You can watch Philip and Axel talking about the book – and the experience of collaborating together – in the video interview above. And there’ll be all sorts of funny, mad (and slightly grubby…) stuff happening in the next few months: a brand new website launching, a brilliantly fun app for your iPhone or iPad, and lots more – so watch this space! This week, I’m reading one of our latest proofs:
The “Make a Face” game uses the front-facing camera in the iPhone 4 and iPad 2 (or later) so that you can copy Pip and Posy’s expressions – sad, happy, laughing, everyone’s favourite – monster – and more, and then take pictures of the results. If you have an older iPad or iPhone, you can still play the game, if a second person holds your device for you.
Once you’ve struck your best pose, you can save the picture to your “Photos” folder or take a screenshot by holding down both the Home and Power buttons – and then you can enter by posting a link to the photo in the comments below, tweeting it to us @NosyCrowApps, or emailing it to apps@nosycrow.com.
The competition closes on Sunday and Pip and Posy will be on sale on iTunes for only $0.99/ £0.69 until then! You can find the app on iTunes here.
It’s an app of many firsts for Nosy Crow: our first Axel Scheffler app, our first games app, our first app of 2012, and the first app that will be released in (at least) 5 languages – so we’re very proud of it!
The app is based (of course) on our Pip and Posy books, and is filled with fun things to do for children aged 2+. Here’s the trailer that we made last week:
There’s lots to do: a drawing tool that lets you color in Axel’s pictures from each of the Pip and Posy books, a very satisfying set of jigsaw puzzles, lots of different matching pairs and spot-the-difference games, and, maybe best of all, an activity that uses the front-facing camera on an iPad 2 or iPhone 4 (or newer) so that you can copy Pip and Posy’s faces in a mirror and then take pictures:
You can find the app on iTunes here – if you do buy it, we’d love to hear from you! Please do review it on iTunes, tweet to us NosyCrowApps or leave a comment on Facebook.
And if you’d like to be kept up to date with all of our latest apps, you can sign up for our mailing list here.
What is it about kids and balloons? They just love them, don’t they? In our family, if we ever have a special-treat lunch out, the children insist that we go to the restaurant which gives away free balloons. They couldn’t care less what the food taste likes (because let’s face it, they’re only going to eat pasta anyway), as long as they get a balloon each, they are happy.
Which is strange, because owning a balloon is almost always going to end in disappointment. The best-case scenario is that they lose their buoyancy and die a long, slow death in a corner of the house, becoming wrinkled and saggy, and tripping people up occasionally. Or, more likely, they meet their tragic end long before they reach home, either by escaping their wailing owner and disappearing into the clouds, or by popping, brutally, on some passing object. Am I the only parent that regards balloons as a mixed blessing because we know that the chances are they are going to end in tears?
In Pip and Posy The Big Balloon, out this month, Pip’s much treasured balloon actually meets both of these fates and Pip is, naturally, distraught. Happily, the ever-resourceful Posy has a two pots of bubble mix in her backpack and in no time at all, Pip has recovered his composure and the friends are playing happily again. It’s a simple tale, but if we’ve helped a few families get through one of life’s early traumas, then I like to think we’ve done our job!
“Love them or loathe them, babies are sweet. At least, that’s what Mr and Mrs Deer think. They long for a baby of their own, so when one is left on their doorstep they do not hesitate to bring it in. But this little baby does nothing but ROAR. And when relatives start disappearing, Mr and Mrs Deer have to ask some serious questions about their new baby. With no happy-ever-after ending, this is a deliciously entertaining story that takes a fresh look at the arrival of a new baby and the problems it can bring.”
On Sunday, Nicolette Jones included two Nosy Crow books in her Sunday Times round-up of Easter reading.
The first was Goldilocks and Just the One Bear by Leigh Hodgkinson. The book, says the Sunday Times, “gives a novel twist to a familiar fairy tale as a lost bear causes mayhem in a city apartment, before the (human) family comes home. After the “somebody’s been…” routine, the mother turns out to be Goldilocks, now grown up, and the bear is the former Baby Bear. This happy reunion is remarkable for its witty, chatty update reminiscent of Lauren Child, with comical, detail-rich illustrations in vivid retro greens, oranges and pinks.”
“A variation on the always popular let’s-put-on-a-play-in-the-barn story, The Secret Hen House Theatre… adds depth with its theme of dealing with grief and a plot about saving a farm. An engaging tale about family and friendship for 10+.”
Well over 100,000 books are published in the UK each year, and I think around 10% of them are children’s books (I have a figure of 8,000 in my head, but I may be making it up or it may be out-of-date, and Google has been unhelpful in verifying it). Let’s assume it’s right, and then let’s assume (wrongly) that roughly the same number of children’s books is published in each month, and that Easter round-ups draw on the previous two months of publishing. That would mean that these books were competing with over 1,300 other books to be featured in reviews. While this arithmetic isn’t exact, it does give a sense of how tough it is to get a review of a book in a major UK paper.
Last year’s Books and Consumers survey suggested that reviews and recommendations drove only 5% of children’s fiction book purchases. However, browsing remains the biggest purchase prompt and covers remain significant, driving 39% of sales between them. One of the things that reviews sometimes provide is a few key words to put on the cover of the next reprint of the reviewed book that, we hope, draw the eye of the potential reader (or parent or teacher of the reader), and support the browsing and cover-based selection process.
Reviews also help us position future books by the author/illustrator with retailers: we include review extracts in the information sheets about our books that we supply to retailers and in our catalogues. In fact, we’re working on a catalogue for the London Book Fair, and I was emailing through the key words from the reviews of the three titles mentioned above for the designer to incorporate into the final tweaks to the catalogue as I was reading the reviews. A good review won’t salvage a book that a retailer doesn’t think that they will succeed with in the first place, but it might reinforce a selection that they are part-way to making… which means that the book will be available for the browsing and cover visibility that accounts for the 39% of book purchases.
The picture at the top of this blog is an illustration from Goldilocks and Just the One Bear in The Sunday Times round-up… with an Axel Scheffler illustration from his first picture book, You’re a Hero, Daley B, that is being reissued and that I mentioned in this recent blog post.
(Twelve Minutes to Midnight author Christopher Edge’s event with Philip Pullman and JD Sharpe at the Oxford Literary Festival about the influence of Charles Dickens on children’s writers was also mentioned in The Sunday Times: “Asked what his first encounter with Dickens was, Edge rather shamefacedly confessed, ‘The Muppet Christmas Carol’.”)
I’ve obliquely touched on the question of rhyming picture book texts in this blog before, most notably in this blog post about Julia Donaldson on her appointment as Waterstone’s Children’s Laureate, and in the comments section of this blog post about Axel Scheffler.
The success of Julia Donaldson’s texts are a real proof of the power of rhyme as a story-telling medium.
Many of my own children’s very favourite picture books and board books – We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, Goodnight Moon, Duck in the Truck, The Cat in the Hat, Green Eggs and Ham, Hairy Maclary from Donaldson’s Dairy, Peepo – rhymed and scanned.
My children learned these texts fast, and could recite them by heart. Even new texts were predictable – when an adult reader paused before a rhyming word, they were able to supply that word, or at least guess at it.
