BEAUTY BETWEEN THE LINES IN INNOVATIVE ALL-AGES READ
When a publisher aims a picture book at “all ages” rather than the usual “three to seven years,” it’s a pretty safe bet that the volume you’re about to crack open is not so much a book for kids as for people with an appreciative eye for illustration.
A Child of Books, by Oliver Jeffers and Sam Winston, is a case in point.
Inventively illustrated and beautifully produced (its clothbound cover sports gold lettering and blind-stamped images of a lock and key), it has a brief and somewhat poetic text about a little girl who comes “from a world of stories” and whose books feed her imagination.
She meets a boy who appears to live with someone who takes life much too seriously — a bespectacled father figure devoid of humour, whimsy or a sense of adventure. So the girl offers to show the boy a way to “discover treasure in the darkness” or how to “lose ourselves in forests of fairy tales / and escape monsters in haunted castles.”
The trick, it turns out, is to create “a house of invention” that’s open to anyone who spends time with a book, it being the key that unlocks imagination.
Kids in today’s digital age are more likely to turn to a smartphone or computer than a book, but there’s no denying that immersing oneself in a good story is a great way to spark the imagination. So aiming this book at all ages is probably a good idea.
If an adult is drawn to the book by its hand-lettered text (a hallmark of the many picture books Jeffers has created) or its intriguing typographical landscapes (an integral part of much of Winston’s art), that adult might actually take time to share the book with kids who also have an eye for the visual. And since most kids ask questions, a discussion could ensue about some of the classic stories whose texts
have been used to create this book’s images.
The Grimm Brothers’ story of Rapunzel, for example, some of which forms the rope our bookloving heroine climbs to reach the boy in his tower, where he’s escaped from a horned monster whose body resembles one of Maurice Sendak’s Wild Things, but whose bulk consists of lines from such classics as Frankenstein, Dracula and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.
This is a book that might, at first glance, seem odd and difficult to deal with. But spend some time with it, and it could open worlds of imagination. Words
take on new meaning when they’re used to create pictures, and curious kids and adults alike will have fun trying to decipher the print. A magnifying glass may help and, cleverly, endpapers identify the books Winston and Jeffers used for each illustration.
With a little luck, A Child of Books will send adults back to the classics of their youth and prompt children to search out the books too often neglected in this digital age.
A Child of Books
By Oliver Jeffers and Sam Winston Candlewick Press, 32 pages, $22 All ages