Attic Door Loves Picture Books: A First Installment

The mid-year holidays have inspired in me not only an appreciation of the fine work of Oliver Jeffers, but of picture books in general...
Here are just a few of my personal picture book keepsakes...

Little Beauty by Anthony Browne

Walker Books are renowned for their beautiful and timeless children's classics, and Little Beauty by Anthony Browne is no exception. Playing on the familiar favourite of Beauty and the Beast, it tells the story of a "very special gorilla who had been taught to use a sign language." But in spite of having everything a primate could ask for (or so a zoo-keeper would assume),  the gorilla grows increasingly sad and one day signs to his keepers that what he wants most in the world is a friend. And so they give him "a little friend called Beauty, with instructions not to eat her. "But the gorilla loved Beauty," we are told, as the big gorilla holds the tiny, grey kitten in the palm of his hand.  He cares for his kitten and dear friend, and the pair are happy, doing "everything together." But one night, after watching King Kong, the gorilla becomes "more and more upset... and then very ANGRY," breaking the television. Rushing in to see what all the fuss is about, the keepers find a broken television and threaten to take Beauty away... Until the kitten begins to sign, "It was ME! I broke the television!" and shows off a rather respectable set of biceps. At this, everyone bursts into laughter, and, of course, the book ends as all good endings do with "Beauty and the gorilla liv[ing] happily ever after." 

A touching tale paired with a frankly gob-smacking attention to detail in Browne's artwork, this picture book is a treasure and must-have for any family bookshelf. 

The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean

A huge fan of Neil Gaiman and his professional partnership with illustrator, Dave McKean, this picture book is sheer genius and a bowl of mirth for the entire family. Inspired by Gaiman's young son who, when pestered by his father's request to get ready for bed (or "one of those things that parents say"), responded by saying that he wished he had a goldfish instead of a dad.  In similar fashion, the book follows the swapping trail that ensues when a boy does just this, swapping his dad for a goldfish. Tattled on by a bothersome sister whose neck he is fond of "putting mud down," the boy's mother sends him to retrieve his father. Things get complicated, however, when his friend Nathan has already swapped the dad for an electric guitar, "a big white one." A gorilla mask, and a bunny named Galveston later, the boy and his sister arrive at Patti's house to find the father in a rabbit hutch still reading his newspaper and "eating a carrot." Admitting that the dad made a very poor pet rabbit, Patti is only too delighted to have Galveston returned. Walking back home with dad in tow, the sister turns to the boy and says, "You like her ... I can tell." To which her brother replies, "If you do, I'll tell everyone at school that you're secretly fat."
Remembering the days when my mother raged at the swaps of my own youth (a family-heirloom broach for an ice-cream container of silkworms, for instance), Gaiman's understanding of the world of children is spot-on, while McKean's signature use of photo images, ink and scraps compliments this in the perfect match.

(Sign on at Lovereading4kids to see an extract.)

Olivia Saves the Circus by Ian Falconer 

I challenge anyone not to be charmed by Olivia-the-piglet in black-and-white who is very partial to the colour red. And Olivia Saves the Circus is one of her finest moments. Today is show-and-tell day, and Olivia "always blossoms in front of an audience." Her show-and-tell a story about going to the circus, Olivia begins by informing her audience that "all the circus people were off sick with ear infections." While lesser-piglets might have been disappointed, Olivia "luckily [knows] how to do everything."  Covering her body in marker pen pictures, she transforms into "Olivia the Tattooed Lady," and with a single wardrobe change, "Olivia the Lion Tamer." And before the day at the circus is done, Olivia has walked a tight rope, ridden a unicycle, donned a clown nose, balanced on stilts, juggled, flown through the air on a trapeze, been "Queen of the Trampoline," and in a final blazing stroke of brilliance embraced the role of "Madame Olivia and her Trained Dogs" (for dogs who "weren't very trained" in her opinion), thus saving the circus. "Then one time my dad took me sailing The End." Her teacher, grown suspicious, asks if all of this is true. "Quite true," she tells him. "All true?" "Quite all true?" Well, to "the best of her recollection," the teacher rolling his piggy eyes and turning them heavenwards. Later that evening, her mother tells her to go to bed and "no jumping." "Okay, Mummy," the piglet promises. But as all children (piglet or not) are wont to do, her mom finds her moments later jumping on the bed. "Now, Olivia, I said, 'No jumping'. Who do you think you are - Olivia, Queen of the Trampoline?" 