When I am looking at rhyming texts, I am really looking for three things:
1. A consistent, clear rhyme scheme with words that really rhyme… and, ideally, rhyme in many English accents. Many texts that I receive rhyme only if you speak RP English (or at least the accents of Southern England), so I always run the text through my head in a Scottish accent (I am from Edinburgh) as well as an attempt at a US accent and an Australian accent.
2. Consistent, clear scansion. This is really key, and a point on which so many texts I see fall down. I tend to use slash-and-breve notation when I’m looking at a rhyming text, and will think to myself, for example, “OK, so this is trochaic tetrameter” (like Wadsworth Longfellow’s Hiawatha), but you don’t, to write a good rhythmic text, have to know your spondee from your iamb. Julia Donaldson said (somewhere – I can’t find it now) that she gives her texts-in-progress to her husband, and asks him to read them aloud. If he hesitates over where to put the stress, then she revisits the line. I think this is a great discipline.
3. And finally, a real story. We’re a UK-based company, and our production of books printed in full-colour depends on our selling rights to other countries. So rhyming, rhythmic texts have to be translated. If, essentially, all that they are IS their rhyme and rhythm, then they are much less likely to be of interest to foreign-language publishers. Most publishers do try to translate rhyming, rhythmic texts into rhythmic rhyme in their own languages. Here are the first four lines of The Gruffalo in English:
A mouse took a stroll through the deep dark wood.
A fox saw the mouse and the mouse looked good.
“Where are you going to, little brown mouse?
Come and have lunch in my underground house.”
And here they are in German:
“Die Maus spazierte im Wald umher
der Fuchs sah sie kommen und freute sich sehr.
‘Hallo kleine Maus, wohin geht die Reise?
Bei mir im Bau gibts Götterspeise.’”
If you speak German, you’ll see that the sense is the same but the word-for-word translation has been sacrificed to the exigencies of the rhythm and rhyme.
But publishers don’t always translate rhyming texts into rhyme, and, even if they do, it’s going to be harder work for them to find the right translator, and something will inevitably be lost. Many are therefore hesitant to take on a rhyming text. So, as a publisher, you have to consider whether there is enough to the story for it to survive if it were translated into prose. I think that most children want a picture book to tell a story, and I find that that’s what most of our translation rights publishers are looking for too. In fact story can be the most important thing in a picture book – more important than words: Rosie’s Walk is a really good example of a picture book with a story – an exciting and funny one at that – that relies on no words at all.
This is not to say that there isn’t room for poetry for children: I was particularly proud, when I was at Macmillan, to publish lots of poetry for children, including an illustrated edition of Charles Causley’s poetry for children, but I published it as poetry for children (with accompanying line illustrations), and not in picture book form: because the illustrations were in black and white, it was financially viable to print this book for the UK alone.
And I am not saying that there isn’t room for highly-wrought, lyrical language in picture books: I was also particularly proud, when I was at Scholastic, to publish Jeanette Winterson’s The Lion, The Unicorn, and Me. Here’s her description of Bethlehem:
“Oh but it was a musty, rusty, fusty, pudding of a town turned out for a show, its people cussed and blustering, all buy and sell and money, taking their chance while the going was good before the goods got going again. Taxes, and everyone here to pay up, and everyone had to be put up, for this one night, so that even the mice were renting their mouse-holes, and there were travellers hanging out of birds’ nests, their beards full of twigs and old worms, and the ant hills were full up, and the bee hives had three families apiece, and there was a man tapping on the frozen lake asking the fish to let him in.”
This is prose, but it’s very close to poetry. It just doesn’t have a formal rhyme scheme or scansion, which makes the prospect of translating it less challenging.
“My granny’s kind of different…
She wears such funny hats.
She’s got a huge menagerie
of cats and frogs and bats!”
The image at the top of this blog is a spread from the book.
Tracey’s working on two follow-ups to this story (which sold remarkably well), and has also written a rhyming text that will be illustrated by Steven Lenton in 2013, called Shifty McGifty and Slippery Sam.
Another author whose ability to create really compelling rhyming and rhythmic text attracted us to her is Caryl Hart, whose The Princess and the Peas illustrated by Sarah Warburton will be published later this year:
Here are the first four lines of this book:
“Lily-Rose May was a sweet little girlie.
Her eyes were bright blue and her hair was so curly.
She lived with her dad in a beautiful wood.
She was kind and polite and was usually good.”
Of course there are exceptions (and, who knows, we may even publish them!), but generally, for Nosy Crow, rhyme and rhythm need to be the engine that drives a really good plot.
Yesterday Seb Braun, illustrator of Noisy Little Farm came to visit, and he brought with him a truly wonderful crow that he’d made for us:
This has become something of a tradition for us: we now have a whole murder of crows (not in any sort of morbid way; that’s the collective noun) by Nosy Crow artists, adorning an (appropriately tree-lined) wall of our reception. And with this wonderful addition, it felt like time to share some of them! So, in no particular order…
And last (for now!) but by absolutely no means least is a brilliant example of an extravagantly illustratedAxel Scheffler envelope, on which Pip is being carried away by an enthusiastic bird:
You can see them all in one place at the top of this post. We hope our crow wall carries on growing and growing – we’ll share its additions with you as it does. And thank you to all of our illustrators for making this the Crow-iest place around!
Just before last week’s Bologna book fair (a Bologna blog post follows when I am feeling a bit perkier as I have come down with a post-fair lurgy), I went to Troisdorf near Cologne in Germany to a really great exhibition of Axel Scheffler’s artwork, both published art from books and magazines and unpublished art including gifts he’s given as presents, illustrated envelopes (of which Nosy Crow has several and I have many), sketches (and some of his sketchbooks) and pictures he’s done just for fun.
An envelope included in the exhibition that Axel drew for me many years ago
A picture that Axel just drew because he felt like it
A childhood experiment with symmetry and imagination that Axel drew for his father
This blog post is illustrated by a brush-pen sketch clearly done when Axel was feeling rather haunted by his most famous illustrative creation, the gruffalo.
As someone who has been published a lot of Axel’s work in the UK, I was asked to write a piece for the catalogue.
This is what I wrote:
Axel Scheffler: Hand-made Humour
I am rather proud to say that the quarter-century anniversary of my friendship and professional connection with Axel Scheffler is coming up next year.
I met Axel in at the Bologna Book Fair in 1988. I was selling rights for Faber and Faber and he’d recently completed his first book illustration work, illustrating The Piemakers by Helen Cresswell (now unavailable, but here’s the audio edition with Axel’s cover) and the Bottle Rabbit stories by Bernard McCabe. Looking back at the black and white illustrations for these books, it’s possible to see many of the things that make Axel’s work so immediately recognisable: Bottle Rabbit is very visibly the direct ancestor of Pip, the rabbit character that Axel created twenty-four years later for Nosy Crow’s Pip and Posy series.
That’s not to say that Axel’s work has stood still: there is something more … basic about everything from the line to the characterisation in these Faber books, though, at the same time, the artwork is somehow less accessible, and certainly, I would say, without quite being able to say why, less “British-looking”. And, technically speaking, too, Axel had a journey to take: other than the covers of these books, these are simple black-and-white line illustrations, and Axel is best known, at least in the UK, for his colour ink-wash-and-pencil work in picture book form.
