Here are three of my favourite New Zealand picture books that give children a manageable dose of horror. Gavin Bishop’s Horror of Hickory Bay has grown on me over the years. The story of a bland family on a Canterbury beach and an amorphous beast seemed a bit coarse to me 25 years ago, but now I love the earthy monster (which has a new force in quakey times). Diane Hebley said it best:

I find this book fascinating for its masterly use of colour and design, its grim humour, its coherence of idea, text and image, and for its acceptance of the dreamworld reality.

The Were-Nana by Melinda Szymanik is a creepy delight about a visiting relative who might just be a monster. The suspense is nicely built up and the double surprise ending (true to horror traditions) is brilliant. Odd cover choice but fine shadowy illustrations by Sarah Nelisiwe Anderson.

Te Kapo the Taniwha by Queen Rikihana-Hyland is out of print but was always popular in class. It’s the story of a half-man, half-monster who was given the job of shaping the South Island. Zac Waipara’s pictures are stunning as usual.

More than any other book I read as a child, The Phantom Tollbooth (1961) by Norton Juster  gave me a love of words– it puns them, pushes them, and explodes their meaning. It’s overflowing with inventiveness: the man who is short, tall, thin and fat, at the same time; the orchestra that plays colours; the city that disappears because nobody cares. And I love the illustrations by Jules Feiffer, especially this faceless timewaster (pictured), The Trivium, who has a message for all writers:

What could be more important than doing unimportant things? … There’s always something to do to keep you from what you really should be doing.

The Phantom Tollbooth is about a child’s quest to overcome boredom. It’s told with imagination, wit and wisdom — what more could you want in a children’s book?

•  New Yorker essay about the book
• Vintage covers
• Video interview with the author
• My Accidental Masterpiece by Norton Juster

 I had been an odd child: quiet, introverted and moody. Little was expected from me. Everyone left me alone to wander around inside my own head. When I grew up I still felt like that puzzled kid — my thoughts focused on him, and I began writing about his childhood.

Children are still the same as they’ve always been. They still get bored and confused, and still struggle to figure out the important questions of life. – Norton Juster

Choosing a title is the fun stage of writing a book. The hard work over, I spend hours happily test-driving pithy, bizarre or lyrical titles. The great children’s titles describe some aspect of the book (plot, setting, character, etc) in utterly striking language. My favourites titles are: A Swiftly Tilting Planet; The Stupid’s Die; and of my own, a book of cautionary rhymes titled, Global Norman. Here are some classic titles of children’s literature:

* Character: Oliver Twist, Shrek, The Halfmen of O, Hairy Maclary from Donaldson’s Dairy, Flat Stanley

* Plot: Millions of Cats,  Journey To The Centre of the Earth, The Shrinking of Treehorn

*Setting:  Outside Over There, The Horror of Hickory Bay, The Black Island

*Theme: To Kill A Mockingbird, Something Wicked This Way Comes, Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry

* Joke: War and Peas, Squids Will Be Squids, Green Eggs and Ham

The Little Prince (1943) by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry is a superb fable about a pilot who crashes in the desert and meets a wise child. It’s one of the world’s most translated books (in 250 languages) and the top selling French book. It also has perhaps the most intriguing sentence in all children’s literature:

What is essential is invisible to the eyes. (L’essential est invisble pour les yeux.)

What is ‘essential’? Is it Truth, Love, God, or Uncertainty? These are the sort of questions the story evokes over and over. The opening chapter about following your dreams is brilliant. Saint-Exupéry was a pilot who also wrote great adventure books (eg. Wind, Sand and Stars ). His delicate watercolour illustrations are near perfect too.

The Awful Warning carried to the point where Awe topples over into helpless laughter.– Harvey Darton

Struwwelpeter (Pretty Stories and  Funny Pictures) by Dr Heinrich Hoffman (1845) is a classic of gleefully gruesome cautionary rhymes about naughty children. Hoffman was a psychiatrist who founded an influential Frankfurt asylum and pioneered counselling as an alternative treatment to cold baths (his life was novelized in Clare Dudman’s 98 Reasons for Being). The characters in Struwwelpeter were inspired by his child patients – he’d tell them stories and draw pictures to calm them down. Hoffman was looking for a book for his three year old son and could only find ‘stupid collections of pictures, and moralising stories’, so he created Struwwelpeter. It was one of the first picture books designed purely to please children – before then children’s books were mainly religious or moral lessons with titles such as An Exact Account of the Conversion, Holy Lives and Joyful Deaths of Several Young Children. Read more about ‘shock-headed’ Peter here.