The whimsical style of Ian Falconer, artfully rendered in black, white and red, has the timeless appeal of Babar and Pooh and a bear delivered to Paddington Station, and Olivia's tall tales will worm their way into yours and your children's hearts with the ease of a circus-performer, of this much I'm sure.

Not a Box by Antoinette Portis

In the same vein as Olivia and her marvellously tall tales, Portis' Not a Box likewise captures the proclivity of the child's mind for imaginative stretches. When the story's bunny is asked, "Why are you sitting a box?" the response is naturally, "It's not a box" (while the picture of a rabbit in a box drawn plainly in black pen is embellished by a race-car in red). When asked, "What are you doing on top of that box?" the red pen boasts a mountain top while the flag waves triumphantly, "Rabbit Peak." And so the questions ensue, with the bunny's increasing frustration in having to reiterate that it is not a box! The final question posed is, "Well, what is it then?" Thinking long and hard, the bunny eventually declares, "It's my Not-a-Box!" and launches off in a space rocket (not a box!).
Reminiscent, both visually and in theme, to Antoine de Saint Exupery's The Little Prince, this is a picture book that will open doors for grown-ups and free boxes from a boring fate the world over.

(Click here to read an interview with the author on her book, Not a Box, and the role of imagination.)

Once there was a boy, and a bear, a penguin, and a heart in a bottle - A Blog in Two Parts on the Incredible Book-Making Oliver Jeffers

Part 2

I am inherently a fan of things by nature... 

Once I discover a favourite illustrator/author/musician/you-name-it, it doesn't take me long to accumulate their work, at times a little over zealously too... And after The Incredible Book Eating Boy, I was an over-night and understandably zealous Oliver Jeffers fan. It seemed little coincidence then when the fourth and, at the time, newest title by Jeffers presented itself to me in the children' section of Fogarty's Bookshop less than a week later. It was The Great Paper Caper, "a thrilling tale of suspense, crime, alibis, paper planes, a forest and a bear who wanted to win at all costs!" the blurb bragged. I called it kismet.

     

Beginning as a story about a forest that is mysteriously losing its trees in the dead of night, it ultimately becomes a story about changing worlds, old traditions, and a bear who wants to uphold the family name in the 112th Biennial Paper Airplane Competition next Saturday at 2p.m. In Jeffers' typically heart-warming but unique fashion, it takes a beaver, deer, duck, pig, anxious-looking owl and one curly-haired boy to help the bear achieve his dream while ensuring that the trees are unharmed in the process. Gathering up all of the bear's old, discarded paper planes, they send him soaring over the finish line in one great big recycled one instead. Cut to the book's end, or "fin," and our paper airplane champion is watering a freshly-sprung sapling.

Whether it is a little boy who loves stars so much that he wants his very own to "play hide-and-go-seek" or "take long walks" with, or the little boy who one day finds "a penguin at his door," or the boy who runs "out of petrol" and gets "stuck on the moon," Jeffers' stories always begin within that magical framework of the child's mind, where anything is possible and nothing extraordinary too out of the ordinary. However, it is where he takes them that really demonstrates a true appreciation of the nuanced child. 

When asked as to the moral of The Great Paper Caper, the author replies, "Don't chop down trees to make paper planes and then get caught doing it... Or if you see a bear, report it." And yet, there is a great deal more to the story, of friendship, and the inheritance of damaging traditions, of community, and of the importance of fun and dreams. But as the author knows, these are not things that need to be spelt out to the child in a heavily moralistic, finger-pointing tone. Rather, they are issues of subtlety that the intuitive child is more than capable of figuring out in each of his picture book's own mystery. And readers, old and young alike, will be rewarded by this process of investigation in his endings.

   

In How to Catch a Star, our little boy eventually resigns from his fervent pursuit of the star, and waits on the beach shore, hoping that the star reflected in the ocean's surface might wash-up. It does, and as the adult will guess (and perhaps child too), in the form of a starfish, nevertheless the boy's very own star.

(It reminded this slightly older girl of her younger days, of a similar love of starfish and mermaid's purses and pumpkin shells that might turn into carriages drawn by a band of seahorse, of hours spent combing the sandy beaches for these immeasurable rarities.)