Axel‘s first picture book, You’re a Hero, Daley B, was published in 1989 by Walker Books. Daley is yet another rabbit (and there is a distinct anthropomorphised-animal, if not always rabbitty, theme to Axel’s British book illustration). By the time that You’re a Hero, Daley B was published, I had gone to a company, Reed Children’s Books, that subsequently evolved into Egmont Children’s Books. I was still selling rights. I had a good friend there, Elke Lacey, whose background was in fiction publishing, but who, for some reason that I’ve now forgotten, was sent a text by an unpublished singer/song-writer and performer. The text was a reworking of a traditional story about an old lady who complains that her house is too small and is advised by the local wise man (a rabbi in the Jewish version of the story) to resolve the problem by taking her animals into her house. The situation gets worse and worse… until the wise man tells her to let all the animals out and she rejoices in how (relatively) commodious her house feels. It was a tightly put-together text with immaculate rhyme and scansion. The author was Julia Donaldson. I suggested that she and Axel, who was by then a friend, would make a good pair: I thought that the absurdity of the animals piled into the house (and, perhaps, behaving in increasingly human ways as a consequence) was something that Axel could capture.
Very sadly – she was very young – Elke died before the book, A Squash and a Squeeze came out, but the partnership that has been the key to the success of both parties was formed.
Some time later, I left the company to become publisher at Macmillan Children’s Books. Alison Green joined me there shortly afterwards. Quite soon after we’d started, Julia Donaldson sent a text to Axel. She knew that Axel and I were friends, and thought that it might be a suitable book for Axel to illustrate and for Macmillan to publish. The text was The Gruffalo. Axel remembers me reading it aloud to him over the kitchen table of the flat in which he lived, and my immediate enthusiasm for the text and sense of its potential. Alison and I knew it was something we wanted to publish and something that Axel would illustrate brilliantly. A multi-million copy seller in the UK and translated into more than 40 languages (I have lost count and so has Axel), The Gruffalo has been adapted into an Oscar-nominated film, and you can buy everything from a Gruffalo suitcase to Gruffalo paper napkins napkins. In the run-up to the last election, several of the new-generation “new man” political leaders showed that they were real family men by including The Gruffalo among their favourite books.
An early sketch of the gruffalo and the mouse, before both were made less scary
That The Gruffalo has been such a success is interesting. There was something absolutely compelling about the text, and it had many of the hallmarks of great Julia Donaldson writing: perfect rhyme and scansion; a real story tightly told; and a narrative with a pattern – in this case the mouse’s three encounters with predators, a central meeting with the gruffalo and then a mirrored reprise of the three meetings with predators. However, I did slightly worry, I will admit, that it would be hard for a child to understand. After all, to really “get” the book you have to know that, at the end, the mouse knows that the gruffalo thinks that the fox (or the owl or the snake) thinks that the mouse is scary, when in fact the mouse knows that the fox (or the owl or the snake) thinks that the gruffalo is scary. That’s pretty complicated even for me to write down, and it requires a child to hold the viewpoints of different creatures in their head at once: the mouse’s, the gruffalo’s and the predator’s.
The famous Sally-Anne test suggests that children under the age of four or five find it difficult to understand that other people (or characters) may not know something that they themselves know. If the simple “Sally-Anne test” baffles such children, then even fewer, surely, would understand the layers of misleading going on in The Gruffalo?
But I have read the book to two year-olds, my own children included, and something about it works even for children who can’t unpick the complexities of the narrative. I think that one of the reasons is Axel’s extraordinarily direct illustrations. We can read the confidence on the face of the mouse as he (or she, but that’s a whole other discussion…!) leads the gruffalo away to meet the other animals. We can see the fear on the face of the snake as it looks at the gruffalo and the first doubt appearing in the gruffalo’s eyes. The book is never really scary for a little child, because the mouse never looks scared.
I suppose that if I had to say that there was one thing that is the reason for Axel’s success it’s that the characters he draws are extraordinarily expressive. Whether they’re snails or whales, or witches or wise men, or mice or monsters, we immediately know what they are thinking and feeling. Pip, in Pip and Posy: The Little Puddle is a male rabbit. Because he accidentally wees on the floor, he needs to change out of his clothes, but Posy, a female mouse, only offers him dresses. The illustration makes children giggle and adults smile, not just because Axel captures the situation, but because the expression Pip wears as he holds out two alternative dresses perfectly conveys his silent, tight-lipped doubt about both options.
In fact, these Pip and Posy books have very minimal texts and they’re all about feelings. The narrative and the emotion are entirely carried by Axel’s illustration skills. They are, I think, books that would not work in the hands of a lesser illustrator.
I said that the picture of Pip makes children giggle and adults smile, and this element of humour is another source of Axel’s huge success: his illustrations are funny, not just because of the expressions of the characters, but often because of peripheral details away from the main focus – the graffiti on a wall in The Smartest Giant In Town or The Gruffalo’s Child; the squirrel with his paws to his ears as Zog the dragon learns to roar; the scrunched-up face of the crow in the face of the wind that blows strongly enough to blow the hat off the witch in Room on the Broom. The humour is often in small details… and Axel’s work is extraordinarily detailed.
In ways that are hard to pin-point Axel’s art doesn’t quite look British, and this is one of the reasons it stands out in such a recognisable way in British bookshops and libraries. He is, however, working in a line-and-wash (with, in his case, pencil) style that is part of a great British tradition including great illustrators such as Edward Ardizzoni and Quentin Blake. Like Ardizzoni and Blake, Axel’s art has verve, humour, poignancy and, as I’ve said, expressiveness.
Axel’s art also, I think, looks, like Quentin Blake’s, easy, by which I mean it looks effortless. In fact, he can, and does, draw very fast. But he rejects many, many line drawings before they get to the colour stage. His colour work is painstaking and larger double page spreads takes time. The depth of colour is built up with thousands of carefully-judged brush strokes with a layer of pencil on top of that. But when you watch Axel draw and paint, and I have been privileged to see him do so more often than I can count, you are aware, I think, of being in the presence of someone completely in command of his remarkable talents, whether you’re watching the effortless fluidity of the initial lines, or the careful and slow build up of colour. Axel himself doesn’t, I think, always see it like that: I don’t think that Axel is often satisfied with his work – he has, perhaps, a vision of an ideal version of the illustration he’s working on that he can never quite realise.
But however hard he finds it, the creation of Axel’s initial line looks easy to the onlooker. And Axel’s art is “easy” in another way too: it’s easy to understand, easy to respond to. Axel is extraordinarily well-read, and aware of his own and of different illustrative and artistic traditions. Despite this, he does not, I think, illustrate to impress. I see many, many illustrators who are interested in creating artwork that they and other adults find “beautiful”, or “challenging”, or “interesting”. This doesn’t seem to motivate Axel. Instead, his illustration is wholly accessible. There is nothing difficult about it, and that’s where his appeal to children lies.