‘The book has long oscillated between being accepted as harmless hilarity and being condemned as excessively horrifying’- Humphrey Carpenter

At last! The original Moomin book has been released in an elegant hardcover English edition for the first time.  Moomins and the Great Flood (1945) is a junior novel that reveals the Moomin’s origins.  Moominmamma and her son leave the world of humans (where they lived behind stoves) and become refugees, seeking their lost beloved, Moominpappa, who has been swept away by a flood. We meet the characters who will populate the later novels: Sniff, the Hemulen, the Antlion and the surreal Hattifatteners, who “did not care about anything except travelling from one strange place to another.” This poignant story was Jansson’s response to the Second World War that had interrupted her painting career. The book has her beautiful atmospheric watercolours.

 Reading this book in the light of the suffering of the Finnish people in 1939 as they were caught up in the turmoil of their Winter War casts a different glow over what is essentially a classic adventure story.– Esther Freud

The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are the work of an obscure Oxford professor whose specialisation was the West Midland dialect of Middle English, and who lived an ordinary suburban life bringing up his children and tending his garden. – Humphrey Carpenter

My holiday reading is Humphrey Carpenter’s wonderful book, J.R.R. Tolkien – A Biography.  The account of his early life is quite moving, and the evolution of his stories is fascinating (as Tolkien said, “Stories tend to get out of hand”). Some quirky influences on his writing include:

• The attack on the toddler Tolkien by a terrifying tarantula in South Africa (1895),
• Tolkien’s language teacher who trained his dog (to lick its lips) with a Gothic command, “smakka bagms”,
• His ‘fellowship’ of young writers at college which is broken by the Great War.
• The vital inspiration of the Kalevala, (Land of Heroes), the mythology of Finland.
• A trip to a ‘nasty little suburban resort’ where he wrote a poem about a slimy cave creature named ‘Glip’ (1922).
• His friendship with C.S.Lewis, on whom he based Treebeard’s ‘hrooming’ voice.

The Hobbits are just rustic English people. – Tolkien

Link to all the Lord of the Rings covers.

Everything in the tales appears to happen by chance – and this has the strange effect of making it appear that nothing happens by chance, that everything is fated. – A. S. Byatt

Two hundred years ago today, the Brothers Grimm published their Household Tales. One of the appeals of the tales is how random events seem connected; as A. S. Byatt says in her excellent essay (online here). They are stories of princesses, simpletons, brothers and sisters who meet with good or bad ‘luck’ on their quest, yet are bound by the rules of the fairy tale world – a kind of guided randomness – usually with a happy ending. Perhaps this is the way children see the world: capricious, sometimes scary, but in the end, a hopeful place. As a child I loved how the characters meet the forces of their fickle, often gruesome world with kindness and cunning. (Illustration  by Arthur Rackham; more Grimm illustrations here).

Fairy tales are more than true; not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten.– G.K. Chesterton

A child that books built, from age five to ten.

Five years old, and terrified, my first day at school. I sat on the hard mat and the teacher read Horton Hatches the Egg by Dr Seuss. I became so engrossed I didn’t notice my mother slip out. Horton the elephant, who suffered so much on his mission, helped me get through that day.

Six years old, and absorbed in Calico the Wonder Horse by Virginia Lee Burton, a cowboy adventure. Gripped by an image of the Stewy Stinker, crying in remorse for his wickedness – aware of my own naughtiness perhaps?

Seven years old, and Tintin was my role model for courage and integrity. His stories ranged across sci-fi, supernatural, humour, history, politics, and war; all in realist comic style.

Eight years old, and The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster opened the world of word-play to me, an addiction that remains today.

Nine years old, and Willard Price books were devoured as pulp adventures with erupting volcanoes, balloon rides and killer anacondas. First inkling I wanted to write books as exciting.

Ten years old, on the ultimate journey with a small hero facing all the forces of evil the universe can muster. The Hobbit kindled my imagination more than any other book. It was, as Tolkien said,

‘an escape to a heightened reality- a world at once more vivid and intense.’

Here’s the 1966 version that I had, with a cover drawing by Tolkien himself (link to all Hobbit covers).

There is great exuberance in the Moomins, and a delightful battyness. – Jeanette Winterson

The Moomin comic strips by Tove Jansson, which ran in many newspapers from the 50s to the 70s, have been reprinted in five magnificent hardback volumes. The comics are a lovely balance of batty humour and optimistic philosophy. The free-spirited Moomins live in the moment and their stories are more relevant than ever, commenting on consumerism, the environment and work ethics.
For example, in The Conscientious Moomins, an officer of the League of Duty admonishes Moominpappa for being a drop-out from society; but when Moominpappa joins the establishment, all the pleasure goes out of life.