      

Meanwhile, in Lost and Found, our protagonist learns that the penguin at his front-door did not look sad because it was lost. After he has made it all the way to the South Pole and back again, the boy realises that the penguin was sad because he was "lonely." Without a moment's hesitancy, our enterprising protagonist undertakes yet another journey, a return-journey to find his friend...

And "so the boy and his friend [go] home together, talking of wonderful things all the way."  

      

And in The Way Back Home, the boy stranded on the moon is not as alone as he at first thinks, but is in fact joined by an equally stranded Martian whose spaceship has a broken engine. Forming an unlikely pair, each conspires to help the other get back home. So doing, they discover the similarities in their otherwise striking differences.And although they are forced to part and each go their own way, on the final page readers are greeted by a knock at the door and the postman, delivering an intergalactic walkie-talkie to the boy back home.

It stands to reason then that a man like Jeffers has kept something of his own little boy (describing himself as he does, as a man who "makes art as well as books and has climbed more than one large tree in his time"). Kids of many ages (and more adults than you'd think) are known to *lomp about sometimes, yelling for whoever cares to hear, 'You just don't get it!' Well, Jeffers gets it, of that there is no doubt.

How to Catch a Star, Lost and Found, and The Way Back Home currently 
available in this little gem of a boxset, Once There Was A Boy ...

But as touched as I have been by all of Jeffers books, and by the predominant child-like stylization of his characters, in their charming watercolour palettes, none have quite hit the spot like his most recent addition, The Heart and the Bottle.

"Once there was a girl whose life was filled 

with all the wonder of the world around her. 

Then one day something occurred that caused the girl 

to take her heart and put it in a safe place. 

However, after that it seemed that more things were empty 

 than before. Would she know how to get her heart back?"

So having read the blurb, the reader turns to the first page and is again told that "[o]nce there was a girl, much like any other, whose head was filled with all the curiosities of the world" and "thoughts of the stars"... But always with the comforting presence of her grandfather (or father, or uncle) to reassure her, from reading aloud to her on the subjects of botany, the whale and the universe in one scene, to pointing out constellations in a midnight sky in another, and flying a red kite on the sea shore while the little girl combs the beach for new discoveries. 

 And our little girl takes "delight in finding new things..." Until, that is, "the day she [finds] an empty chair." 

"Feeling unsure," the girl resolves that the "best thing to do" would be to "put her heart in a safe place," "[j]ust for the time being." And putting her heart neatly away in a bottle and hanging it round her neck, everything seems momentarily "fix[ed] ... at first." 

"Although in truth, nothing was the same." 

With her heart encased in glass, the little girl - slowly growing up as the story progresses - begins to forget about the stars, and ceases "taking notice of the sea." "[N]o longer filled with the curiosities of the world," the only thing she does notice is how "heavy" and "awkward" the bottle has become around her neck. "But," she comforts herself," "at least her heart [is] safe." 

However, the reader knows otherwise, when the scene depicted here is one of the girl grown now into a young woman, eating alone, washing her solitary dish alone, while the heart in a bottle continues to hang heavily.

But there is hope for our now young woman yet, when walking down the length of the beach one day, she comes upon a little girl building sandcastles and talking of elephants in the sea. In fact, it "might never have occurred to the girl what to do had she not met someone smaller and still curious about world," and she remembers "a time when [she] would have known how to answer" the awe-struck questions of this little girl. Sadly, "not now." 

"Not without a heart."

"And it was right at that moment she decided to get it back out of the bottle. 

But didn't know how. She couldn't remember." 

A pair of pliers, a hammer and a tool-bench equipped with saw, drill, mullet and axe, and still "nothing seemed to work." The bottle simply won't be broken.

Bouncing off, and rolling "right down to the sea" instead, it occurs to that "someone smaller and still curious about the world that she might know a way." And with a single, effortless motion, the "someone smaller" has reached into the bottle and retrieved the now young woman's heart. 

(Here again the reader is rewarded by Jeffers' delicious details, in that the girl's initial sandcastle of little more than a few upturned buckets, has become a two-tiered castle with both bridge and turret, a small yellow bucket and blue spade sitting modestly in the sand behind it.)

Having had her heart returned to her, it is now time for the young woman to face her loss.

Standing with her hands on her hips, she reproachfully regards the empty chair,and literally-manifested seat of her hurt, the chair that first made her put her heart in a bottle. And how does our protagonist meet the challenge of the empty chair?