Axel’s illustrative journey has taken place at a time in which illustrative techniques have changed with extraordinary rapidity: most children’s book illustrators now use digital technology to create, manipulate, enhance or at least correct their images. This is not a tendency that Axel has, so far, embraced at all. He’s resolutely attached not just to inks and pencils but to particular inks and pencils: I’ve had to order some pencils for him from the US quite recently, as he couldn’t find them in the UK, France or Germany, and, though not a complete Luddite, he doesn’t shop online. While digitally-created artwork can have warmth, I think that it’s this very visibly made-by-hand quality – the lines uneven as the nib scratches its way along the page, the water marks visible in a stormy sky – that is another part of the appeal of Axel’s art: while it is utterly modern, it also feels very traditional, warm and personal.
The Gruffalo has been followed in the UK by other books that are also British modern classics: The Snail and the Whale, Room on the Broom, Stickman, The Gruffalo’s Child and many other books, both those created in conjunction with Julia Donaldson and those created with other authors. I’ve been involved in most of them, and, while I am proud of many of the books I have published, they are, I think, the best books I’ve worked on.
Axel Scheffler’s doing a charity meet-and-greet, signing and art auction (his pictures tend to go for a lot so don’t come expecting a massive bargain – just saying) in Richmond on March 4 2012. It’s in aid of Hope for Konya medical station in Kenya.
You can get a bit of a sense of the village – huge numbers of kids! – here
And here are all the details of the event:
I am not sure how many tickets are left.
Do please forward this link to (ideally really rich, so that the charity can get as much money as possible) friends with children in or near South West London.
Today (well, it was today when I started writing this) Waterstones released its shortlist of Waterstones Children’s Book Prize books, which The Guardian said was dominated by gritty teen reads (Don’t worry for us that there are no Nosy Crow books on the list, by the way: we didn’t submit anything for the prize because we felt that nothing we’d published in 2011 quite met the criteria). It was a tough but impressive line-up of teenage books, but even several of the picture books – Good Little Wolf by Nadia Shireen and I Want My Hat Back by Jon Klassen – were books with (carnivorous) bite and wit. What I do think, for what it’s worth, is that the Waterstones shortlists are particularly strong on children’s books that adults enjoy, whether gritty or whimsical or witty. But that’s another post…
Anyway, today was also the day that The Reading Agency produced a list of “mood-boosting” books.
So I asked around the office to get people to tell me what their “mood-boosting” books were. What’s interesting is how often these aren’t “happy-clappy” books: there are references to grief, tears and emotional roller-coasters as well as to escapism in people’s explanation of why they chose these books. Perhaps they’re more accurately described as “comfort reads”. That’s not what I asked for but it is, I think, what I got, and it says something about the range of ways that readers can extract emotional satisfaction from a reading experience that so many of the books people mentioned, though they had happy endings, were often far from monochromatic in their emotional palette. That relieved and complete sense of “ahhhh” at the happy resolution of what might have been a sad or difficult book is enough to make a book a comfort read and even, perhaps, a “mood-boosting” book.
Dom, who responded in detail and with real enthusiasm, said, “I have a serious Agatha Christie addiction. I have to re-read one a month, or I get twitchy. I find the blend of ‘gung-ho’ + naivety + well-mannered acceptance of dangerous situations of her lesser known heroes like the Beresfords, or Anne in The Man In The Brown Suit to be the perfect tonic to our fear-filled lives: we’re ALWAYS being told what will kill us: sugar, salt, wine, deep snow, white bread, etc. And the ‘deadly’ things are ALWAYS fun!
“Anything by Eva Ibbotson lifts my soul. There’s a line in The Secret Countess that pricks my eyes with tears whenever I read it.
“And Mrs ‘Arris Goes To Paris by Paul Gallico! A BEAUTIFUL book all about the kindness of strangers.
“Oh, and Sita Brahmachari’s Artichoke Hearts weaves together perfectly the joy of life and living with the peculiar blend of gratitude/regret of grief…while being intensely uplifting all the while.”
Ed said, “Comic capers from Jasper Fforde, Carl Hiaasen (he’s done a few stories for younger readers too, like Flush and Hoot) and Janet Evanovich are always a lot of fun too!” and that his wife “always heads for a Georgette Heyer: off you go to another time and place, away from all your worries and there’s always a happy ending.”
Leen said, “Jane Eyre is a massive comfort read! As is Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. And The Neverending Story. Oh, and any Georgette Heyer book.”
Kirsty, reasonably enough, asked, “Is it comfort reads for kids or adults?” She said that her children always go back to Enid Blyton and A Squash and a Squeeze (illustrated by Axel Scheffler) but she also listed Captain Underpants and Little Women (not sure if they were for her or for the children, and she’s not around to ask right now, so you’ll have to guess).
Steph, very definitely and with no hemming and hawing over alternatives, nominated a book I didn’t know at all: Someday. She said, “It takes you on an emotional roller-coaster and reaffirms everything good about parenting and the circle of life.”
Joanne, who’s doing freelance marketing for us and whose biography I really must get up on the website, said, “Jez Alborough’s Hug! was the first thing that popped into my head.”
Mine – and I did find it hard to choose – are probably I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith and The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams, and Emma is a pretty cheering kind of a read too. When I was a child, I read and read and reread Enid Blyton, particularly the Malory Towers books. I did set out to make Just Right a particularly feel-good text, and I think it achieved that, judging by the reviews.
What are YOUR mood-boosting books? Are they the same as your comfort reads?
While we’d love to hear about any books, we’re especially interested in children’s book – ones you read now, ones you read as a child and/or ones you share with children.
Please tell us on Twitter or (even better, because it lasts longer) by commenting below.
We’ve got some exciting news – the launch of a brand-new website devoted to Axel Scheffler’s Pip and Posy characters.
There’s so much to do: at www.worldofpipandposy.com, you can play exclusive Pip and Posy games, learn more about the books, watch videos of Axel drawing the characters, print off and colour in Pip and Posy yourself, find out about upcoming events, and sign up for news.
As the days shorten, the nights get nippier and the leaves fall from the trees, we find ourselves turning to indoor pursuits, to cooking and craft… and to sharing scary stories. At Nosy Crow, we’ve noticed that toddlers love the thrill of a spooky tale as much as the rest of us – providing it’s not too frightening, of course.
In Axel Scheffler’s new Pip and Posy story, The Scary Monster, Posy is interrupted in her baking by a big, furry blue hand knocking at her window. At first, poor Posy is alarmed and rather scared but, with a little bit of courage and smart thinking, she soon realises that it’s not a monster, after all, but Pip in a silly costume. We hope it’s a gentle and funny way of allowing little children to join in with autumnal fun and games, without frightening the living daylights out of them!
Tom and I are just back from the Edinburgh International Book Festival, having carried the quite-light-but-hugely-bulky Pip and Posy costumes (as seen in previous blog posts ) there.
Our visit to the Book Festival over this weekend was fleeting, but Nikalas and Tim were there earlier this week for what was, by all accounts, a stonking Mega Mash-up event while the Nosy Crow staffers were cleaning the loos and unpacking crates in the new office.
On Sunday, though, we had three great events, thanks at least in part to the redoubtable Book Festival staff, Janet, Sian and Hannah. The first sell-out event was a Pip and Posy event with Axel Scheffler (pictured above, signing the flip-chart drawings he created at the event) attended by Sarah Brown, last seen and written about by Kate at Cybermummy 11, and her sons.