“To you life is not even a struggle. You earn no money!”
“We need very little”
“As soon as you earn some you will need it!”

.

Iona and Peter Opie were the Brothers’ Grimm of the 1900s. Their greatest contribution to cultural history was the fabulous book The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren. It’s an epic collection of children’s rhymes, sayings, riddles, superstitions, jeers, tricks and customs – garnered from interviews with over 5000 UK children in the 1950s – passed on through generations, and naturally not intended for adult ears. Today’s children are perhaps not the ‘savage tribe’ they once were but it’s heartening that many of these verses persist in the playground today. Here are some morsels from the Opie’s collection:

Pinch-me, Punch-me, and Steponmytoes,
Went down to the river to swim,
Two of the three were drowned,
Who do you think was saved?

Old Mr Kelly,
Had a pimple on his belly;
His wife cut it off,
It tasted like jelly.

When the war is over Hitler will be dead,
He hopes to go to heaven with a crown upon his head.
But the Lord said, No! You’ll have to go below,
There’s only room for Churchill, so cheery, cheery oh.

Same to you with knobs on,
Cabbages with clogs on,
Elephants with slippers on,
And you with dirty knickers on.

God made the bees
The bees make the honey;
We do the work,
The teacher gets the money.

Scab and matter custard,
Green snot pies,
Dead dog’s giblets
Dead cat’s eyes.
Hard boiled snails, Spread it thick
Wash it down with a cup of cold sick.

Can you keep a secret?
I don’t suppose you can.
You mustn’t laugh or giggle
While I tickle your hand.

It’s Banned Book Week. Read some classic banned children’s books, such as  Alice in Wonderland (was banned in China for ‘humanizing animals’); The Diary of Anne Frank (was banned in Lebanon for portraying Jews ‘favourably’); or the delightful The Rabbit’s Wedding by Garth Williams about a black and white romance (was banned in Alabama).  Shel Silverstein‘s poems were often the target of censors (who considered them ‘anti-family’). I love his gently subversive collection A Light in the Attic, which includes a poem about a critical spirit, ‘Almost Perfect’, and my favourite, ‘With His Mouth Full of Food’:

Milford Dupree, though he knew it was rude,

Talked with his mouth full of food.

He never would burp or walk out of in the nude,

But he talked with his mouth full of food…

Books are sensory objects. They have a pleasing look, a comforting smell, a grainy feeling, a reassuring weight. The best-loved ones are battered, dog-eared, coffee-stained, signed by the author, and they create beautiful bookshelves. You can lend a book, read it and shove it anywhere, hide treasures in it.  A book carries your memories with it, locked into countless brain networks by all those senses and ideas you had when reading it. Why do you love your books?

“If you take a book with you on a journey,…an odd thing happens: The book begins collecting your memories. And forever after you have only to open that book to be back where you first read it. It will all come into your mind with the very first words: the sights you saw in that place, what it smelled like, the ice cream you ate while you were reading it…yes, books are like flypaper–memories cling to the printed page better than anything else.” ― Cornelia Funke, Inkheart

I still wonder if books will survive a long time because there’s nothing as convenient, nothing else that entertains and informs us in so “human” a manner. A book works at my speed, comfortable and slow, faster when I want it to be, then slow again. Many of my books are old friends. A world of chaos is a high possibility, given the human urge to dominate others, but our need for story, for understanding ourselves through story, our history through story, for entertaining ourselves with story is a constant.– Jack Lasenby (Read the full interview here).

Books will have to earn their keep – and so will bookshops. Books will have to become more desirable: not luxury goods, but well-designed, attractive, making us want to pick them up, buy them, give them as presents, keep them, think about rereading them, and remember in later years that this was the edition in which we first encountered what lay inside… When you read a great book, you don’t escape from life, you plunge deeper into it. Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic. And for this serious task of imaginative discovery and self-discovery, there is and remains one perfect symbol: the printed book.– Julian Barnes

1. Have lots of books available.
Access to books is the key to a child’s reading ability – children living in homes with books stay at school 3 years longer than those without. Children need books.

2. Read aloud.

• start a book together and let the child finish it,
•  read to a pet,
•  have a family readathon.

