One of the unexpected pleasures of living with very small people has been discovering the wonders of picture books all over again. I grew up with Richard Scarry, Victor Ambrus, Edward Ardizzone and their contemporaries, but picture books were scarce and colour was rare. In the intervening years there's been an explosion of children's literature, and the books we check out from the library every fortnight quite frequently take my breath away with the beauty and subtlety and general all-around brilliance of their illustrations. These are some of my favourites who are, sadly, missing from the recently-discovered treasure trove of bookplates:
- Barbara Firth is a genius, pure and simple. We've bought all five of the Little Bear books, The Park in the Dark and will buy whatever else we can lay our hands on. It doesn't hurt that she works a lot with Martin Waddell, who's another genius. This one gets me every time:
- Helen Oxenbury is just about as famous as you can get being a children's book illustrator, I suppose. I can't wait until my kids are old enough to sit still for her Alice in Wonderland, but in the meantime we have these:
- If anyone can give Helen Oxenbury a run for her money, it's Shirley Hughes. She's astoundingly prolific both as an illustrator and as an author. She's written a beautiful series about Alfie and his sister Annie Rose:
- Jan Ormerod is hardly known at all for some reason I don't understand, but our local library is well stocked with beautiful books including this one, which is entirely wordless. There's a companion volume called Sunshine which I can't find a pic from, but Amazon has a "Search-Inside" feature for both:
We've also enjoyed discovering Peter Spier -- Rain is another beautiful wordless book - and Robert McCloskey. Blueberries for Sal was written in the 40s but I'd never heard of it until I got it for my own kids:
The endpapers of this one, in which Sal and her mom are bottling blueberries in the kitchen, are a fascinating bit of social history in themselves.
5 comments:
Hi - stumbled across your blog - Love your post about childrens books: have you seen the "Eloise" series? Stories by Kay Thompson. The most amazing illustration by Hilary Knight. http://www.eloisewebsite.com/
Thank you! Those are news to me -- on the wishlist now!
Good, I'm sure you'll enjoy them. And yes, unravelling is a bitch!! I still haven't got around to buying more needles and wool but hope to once I knock off work for the xmas break. Keep those hands busy in the evenings.
What a fantastic post! I'll be putting a stack of these on my wishlist. (I also love Pat Hutchins, and I share your enthusiasm for Martin Waddell - Owl Babies, in particular, is soooo cute.)
Owl Babies is another of our favourites - in fact Patrick Benson who did the illustrations only just missed getting into this post because it was late and I couldn't find a picture. But I can also highly recommend another Waddell-Benson collaboration called The Tough Princess, especially if you have daughters. The first line made extemp. laugh out loud and it gets better from there :-)
Post a Comment