We then had a Dinosaur Dig event with Penny Dale – also a sell-out – which included a draw-your-own stegosaurus (on roller skates) session.
Here’s Penny’s stegosaurus:
And here is a stegosaurus from a talented member of the audience:
Lastly, I did a session on apps as reading experiences, impeccably chaired by Nosy Crow author, Simon Puttock.
And then we went out to dinner. Scotland is another country: they do things differently there (I should know: I am a Scot, though I have lived in London for a long, long time), and it is really interesting to see the connections between individuals in different parts of the vibrant and committed Scottish children’s book community.
Tom and I were back on the London-bound train as the early morning sun shone on the coast of East Lothian… and I’m writing this in a bit of a rush as I prepare to leave for Brazil tomorrow.
This weekend saw the launch of the Pop-Up Festival in London’s Coram’s Fields – a brand new festival of stories, aimed at children and young people of all ages. The festival is actually the grand finale of several weeks of events which link schools and academies in the London boroughs of Camden and Islington with top name illustrators and authors, including Anthony Browne, Emma Dodd, Alex T Smith and Jamila Gavin.
The artists work with classes on tailor-made projects, making stories in all sorts of forms, from poetry to sculpture. It is a fantastically effective way of getting a huge number of (around 3000) children interested in and inspired by both reading and writing – especially those for whom stories and reading is not an integral part of their home lives.
On Saturday and Sunday the festival was opened to the public (the organisers estimate that they had 6000 visitors) and it didn’t disappoint. Five gigantic tents offered a delectable and exciting range of events for every age and taste, from Peter Rabbit, Spot and Rastamouse to performance poets and stars from dub step and hip hop. Like two Victorian ringmasters, Michael Rosen and Philip Ardagh each curated a tent, and our own Axel Scheffler drew Pip and Posy for a packed audience and then signed copies of the books for nearly two hours.
For those of us that attended, there was a real feeling that Pop up lived up to its name – it was refreshing and rich, and burst confidently onto the festival scene. Look out for it next year, when it increases the number of schools involved and links up with Central St Martins on its new site at Kings Cross.
In the UK, one in six people struggles with literacy. The National Literacy Trust is an independent charity working to ensure that everyone has the literacy skills they need to lead a successful and happy life.
Last week, I was invited, as a member of the Trust’s Advisory Committee, to an inspiring event that was part of the Trust’s Young Readers Programme. The Young Readers Programme (formerly known as Reading Is Fundamental, which is the name the sister US programme continues to use) aims to bring reading for pleasure to 200 communities of children – children in schools, children in refuges, children in care – that need reading support. In the course of the programme, children are introduced to the skills they need to choose books (the children learn to “decode” a cover, to read a blurb, and to check inside to see if a book is at an appropriate reading level). The emphasis is entirely on reading for pleasure, and the programme is based on OECD research that suggests that reading for pleasure by the age of 15 is a powerful indicator of future life chances, even when parental socio-economic and education levels are taken into account. These skills are taught by specially-trained people within or familiar with the community, who are often, but not always, librarians. The children receive three free books in the course of the programme which lasts at least 12 weeks. Wherever possible, children meet authors or storytellers who bring their own passion to the storytelling and book-choosing process.
The event I went to was at the Barbican Library. Cressida Cowell (pictured above at the event) was reading and talking to children from a nearby school.
She began the event by talking about a book she loved as a child: Peter Pan by J M Barrie. She read aloud the shockingly violent and very compelling first description of Captain Hook in which he eviscerates another pirate with his hook without taking the cigar from his mouth. She spoke about being a London-born child who longed for something extraordinary to happen – longed for the kind of adventure that the Darling children have in Peter Pan. In fact, for her, the real life childhood adventure was going on holiday year after year to the same small Scottish island: her own equivalent of Barrie’s Neverland. She said she used to sit at the top of the island, and imagine a Viking invasion. She described, too, the face she could see in the cliffs on the island’s beach, with two caves for eye-sockets. She said she used to imagine what might live in those caves: dragons, perhaps…
Peter Pan, islands, Vikings, dragons and caves, of course, all combine in her brilliant Hiccup books. She read – dropping her voice to a whisper at times, while the children held their breath – from the first novel in the series, How To Train Your Dragon about Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III’s journey with his friends into a cave used by dragons as a nursery (not, she said, unlike the left eye socket cave in the face in the cliffs on the island on which she’d spent her holidays) to catch his own dragon.
It was a stellar performance and one that really engaged the children. Here she is afterwards, surrounded by fans:
The National Literacy Trust campaigns for the recognition of the impact of literacy issues; runs projects and initiatives such as the Young Readers Programme; and is a the most fantastic source of information and research on literacy in the UK.
One is to participate in the auction
it’s recently set up (closing date for bids February 24 June), auctioning favourite books belonging to favourite authors. You could, for example, get a copy of Shrek by William Steig from Axel Scheffler’s bookcase:
The book has a message and a sketch from Axel inside it:
Young British illustrator Frann Preston-Gannon has said that new British illustration talent is being forced to go abroad in search of work as the UK picture book market becomes increasingly conservative.
Comments on The Bookseller article reporting Frann Preston-Gannon’s remarks point out that library cutbacks and the shrinking of the independent bookshop sector are a factor in this increased conservatism in the UK market, and I do think that both libraries and independent bookshops have, historically, been particularly strong and important supporters of more experimental illustration styles in the UK.
However, from the point of view of an independent children’s book pulbisher, I’d say a couple of things:
The first is that the UK has always looked outside the UK to launch new artists. Selling co-editions (i.e. co-ordinating a single printing of full-colour books in several different languages for different countries so that some of the costs of the printing are spread across many copies, and each country benefits from a sort of “bulk discount” with the printer) has been at the heart of the picture book’s financial viability for over two decades. If opportunities for artists exist outside the UK, even if the UK market itself might not be a big market for a particular artist, UK publishers are often keen to find them, and to support new talent with international sales. So a book originating in the UK may sell better abroad. At Nosy Crow, and at other UK publishers, the UK print-run can be just a tenth of the total print-run – the rest is made up of co-editions.
Second, there are many illustrators who, initially, frightened the UK retail horses at the early stages of their career, but who are now well and truly part of the illustration establishment. Axel Scheffler is a good example. When I first published Axel, I was told his work was looked “too continental European”; that the eyes were too goggly and the noses too big. The first UK print run of The Gruffalo was very small – perhaps 1,500 or 2,000 copies, I seem to remember, and, whatever it was, UK sales were smaller! We persisted (as did Axel, of course) and great, distinctive, witty illustration won through won through.
Third, at Nosy Crow, we’re always looking for new illustrators. We’ve a small picture book list, but over the next 18 months it will include, among other new illustrators:
Nadia Shireen who graduated in 2010, and whose art complements a dark and funny text (involving characters being eaten) called The Baby That Roared by Simon Puttock publishing in January 2012 (her first book, Good Little Wolf, published by Random House, is out now);
Nicola O’Byrne who graduates this summer and whose book, Open Very Carefully is a witty celebration of the printed book that publishes in autumn 2012.