The amount of time the child spends listening to parents and other loved ones read continues to be one of the best predictors of later reading.-Maryanne Wolf

3. Find the best books.
Use guides such as The Reading Bug by Paul Jennings, or reviewers’ best books lists.
Few children can resist books such as

• Millions of Cats by Wanda G’ag,
• Who Sank the Boat by Pamela Allen,
• Shrek by William Steig,
• Moomin books by Tove Jansson,
• The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster.

4. Match books to children’s interests.
Whatever they want to read – comic books, science, or ghosts – they probably need it. Librarians love to help you find the right book.

You need a top story. You need a subject that interests a child. And you need something that they can read. – Paul Jennings

5. Interact with books.

• write to the author,
•  dress up as characters,
•  create book artwork,
•  write a book,
•  use e-readers and movie versions.

It’s really, really heartbreaking. But for some reason you want to read it again and again. It’s an extraordinary love story. It really is exquisitely written.– Michael Morpurgo

Every Sunday morning as a child  I’d listen to Oscar Wilde’s Happy Prince (1888) on the radio and cry into my pillow (so my brother in the next room wouldn’t hear). I suspect the story shaped my attitude to justice and God. I didn’t understand half of it then but the message about compassion got through. Today, I see it’s also a love story between two needy characters (a guilty Prince and a self-absorbed bird) and I like Wilde’s digs at authority figures and subtle commentary on happiness. Here’s the wistful old radio version read by Robert Morley. Still makes me cry.

Some of my favourite lines:

The living always think that gold can make them happy.
Death is the brother of sleep, is he not?
Bring me the two most precious things in the city.

Perhaps it is only in childhood that books have any deep influence on our lives. – Graham Greene

In a world that offers children so many digital delights, why bother with books?

1. Books help children understand the world

Books expose children to new ideas and help to shape their view of the world. Reading is a meeting of minds.

While reading, we can leave our own consciousness, and pass over into the consciousness of another person, another age, another culture – Maryanne Wolf

2. Books help children understand themselves

Children ask (subconsciously) ‘Who am I? Why am I feeling this?’ Stories give a frame of reference by which they can measure their experiences.

3. Books develop children’s imagination

Reading is imagination and imagination is a powerful thing. Imagination also enriches the real world.

Children do not despise real woods because they have read of enchanted woods; the reading makes all woods a little enchanted.–C.S. Lewis

4. Books develop children’s brains

Books boost a child’s intellectual development, especially language. The brain changes when children learn to read: it creates new neural pathways which are the basis for innovative thinking. Reading and thinking enhance each other.

5. Books are enjoyable.

Ultimately a child must want to read. The child who reads for pleasure is forming a wonderful habit – and there’s also pleasure for parents in reading aloud.

White wrote only three children’s books and two are the most popular of all time in the US (Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little). What was his secret? Imagination, yes, but he also took his time and revised a lot. Charlotte is short but it took two years to write the first draft, then another year to rewrite it. It has the best opening line of any children’s book I’ve read (“Where’s Papa going with that axe?”); and perhaps the greatest, most heart-rending ending. (And those rustic Garth Williams illustrations).

It has taken 25 years for me to be able to contemplate this book with relative equanimity. I see now that the ending is as beautiful, bold and full of integrity as Charlotte herself.– Lucy Mangan

In a fine interview (Paris Review) White puts a delightful spin on writers’ procrastination :

Delay is natural to a writer. He is like a surfer—he bides his time, waits for the perfect wave on which to ride in. He waits for the surge (of emotion? of strength? of courage?) that will carry him along. I am apt to let something simmer for a while in my mind before trying to put it into words. I walk around, straightening pictures on the wall, rugs on the floor—as though not until everything in the world was lined up and perfectly true could anybody reasonably expect me to set a word down on paper.

Hergé was a master of evoking atmosphere. Think of the house of Professor Tarragon in The Seven Crystal Balls: the building of the storm, the heat leading to the burst tyre, the gust of wind as depicted by a slender tree against a slate grey sky, the sinister Rascar Capac mummy in his cabinet, the ball lightning, Tintin’s nightmare – such a feeling of supernatural dread evoked by a confluence of natural events … Despite the cinematic quality of Hergé’s stories, Tintin’s true home is in the comic book medium. He occupies a space at a perfect level of abstraction, real enough to evoke our world, pared back enough to activate the imagination. – Hugh Todd

Read the rest of the interview here.

Never open a book with weather.– Elmore Leonard

The best openings begin with a character and take the reader captive almost immediately. My examples come from children’s books, the very best being the opening of Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White which deftly introduces character, setting, and tension to grab the imagination.