Well, she fills it, of course. Turning over the page, the reader learns that while the bottle may be empty, the chair is no longer so... And in it, the girl sits happily reading from one book while a tower of books builds next to her, filling her head once again with all the curiosities of the world around her, with sandcastles and sea-elephants.

The entire book speaking as it were, in metaphor, what Jeffers has captured in this heart in a bottle hung around a neck, is so succinct in capturing that simultaneous feeling of the weightiness and emptiness of loss. Beautifully aimed at an audience not yet discouraged by the notion of a thing being far-fetched, the metaphorical becomes brilliantly literal and the literal, pictorial renderings totally unforgettable.

Perhaps close to my own heart because I was similarly taken to a library brimming with the all the curiosities of the world, after which a grandfather would sit me snugly, while reading The Mrs Pepperpots Omnibus aloud. I have not yet suffered any such loss as the little-girl-grown-older in our story... 

But I imagine that if I were to, The Heart and the Bottle by Oliver Jeffers might just be the literal way of reaching into a glass case and finding the heart.

(*a kind of lumpy, stomping motion)

Avid readers of Oliver Jeffers can eagerly anticipate 
the nail-biter of a sequel to Jeffers' Lost and Found, 

in the up-and-coming Up and Down.

Once there was a boy, and a bear, a penguin, and a heart in a bottle - A Blog in Two Parts on the Incredible Book-Making Oliver Jeffers

Part 1

Once there was a girl who, trawling as she liked to do ofttimes for little treasures in her favourite bookshop, found in a pair of hands a very special treasure indeed: Oliver Jeffers Presents The Incredible Book Eating Boy...  A declaration of circus proportions in bold, star-marked letters...


"Henry loved books.

But not like you and I love books,no."

No?

Piquing curiosity, a turn of the page...

"Henry loved to EAT books.

It all began quite by mistake one afternoon when he wasn't paying attention.

He wasn't sure at first, and tried eating a single word, just to test.

Next he tried a whole sentence and then the whole page.

Yes, Henry definitely liked them.

By Wednesday, he had eaten a WHOLE book.

And by the end of the month he could eat a whole book in one go."

So begins the fascinating story of Henry, who loved all books, or more specifically eating all books. And as far as book-eaters go, Henry is entirely non-discriminatory in his book tastes...From "storybooks," to "dictionaries," "joke books," and "even maths books," he eats them all - although, admittedly, the "red ones [are] his favourite."

Furthermore, Henry is thrilled to discover he is becoming smarter in the process.

It is after eating "a book about goldfish," that Henry is able to know what to feed his aquatic playmate, Ginger. Shortly after which he finds himself doing his "father's crossword in the newspaper."

A prize of a book from the onset, The Incredible Book Eating Boy is accompanied by illustrations equally quirky and charming enough to share in Jeffers' original tale. In fact, I suspect most readers will find it difficult to imagine one without the other.  It's this quality, I feel, that makes the memorable picture book: words and story and illustrations merging in such a way as to constantly surprise and delight the reader.  And Jeffers, both as artist and storyteller, is nothing short of surprising and delightful.

Henry's new-found adeptness at crosswords goes cheek by jowl with a picture of the dad (a balding man with square glasses, staring perplexedly at the paper open before him), as the young boy at his side triumphantly calls out "MONUMENTAL". Later, the book-eating boy reaches great heights as he surpasses even his own teacher, a bemused though attentive blonde - kitted out like the dad in square glasses, the really smart kind.  Turned to face the blackboard, the teacher is perched at her desk while Henry demonstrates by sketching out the formula for a rocket to make its journey to the moon in white chalk. Meanwhile, as if to explain away the phenomenon, a diagram-style drawing demonstrates Henry eating a large orange book entitled Rodney's Great Adventure and Other Chicken Stories, as "A: Book goes in; B: Information goes to brain [Brain getting BIGGER]; C: Belly gets FULL." An artfully-wrought 'win win'. 

Mmm... Too good to be true, or downright unlikely, the reader begins to suspect...

Most readers have come to learn, in books as in life, there can be no actions without consequence and surely, in this, book-eating is no different.

And while Henry becomes so "incredible" at book-eating as to swallow books not only "whole" but "three or four at a time," suspicions are confirmed when things suddenly start to go "very, very wrong."