Of course there are some publishers who play very safe, and there are others who are a bit more edgy. Not being part of their decision-making process, I can’t speak for them. But I can speak for Nosy Crow. We’re somewhere in the middle, I’d say. We need to feel that an artists work will appeal to a child (rather than appeal just to an adult), and that’s really our starting point. we have to feel that there’s a market for an illustrator’s work somewhere in the world, especially if we think that the UK market won’t rush to embrace a particular style. We don’t always agree: as in so many areas of publishing, we’re making subjective judgements based on a complicated mix of taste, experience and knowledge.
The book market – UK and international – doesn’t owe us (or any particular artist for that matter), a living: we have to publish books that are commercially viable, but, at Nosy Crow, we’re always looking for new talent, and we’re willing to take risks on it.
And we congratulate Frann Preston-Gannon and wish her the best of luck, wherever she publishes.
Julia writes fiction for older children (The Princess Mirror-belle books, The Giants and the Joneses and Dinosaur Diary) and has written a dark and challenging novel for teenagers (Running on the Cracks), but she is best known for her rhyming (though not always rhyming: The Smartest Giant doesn’t rhyme except at the end) picture book texts, of which the best known is The Gruffalo, illustrated by Axel Scheffler, who has been the illustrator of her most successful picture books.
I felt, vicariously, very proud: I’ve been responsible for publishing over twenty of Julia’s books over the years. I first got to know Julia’s work in the early 1990s. She sent the lyrics of a song to Methuen (which has been absorbed into Egmont) where I was working as a rights director. An editor there, Elke Lacey, liked it. I suggested that a friend, who I’d met when he was illustrating a couple of fiction titles for Faber and Faber when I was selling rights there, might be the man to do the pictures. He was Axel Scheffler. The book was A Squash and a Squeeze. Elke was a fiction editor, and hadn’t worked on picture books and she and I worked on A Squash and a Squeeze together. But then she got ill and died, ridiculously young, just before the book was published.
A little later, I moved to Macmillan as a publisher, and Alison Green came with me as editorial director of picture books. One day soon after we’d started, Julia sent Axel the text of The Gruffalo, and, we decided to publish it. It was the resumption of what became a truly astonishingly successful partnership, though Julia’s texts were also wonderfully illustrated by other illustrators including Nick Sharratt, Julia Monks and David Roberts. After ten years, Alison and I moved to Scholastic, and Axel and Julia’s new books were published under the Alison Green Books imprint there, though Julia continued to publish other picture books with Macmillan and has had some books published by other publishers too. The first of several Scholastic Julia-and-Axel books was Tiddler, and the most recent one, The Highway Rat, comes out this autumn.
Julia is many things. She has a command of the combination of rhyme and story that is unparalleled, and that she produces excellent book after excellent book is breathtaking. She’s passionate about her work and a true perfectionist. She’s an absolutely brilliant and indefatigable performer with as much of an affinity with music (she introduced me to this, which is one of the many reasons I am eternally grateful to her) and drama as she has with words. She’s honest, outspoken (even if it’s sometimes about subjects on which we don’t entirely agree!) and approachable. She is, quite properly, famous.
I think Julia will be a highly-visible and committed advocate for reading, for printed books and – at this time of real need – for libraries, and, I am sure, for other things too, as her Laureateship evolves. She’ll be great.
I went to Philip Ardagh’s event at the Hay Festival yesterday. He was talking mainly, but far from exclusively, about his latest Grubtown Tales book for Faber and Faber, When Bunnies Turn Bad.
Honestly, I’d have gone even if he hadn’t been a Nosy Crow author (we’re publishing the first in his new series, The Grunts, next year, with illustrations by Axel Scheffler). His events are masterclasses in high-energy, interactive, stand-up comedy and for a child-and-parent audience, that weave together the story of how Philip became an author with lots of great scatalogical and tongue-in-cheek self-aggrandising material that had the child one along from me actually falling off her chair she was laughing so much.
However professional and brilliantly prepared Philip is, he can’t predict everything, and a high-point of the event was him putting his foot (clad, as everyone in the audience knows, in size 16) through the set of one of Hay’s two swankiest event spaces:
Philip worked the incident into the event so brilliantly that even the technicians in charge of the venue were laughing in the aisles. Here he is with a triangle of broken stage after the event:
I, for one, can’t wait for the Philip–Axel The Grunts double-act.
Hello, everyone. Pip and Posy here, posting from the Hay-on-Wye festival. It’s fantastic here – there are millions of books, quite a few clever grown-up people talking about books, and loads of wet other people wearing wellies. We even saw a royal Duchess (Camilla – no crown, but no wellies either).
The first thing we did when we arrived was run down to Penny Dale’sDinosaur Dig! event. Here’s Penny reading the story:
It was brilliant fun. We didn’t have to sit still, or behave ourselves properly or anything. Penny showed us how she drew the pictures which was really interesting – how do you get a T-rex’s tail in a dumper truck cab? But the best bit was when she got us all to stamp and stomp, and to roar a lot, just like in the book!
We had such a good time that Pip very nearly had a little accident, but we got to the (really nice) toilets just in time, so it was ok.
After that it was time to meet up with Axel Scheffler, for our very own show. He and Kate were on a big stage, with bright lights and loads of people watching. They told our stories, Pip and Posy: The Little Puddle and Pip and Posy: The Super Scooter. Axel did lots of pictures of us doing funny things, and Kate made everyone laugh by talking about wee and sick and things.
Axel even drew a picture of us meeting the Gruffalo, because, of course, even though people were very pleased to meet us, they all love the Gruffalo:
At the very end, we were allowed to come in and say hello to all the children:
It was lovely because absolutely everyone wanted to give us a cuddle:
Afterward, in the bookshop, Axel signed and signed copies of our books. And then he signed and signed some more. He was signing for an hour!
Then we all went back to the house where we were staying for dinner cooked by Adrian. With gooseberry fool for pudding – Hooray!
Really, I think, because I was in Australia on publication date, we haven’t taken time this month to celebrate the distillations of children’s book goodness that are our May publications.
And May was a big month for us: for the first time, we were publishing more than one print “thing”.
Just to remind those of you who are interested in a kind of “previously on Nosy Crow” kind of way:
In January, we published Small Blue Thing, so the list launched with a single romantic fantasy novel.
Dinosaur Dig was inspired by Penny’s pre-school grandson Zachary’s love of all things mechanical. It’s a counting book with (very benign) dinosaurs, mechanical earth-moving equipment, a bit of suspense and a swimming pool finale. It caters quite shamelessly for the obsessions of many, many small boys. One of the things we thought that they would respond to is the carefully-realised detail of the dinosaurs and the diggers: you can see every claw and every piston. This was a book that came in to Nosy Crow from Penny’s agent just weeks after we’d started up. It was a book that we’d made an offer for within an hour of opening the envelope with Penny’s beautifully detailed sketches in it. Here’s a little flavour of what the book looks like inside:
And, to give you a sense of how Penny works, here’s a movie of Penny (re)drawing the cover artwork on an iPad:
She’s written about the process of creating the book for a boy audience in a guest post for the Book Trust blog.
We’re in the run-up to Easter (and Passover’s begun – any good childeren’s versions of the Haggadah, people?), so it seemed interesting to ask people for their Easter and, more generally, spring book recommendations.