“Where’s Papa going with that axe?’ said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.

“Out to the hoghouse…”

Test Yourself

Match these classic opening sentences with the titles below.

1. All children, except one, grow up.

2. There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.

3.The Iron Man came to the top of the cliff.

4. Here I am, Ralph William Mountfield, banished to my bedroom on Christmas Day.

5. Keith the boy in the rumpled shorts and shirt, did not know he was being watched as he entered Room 215 of the Mountain View Inn.

6. My father is put in the stocks again! Oh! the injustice of it!

7. When Old Tip lost his bark, Uncle Trev had to teach his horse to bark and chase the cows up to the shed for milking.

8. It’s a funny thing about mothers and fathers. Even when their own child is the most disgusting little blister you could ever imagine, they still think that he or she is wonderful.

Titles: The Iron Man, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, The Mouse and the Motorcycle, Devil-in-the-Fog, Matilda, The More the Merrier, Uncle Trev, Peter Pan

Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on … that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.– Kurt Vonnegut

Everything in the tales appears to happen by chance – and this has the strange effect of making it appear that nothing happens by chance, that everything is fated. – A. S. Byatt

One of the appeals of the 200 year old tales of the Brothers’ Grimm is how random events seem connected; as A. S. Byatt says in her excellent essay (online here). They are stories of generic princesses, simpletons, brothers and sisters who meet with good or bad ‘luck’ on their quest, yet are bound by the rules of the fairy tale world – a kind of guided randomness – usually with a happy ending. Perhaps this is the way children see the world: capricious, sometimes scary, but in the end, a hopeful place. As a child I loved how the characters meet the forces of their fickle, often gruesome world with kindness and cunning. A favourite was Clever Gretel and the ‘juicy shickens’ – as a child I’d listen to Danny Kaye’s brilliant reading every Sunday morning on the radio. (Illustration  by Arthur Rackham; more Grimm illustrations here).

Fairy tales are more than true; not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten.– G.K. Chesterton

Comics were banned in occupied France but Edmond-François Calvo secretly produced a powerful satirical comic that became a French icon after the Germans scuttled in 1944. It’s the story of the bloody European war but told with Disney-style animal characters: the French as rabbits; British bulldogs; and German wolves (Goebbels a weasel, Himmler a skunk). La Bete Est Morte! was a forerunner of the  graphic novel, Maus, with its Nazi cats and Jewish mice. Here’s an extract:
My dear little children, never forget this: these Wolves who perpetrated these horrors were ordinary Wolves … They were not in the heat of battle excited by the smell of powder. They were not tormented by hunger. They did not have to defend themselves, nor to take vengeance for a victim of their own. They had simply received the order to kill.

That touch of reality in a child’s life is a child’s comfort. The child gets the sense that this person who wrote this book knows about me and knows the world can be a troubling, incomprehensible place. Maurice Sendak

One of the world’s most treasured children’s book creators, Maurice Sendak, has died, aged 83 years. For me, his picture book Outside Over There is the essence of Sendak – haunting, comforting, uncompromising –  nobody else combined the real and the unreal so brilliantly. In a rare interview, Maurice Sendak talked about how his stories reflect ‘childhood as a very passionate, upsetting, silly, comic business’.  Outside Over There is a  tale of separation and siblings that features a creepy ice baby (pictured). Sendak’s books can also be exuberant (In the Night Kitchen) and even spiritual (Dear Mili). On teaching writing Sendak said:

I stress character, character, character. And for authors to go where you want; go where you will. Children will go everywhere.

Max and Moritz (1865) by William Busch is one of the first ever comic books. The boys create mayhem with violent booby-traps that torment animals and authority figures; but they are finally, justly, eaten by ducks. The exaggerated wickness follows the style of Shock-headed Peter (1845).

Through the chimney now, with pleasure

They behold the tempting treasure.

Busch was the first comic artist to use motion lines to show rapid movements, such as his eye-popping piano virtuoso playing furioso:

Quadratino (1911) or ‘Square Head’, is an Italian comic strip by Antonio Rubino. In each story, Quadratino’s mischief is punished by an ‘accident’ in which his head is squeezed into a new geometric shape – he rolls downstairs and it becomes a circle; a biscuit tin squashes it into a rectangle – and Mother Geometry must ‘redraw’ his square.  Maths has never been such fun! According to the essential guide 1001 Comics You Must Read Before You Die Quadratino is “the best conceptual homage to comics” (he’s a living comic strip frame). I love his cat too:

Alice Walker’s picture book Why War Is Never a Good Idea begins with the bright, comforting colours of a book for young children, but as War devastates the land the images become grim. It’s a scary message and parents will judge when their children are ready for it. The illustrations by Stefano Vitale are evocative and Walker’s words are true:

Though War is old

It has not become wise.