Chased screaming through his dreams by the terrifying A-Z of Monsters, its gaping jaws wide open, a daytime Henry finds he is unable to munch a copy of Best Quiche 1972 - nor any other book for that matter! - without being turned "greenest" and forced to perform "an Irish word for ejecting the contents of your stomach", that is, "boke."  But the worst is yet to come as all the knowledge Henry has accumulated is bungled up inside. Unable to digest his books properly any longer, streams of nonsensical words spew from Henry's mouth making it "quite embarrassing for him to speak" and maths equations result dismally in "2+6 = elephants."

Advised against it by his father, physician, fines-tallying librarian and the A-Z Book of Monsters alike, Henry resigns from the business of book-eating, dismally disappointed. However, it does not take our young protagonist long to pick a slightly nibbled text up off  the bedroom floor and do the unthinkable...
"[A]fter a while, and almost by accident," our Henry begins "to read," finding much to his astonishment that he love[s] to read" and "that he might still become the smartest person on Earth" after all...

And seldom without a sly sense of humour, Jeffers ensures that the back-cover of the book is missing a chunk in one corner, a tip-off to readers that occasionally, just once in a while, Henry falls back on old habits; Ginger meanwhile sagely advises on the same coverpage the "DISCLAIMER: DO NOT EAT THIS BOOK AT HOME."

Beginning with Anthony Browne's Little Beauty a few weeks prior, I think it was Oliver Jeffers' story of a book-eating boy that really confirmed my love of (and return to) picture books.

And I will proudly tell anyone this, as I sit here ever-so-unassuming at my laptop: twenty-six and, to the best of my knowledge, only slightly niggled* by the desire to have any children of my own  (or at the very least in this millennium, and yes, for those uncertain, that would make me near-on immortal). Honestly, this picture book is the sort of tribute to books and the art of storytelling that takes one defiant step for little readers and one boisterous leap right over Ageism.

Throughout the picture book, Jeffers cleverly juxtaposes typewriter font with hand-script, while in his employment of collage in illustration, graph paper, worn-out dictionary pages (marked "intemperance" at the top), and that familiar blue-lined A4 foolscap serve as 'backdrops' to Henry's (mis)adventures and ultimate success.

This way, the very young are impressed by the intriguing texture, while the slightly older will more fully relate to the medium using, as it does, tokens from their everyday school-day experiences. And as for me, the old, old who wears her trousers rolled, well, the elderly are easily swayed by nostalgia and memory, but mostly, by the innocence.

Hubbub, bill-paying and daily meannesses have a tendency to turn a young and unsuspecting woman such as myself into a Hag, regrettable but altogether true. I do not want to be a Hag, but I have found myself behaving in a Haggish manner from time to time...

Again, regrettable but true.

And as much as I was all-too-glad earlier to declare my undying gratitude to the picture book, I am as much ashamed to admit that my love of books has been known to become all tied up in the serious business grammar and syntax. This, I will have you know, is a tell-tale sign of an early onset of Haggishness, but not a hopeless symptom if caught early enough. For this, The Incredible Book Eating Boy is the spoonful of sugar and the medicine for the cure.

Never overbearingly didactic in his story's 'message'/moral, Jeffers' home-base is a good story, told well, with the wit, humour, and healthy dose of a childlike suspension-of-disbelief and creative ingenuity. And don't be fooled by the simplicity of Jeffers' less-is-more approach... This, together with other Jeffers' titles soon to feature on this blog, couldn't be further from it.

They speak from a perspective of the world that may initially appear simple to the untrained adult eye, but is, on closer inspection, well-stocked with the relentless marvels of the little explorer's torchlight, felt with the amazement of the child who cannot pinpoint these feelings as we grown-ups, and cares naught but to give the unnamed emotion wings and watch it take flight.

So, although I could tell you, that The Incredible Book Eating Boy by Oliver Jeffers is ideal for audiences aged 3-5, I won't bother. Instead, I will tell you I can safely hope that, old as I may get, I do not see any Hagging in my future, so long as there are storytellers like Jeffers in my vast and infinitely surprising and delightful universe.

(*Any encounter with a bookish, soapy/grassy-smelling, and properly-mannered child - i.e. one that can say 'Please' and 'Thank You' and refrain from sticking both fingers up his/her nostrils - qualifies as a niggle.)