EASTER-SPECIFICTITLES
It seems that the most impressive – to me – children’s book telling the story of Easter, Jan Pienkowski’s Easter, is out of print. It combines King James Bible words with Jan’s trademark silhouettes against a marbled background.
@dredgewood suggested The Story of Easter by Christopher Doyle.
Tom, who’s interning here, and whose photography skills I’ve already roundly mocked, suggested that the great Easter children’s book is The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by CS Lewis. I looked puzzled. “But it’s about a world where it’s always winter and never Christmas,” I said. He reminded me of the Christian allegory of Aslan’s self-sacrifice for Edmund’s betrayal. Ahem. He is right, of course… though, as ever, I tend to see children’s books through the lens through which a child might look at it, and I don’t think that many 10 year olds will clock that allegory.
SPRINGTITLESMOREGENERALLY
Widening the search beyond Easter-specific titles, I asked Twitter followers about spring and chick ‘n’ bunny books.
There were a few generally spring-like suggestions.
@sarah_hilary proposed The Secret Garden, which is, after all, about a physical and metaphorical, transition from winter to early summer.
And, if we’re going general – and as maybe I’m thinking about it because of the current almost-full moon – what about The Very Hungry Caterpillar?
BOOKSWITHCHICKS, EGGSETC
I had the following suggestions that were poultry-based:
@prestonrutt suggested Ed Vere’s Chick.
@Discover_Story suggested The Odd Egg by Emily Gravett.
@AliB68 reminded me of The Spring Song in Tales from Moominvalley by Tove Jansson.
And I’d add a personal favourite, Ruby Flew Too by Jonathen Emmett and Rebecca Harry – read it as a parent and blub.
BOOKSWITHBUNNIES
There were some fine bunny-based suggestions too:
Camilla suggested Guess How Much I Love You (the office copy of which she’s just taken home to read aloud).
@prestonrutt suggested Emily Gravett’s The Rabbit Problem.
@dredgewood suggested The Country Bunny & The Gold Shoes by Du Bose Heyward.
Not a rabbit, but a hamster (so here because displaying impeccable rodent credentials and also because it has Easter in the title), was remembered fondly by @amandapollard, whose Haffertee’s First Easter by Janet and John Perkins was a Sunday School gift, “and undoubtedly the highlight of 8 years endured”.
@sarah_hilary suggested The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Wiliams (again, I think of this, in my literal-minded way as a Christmas book more than an Easter book) and it got two other votes too, so it made the list, on condition that no other edition than the William Nicholson illustrated edition is given house room, and I do love it.
Kate Burns suggested You’re a Hero, Daley B by Jon Blake, which was one of the first books that Axel Scheffler illustrated.
My own list would include:
Axel Scheffler’sPip and Posy and The Super Scooter (of course!), which not only features a very fine rabbit (Pip) but also feels very spring-like. As Julia Eccleshare says of this book in her round-up of new children’s books for this Easter in The Guardian, “Scheffler’s illustrations are full of comfort and gentle humour”.
Little Rabbit Foo Foo by Michael Rosen and Arthur Robins (just typing it makes me smile).
Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter (and @publishingmum mentioned Peter Rabbit too)
ACTIVITYBOOKS
There’s lots of spring/Easter activity stuff out there.
The very fine website, Parents in Touch, has done a post on spring and Easter activity books here
Also on the activity books theme, when I asked on Twitter for Easter book recommendations, Usborne amusingly simply sent me a link to their homepage and therefore all of their books. However, it is true that they have an awful lot of Easter titles here. When pressed, their tweeter selected First Activities: Easter Fun as their favourite Usborne Easter book.
A RELUCTANTAFTERTHOUGHT
And finally, I am, with a stone in my stomach, forced, too, to acknowledge that several people pointed out that the weekend following the Easter weekend is the Royal Wedding weekend (maybe this is just sour grapes: I will be flying to Australia). The Perfectly Pretty Royal Wedding Book was suggested by Scholastic, which I’d have ignored (sorry, Alyx), except that @librarymice said she was giving it to her daughter as part of her Easter book bundle. So here it is, included with a bit of a sigh.
So what’s missing from this list? Do let us know by sending us a comment.
This is a picture by Axel Scheffler, which he donated and which was sold to an anonymous buyer in aid of the National Literacy Trust. It shows the Gruffalo (and Mouse) with Pip and Posy going to the London Book Fair.
The London Book Fair, which has less of a rights focus and more of an export focus and is a general (as opposed to a children’s books) book fair, is very much secondary in importance to the Bologna Book Fair for Nosy Crow. It was particularly tough to focus on it this year as it came so hard on the heels of the Bologna Book Fair. It’s a fair at which, this year and last, we haven’t taken a stand, though I think we may have to rethink that for next year, given the number of messages left for us with the kind people of the Independent Publishers Guild stand.
On Monday, Deb presented our The Three Little Pigs app to a crowd of people in the children’s innovation space.
On Tuesday and on Wednesday (when Axel was, with Julia Donaldson, combined “author of the day”), Kate had a series of rights appointments. Some were with publishers who, for one reason or another, we were unable to see at Bologna, and some were follow-ups to Bologna apointments. We also had the chance to meet up with a few UK bookshop and other buyers.
Nosy Crow had been invited to participate in a Publishers Association presentation of key titles for the second half of the year to independent booksellers. We were the last of 12 publishers, and, the session was, perhaps inevitably, a bit of a “death-by-powerpoint” kind of thing, so we entirely abandoned our powerpoint, and spoke about just four things we’re publishing in the second half of this year, which I felt (on the hoof) gave some sense of the age-range and kind of books we cover: Pip and Posy: The Scary Monster ; Mega Mash-ups: Pirates and Ancient Egyptians in a Haunted Museum ; Olivia Flies High ; and our Christmas picture book, Just Right. Realistically, after seeing 70-odd titles, I thought that there wasn’t a chance of anyone remembering much about individual books, but I hoped that, by taking the less conventional approach, the independent booksellers would remember Nosy Crow, so that, when their Bounce rep came calling, they’d feel positively disposed towards the books.
I also did a talk as part of the Oxford Brookes University “Publishing Round The World” series, with an editor from Samokat and a founder of Milly Molly. Here’s me expounding Nosy Crow’s digital marketing thinking:
The photo above, which is as unflattering as it is grainy, was taken by Tom Bonnick, who’s interning with us. We wanted to check that his standards of photography are on the same level as our own if he is to continue to intern for us, and I am happy to say that they are! He did just take it with a phone, though, and from a long way away.
Lots of interviewers wanted to talk to him about his best-known books, The Gruffalo, which he illustrated and Julia Donaldson wrote and which I published at Macmillan perhaps almost 12 years ago. The book is regularly described as a modern classic and is the basis of an Oscar-nominated short film, not to mention a merchandising phenomenon, so this isn’t terribly surprising.