Though War has a mind of its own

War never knows who it is going to hit.

Walker comments: ‘War attacks not just people, “the other,” or “enemy,” it attacks Life itself: everything that humans and other species hold sacred and dear … It doesn’t matter what the politics are, because though politics might divide us, the air and the water do not … Our only hope of maintaining a livable planet lies in teaching our children to honor nonviolence, especially when it comes to caring for Nature, which keeps us going with such grace and faithfulness.’

The classic Ferdinand by Munro Leaf (1936) remains one of the most influential children’s books (it’s never gone out of print) because of its simple but powerful theme. The tale of a bull who likes to smell flowers instead of fighting was seen as a pacifist text at the time of the Spanish Civil War. Ferdinand is an outsider; a free-thinker who bravely chooses to do what he loves instead of following the crowd.

No wonder the book was

• banned by Franco
• burned by Hitler
• used by Stalin to name a gun
• a favourite of Gandhi
• made into an Oscar-winning movie by Disney

In contrast, Munro Leaf also wrote books which reflected the strict child-raising style of the time. His 3 and 30 Watchbirds (1941) condemns behaviours such as shoe-scuffing, primping, mumbling, moaning, fidgeting, sassing and wasting food. Some of it is in the spirit of war-time frugality but some Watchbirds are a bit extreme:

Grammar Can Be Fun is slightly more tongue-in-cheek and warns children against slack language such as “gimme, wanna, gonna, and ain’t”.

I’m to become a grandfather this year (!) and I can’t wait to provide lots of lovely books. The best picture books are a marriage of text and illustration: they should both support and spark off each other. The plot should be focused for very young children and the pictures oddly comforting.  I Went Walking by Sue Williams is a perfect first book. The words are  extremely basic yet they incorporate repetition, questions, rhymes and humour. And the illustrations by Julie Vivas are sublime; leading the eye across the page in a dance of line, shape and colour. (See her gorgeous version of the Nativity too). 

Max’s Bath by Barbro Lindgren is another delightful book for preschoolers. Max dumps his toys and his food in the tub and then tries to bath the dog with predictable results. Max is a classic ‘terrible two year old’ combining the utmost charm and mischief.

The picture book Seasons by French artist Blexbolex is a unique, meditative book for young children that adults will relish for it’s design. It’s a tactile treat, printed in chunky hardback on rough paper, like the old comic annuals. Each page has a single word and a subtle image to illustrate it. No garish colours here, just the quiet passing of seasons.

Imagine a world where instead of weapons of mass destruction, governments made weapons of mass instruction. Instead of spending $1.5 trillion a year on lethal weapons they could spend it on books. Here’s a better invasion strategy: Literacy Drones fly over villages and identify those without libraries; vehicles called Book Tanks (photo) move in to give away books to children; finally Seuss Troops visit schools to read aloud to them. Delivering books instead of bullets to children is a more effective way of fighting terror and raising living standards. Artist Raul Lemesoff already has a prototype Book Tank delivering free books all over Argentina, including to rural areas where there are few schools. Read about him in English or visit his Spanish website.

After reading Wolfram’s dramatic story I discovered his daughter’s wonderful art. Alexandra Milton is an animal artist and children’s book illustrator. She creates her creatures by collage, using hand-made papers with mysterious names: Korean mingeishi, Thai silk thread, Himalayan khadi, and Payhembury marbled paper. Her honey bee illustration below is warm and characterful (like bees).

I aim to celebrate all that is to be marvelled at in nature; to catch, in colour and form, a glimpse of the miracle of creation Alexandra Milton

Following up on my review of Hugo, here’s an excellent interview with the author Brian Selznick. The article describes Hugo as ‘a perpetual motion of correspondence‘ between book and film. Fascinating too that The Artist has emerged just now as another gorgeous recreation of silent movies (no talking, no colour, no widescreen, and yes, it works!). My favourite silent movies? Metropolis (photo), and anything with Buster Keaton. Read a New Yorker article about the acting style in silent films.

Silent film is another country. They speak another language there—a language of gestures, stares, flapping mouths, halting or skittering walks, and sometimes movements and expressions of infinite intricacy and beauty. David Denby