful 36 Pages features This is Silly! by Toronto-based artist/illustrator Gary Taxali:

* Chronicle Books is distributed in Canada by my employer Raincoast Books.

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