Think what you would have been now, if instead of being fed with tales and old wives tales in childhood, you had been crammed with geography and history. The popularity of children's books ensured that illustrations were taken seriously. In William Roscoe's The Butterfly's Ball and the Grasshopper's Feast came out, with luscious, detailed, hand-coloured engravings; in Tabard's Popular Tales carried fluent, mobile line-drawings of characters such as Sinbad that have influenced interpretations ever since; and in the s George Cruikshank produced his classic, spiky, scary illustrations to Grimm's Fairy Tales.
Pictures improved with each leap in technology, the most important being the invention of lithography in the early 19th century.
And although the moral tales marched on, by the s they were being rocked and mocked by translations of Heinrich Hoffmann's violent and satirical Struwwelpeter , and Edward Lear's Book of Nonsense , in which the eccentric drawings, as well as the verse, undercut all solemnity. In the s came the fraught and brilliant collaboration of Lewis Carroll and Tenniel in the Alice books, adding a new resonance to fantasy. The later years of the century were awash with imperial stories of derring-do, "beautiful children" such as Little Lord Fauntleroy, and eternal youths such as Peter Pan.
With them came a "golden age" of illustration, the work of a stable of artists linked to the printer Edmund Evans, including Walter Crane, Kate Greenaway, Randolph Caldecott and Arthur Rackham.
In their wake, the new century dawned with another highly original talent, Beatrix Potter, whose Tale of Peter Rabbit was published in Scanning this history I feel a rising anxiety about unmentioned favourites — where is Captain Pugwash, or Orlando the Marmalade Cat?
What about the great bursts of children's writing and illustration, such as the run of invention in the s and 30s? Was this flowering a result of new markets, or was it perhaps a response to the darkness of the war that had blighted the lives of so many children? Each new generation has embraced new writers and artists. And in the past 50 years, the qualities of the book as a three-dimensional object have also been increasingly exploited, from the advent of board books and textured, "feely" board to the use of cut-outs and pop-ups a return to a device popular in Victorian nursery rhymes and fairytales.
Sometimes I feel that the realm of children's picture books is the one place that "book art" — playing with a book as a visual, tactile object — has found a home in the commercial world. Children have become used to the clever slippage from page to page that Eric Carle used in The Very Hungry Caterpillar in and the Ahlbergs used in Peepo! They enjoy the play with different forms of representation, such as the mix of photography, typography and drawing in the witty collages of Lauren Child's Charlie and Lola series.
They laugh, too, at postmodern games with the constraints of page and volume, as in Catherine Rayner's new book Ernest , where Ernest the moose is too large to squash between the margins until he and his chipmunk friend manage a final, glorious fold-out. Small readers like leafing through books, turning pages backwards, poring over pictures, throwing them down abruptly. But usually the enjoyment of books at this stage is, as Browne says, a shared experience.
The power of pictures is enhanced, too, by chiming refrains or tongue-rolling rhymes: "Silly old Fox, doesn't he know there's no such thing as a. But Children's Books moves swiftly beyond being read to, into the intense world of private reading and imagining.
Although my subject is illustrated books for small children, the breadth and depth of Eccleshare's trawl through the literature, right up to the most demanding teenage fiction, demands noting and celebrating. The book is compiled chiefly for adults forming a child's bookshelf, but it would also be perfect — like a good library, or old-fashioned bookshop — for older, greedy-reading children to browse through to find what to read next.
Within each age group, titles appear chronologically, so that one follows the development of the genre in all its variety, from myths and folk-tales to domestic stories or pirate adventures. This chronological sequence is also a bird's-eye map of the ideology of particular eras, showing how it is reinforced by writing for children, and confronting the difficulties of attitudes to race and gender in the most cherished tales — the prejudices lurking in Tintin, or the relics of imperialism in Babar the Elephant.
Illustrators have always played an important role, both in reinforcing current values and stereotypes and brilliantly debunking them. To take just one example, girls' school stories, set in the Chalet School or Malory Towers, could never be the same after the demonic girls of Ronald Searle's St Trinians rampaged into print in The figures in Searle's cartoons, notes the entry on this book, "are all angles, with sharp little expressions knotted into mischief, and not a pretty face in sight".
Boys fared the same. Even the first irreverent Jennings book, which appeared in , was trumped three years later by Geoffrey Willan's Down with Skool! In Children's Books Philip Pullman locates its "irresistible flavour" in its misspellings and anarchic phrase-making, but also in Searle's drawings, which do not date with the text, but remain "wildly and gothically extravagant masterpieces of comic art.
A real bonus is the inclusion of titles from around the world. Many foreign stories, like British classics, take place in that liberty-promising realm from which adults are banished or consigned to the margins.
This is full of jolly wheezes and projects, from tree-houses to treasure hunts, and many of us might sigh dejectedly as we compare our failures to the Brocket family's genius for hammock-making or literary table tennis. Luckily, the gung-ho efficiency is redeemed by the author's sense of humour her jumping-off point is William Brown taking the library clock apart "to see how it works", inspired by a Christmas present called Things a Boy Can Do , and by the selection of period line drawings.
These range from Milly-Molly-Mandy's cut-out dolls to the reviled Famous Five, taking a dip in a rock-pool on Kirrin Island before "racing back to their cave for a nice hot drink and a hearty breakfast, all ready and energised for whatever adventure awaits". Those were the days. Reading itself can feel like a well-appointed cave, a private retreat. In Children's Books , the run of introductions to individual titles is interrupted from time to time by special reviews from writers.
Here the real magic of reading glimmers through. Judy Blume, for example, remembers her mother taking her to the library, where she sat on the floor and thumbed through the books. One day she found Ludwig Bemelmans's Madeline — important, I think, that it was her own discovery, not handed to her by an adult.
Loved it so much that I hid it in my kitchen toy drawer so that my mother would not be able to return it. We might never work out why they mean so much. In this case, Blume remembers that, while she was small and scared of everything, Madeline was equally small but always brave, and that, by reading, she could cloak herself in her heroine's boldness.
Shulevitz, U. New York: Watson-Guptill Publications. Like this: Like Loading Follow Following. Sign me up. An example that is used to clarify or explain something. What is a picture book format? A picture book combines visual and verbal narratives in a book format, most often aimed at young children. With the narrative told primarily through text, they are distinct from comics, which do so primarily through sequential images.
Why is illustration important in children's books? Illustration is a very important part of children's book. It is through the images that the children learn and understand the world around him or her. Images help the children to understand and identify the things they come across in daily life.
Children respond to pictures in a book with ease than the words. What are different types of books called? Science Fiction, satire, drama, Action and Adventure, Romance, mystery, horror, self help, guide, travel, children's, religious, science, history, math, anthologies, poetry, encyclopedia, dictionaries, comics, art, cookbooks, diaries, prayer books, series, trilogies, biographies, autobiographies, and fantasy.
What are the different types of story books? Following is the list of different genres of books: Action and Adventure. The stories under this genre usually show an event or a series of events that happen outside the course of the protagonist's ordinary life.
Comic and Graphic Novel. Crime and Detective. Fairy Tale. What are some graphic novels that have enjoyed popular success? What are the characteristics of a graphic novel?
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