The Pip and Posy books are about a boy rabbit called Pip and a girl mouse called Posy. They all explore a bad thing that happens, that makes either Pip and Posy very sad, or angry or scared, and then the books show how they resolve those problems. So in Pip and Posy: The Super Scooter, Posy takes Pip’s scooter without asking and then she falls off it. Even though Pip was furious with Posy, he gives her a hug, and, though Posy’s hurt her knee, she cheers up and they both go and play in the sand pit. Though the stories are short, Axel wanted to communicate in the illustrations how angry Pip is and how sad and sorry Posy is. In Pip and Posy: The Little Puddle, Pip has an accident and does a wee on the floor. He’s really embarrassed, but Posy makes it all OK. He borrows some clothes, and the next time he has to do a wee, he does one in the potty. So every story has an low point – and “oh, dear” moment – and then, at the end, a high point – a “hooray” moment.
Axel’s ability to capture, for example, the expression on the face of a male rabbit asked to choose between two alternative dresses to wear after a puddle-on-the-floor accident is one of the reasons we think he’s utterly brilliant!
Here’s Axel talking to BBC radio Humberside:
The interview, together with interviews on BBC Humberside, BBC Ulster, BBC Bristol, BBC Wiltshire and BBC Cumbria, will be broadcast today, with others following over the next few days.
Kate’s been describing the books – rather tongue-in-cheek, of course – as “when bad things happen to good toddlers”. In each story, a bad thing happens – whether it’s that Pip forgets he needs a wee, and wets his trousers, or Posy snatches Pip’s scooter without asking and then falls off – but between them, Pip and Posy are able to sort things out and, together, go on to do something nice and happy. So they very much reflect the roller-coaster of pre-schoolers’ emotional lives.
Pip and Posy’s first outing was, in fact, at the Discover Centre in Stratford East and you can read about it here, but now they’re properly published. Axel nipped into Waterstone’s flagship store in Piccadilly to draw on their blackboards to celebrate and will be talking about Pip and Posy at Stratford, Hay, Edinburgh and Bath Literary Festivals this year.
We’ve sold rights to the USA/Canada, France, Germany, Sweden, Finland, Norway and Holland already, with many more languages to follow.
We’re proud of all of the books and apps we publish and of all of our authors, but it is the case that we were unusually and particularly lucky as a new independent publishing company to be able to persuade Axel to illustrate for us, and we’re hugely grateful to him for his leap of faith.
We’re marking the release of Pip and Posy with a competition to win a signed set of books.
So to be in with a chance of winning, please post a comment on our Facebook page or in the Comments field below telling us why you love Axel’s artwork. The winner will be picked at random. The closing date is Friday 15 April.
This is a series of four books by award-winning author Philip Ardagh. The books, which feature the eponymous and disgusting Grunt family, will be illustrated in black and white by Axel Scheffler and the first book, The Grunts in Trouble, will be published in May 2012.
Philip makes me laugh – as a person and as an author. Always has done, always will. His combination of professionalism and irreverence make him the perfect Nosy Crow author, and we are pleased and flattered that he’s chosen to publish with us. Pairing him with Axel Scheffler is going to make this an utterly irresistible series for children of 9 and up.
Philip says:
“I’m delighted that The Grunts, my latest series of (very silly) novels, is to be published by Nosy Crow with the crow so fresh from the egg, and still slightly yolky. For Axel Scheffler to have agreed to illustrate it — without my having to resort to threats of any kind — is the real icing on the metaphorical cake. I very much look forward to working with him, Kate Wilson, and the rest of the Nosy Crow team on what I hope will be some of my most outrageous books to date. These are exciting times! FUN just doesn’t express it.
And Axel says:
“It’s been several years since I’ve illustrated fiction, but there was an anarchy and humour in the outrageous Grunt characters that really appealed to me, and I look forward to working with Philip on his series with Nosy Crow.”
This is the most high-profile of several recent great fiction acquisitions, including a series of four titles by best-seller Holly Webb, that make it clear how serious Nosy Crow is about fiction publishing as well as full-colour publishing. We’ve got world rights in all languages for all of them, so there’ll be lots to talk about at the Bologna Book Fair next week.
Today, as well as announcing this acquisition, we have added our 2012 titles to the Books section of our website. We will publish 25 new titles this year, and at least 35 next year. This year we’ll launch 5 apps for iPad, iPhone and iPod touch and we’re planning to make at least 8 new apps in 2012.
About 100 people squashed into a room that had felt full when Neal from “Winged Chariot” and I had done an event about apps for 50 people on Thursday evening.
Discover Centre story-teller Rebecca took an audience of two to five year olds for a ride on the small-but-intense emotional roller-coaster of the first two Pip and Posy stories. Children shouted out in recognition of the puddle of wee on the floor that appears after Pip gets so involved in playing at being a lion that he forgets he needs to go to the loo in Pip and Posy: The Little Puddle. And they knew exactly how Posy felt when she scraped her knee after snatching Pip’s scooter in Pip and Posy: The Super Scooter.
Axel showed children and parents how he drew the world of Pip and Posy… and was interrupted by the arrival of Pip and Posy themselves – we’d picked up the costumes the previous day. Only two (very little) children cried, which is a bit of a result where costumes are concerned. There was a lot of shaking hands with Pip and Posy and much cuddling of them.
Here’s a really terrible photograph of Pip and Posy’s first encounter with small children.
Axel signed for well over an hour, drawing a little drawing in every book, whether it was a Pip and Posy book or a well-worn copy of The Gruffalo.
We’ve got very cheering videos of a pair of two year-olds reading each of the books in the “extras” tab for each book.
These books have simple rhyming texts and really sturdy mechanisms and are really great for children from 18 months to 3.
We’ve got some to send to reviewers and bloggers. So, if toddler books float your boat, let us know: contact us on hello@nosycrow.com with the subject line, Reviewing Bizzy Bear.
And if you are in East London today (4 March), you could come to our Bizzy Bear event at 11.30am for 45 minutes of songs, stories and colouring at the Discover Centre’sBig Write festival, where we’re doing other events, too:
I’ve written about it about it for The Bookseller online, but you can read about it here too:
I’m dating the start of the company from our announcement of our existence, which we sent to the trade press and others on 22 February 2010. In some ways, we didn’t feel quite ready to announce, but our hand was forced by two things. The first was that I had been asked to judge the British Book Awards and had given my job title as “MD of Nosy Crow” for an announcement of the make-up of the judging panels that came out in the week of 22 February 2010. The second was that I’d been messing around with Facebook on the evening of 21 February, working out how to set up a fan page and invite people to it, when I inadvertently sent out a message to my entire address book for a profile that referred to Nosy Crow.
We had, from memory, just three projects signed at the time we announced, and a stated intention to acquire from established talent and from newcomers. We also clearly stated that we intended to create apps from scratch. There were four of us – me, co-founders Camilla Reid and Adrian Soar, and Imogen Blundell – in a single room in an office complex in a Victorian school building.
One year on…
We have three print titles published. In mid-January, we published Small Blue Thing, a debut romantic fantasy that was written by the colleague of the headhunter I consulted when I was thinking I’d get the hell out of the industry. In mid-February, we published Mega Mash-up: Romans v Dinosaurs on MarsMega Mash-up: Robots v Gorillas in the Desert, innovative two-colour combinations of fiction and doodle-book drawing on popular boy themes by a team who came to us because I’d worked with one of them at Scholastic when he was a designer there.
This year, we will publish 23 print titles for children from 0 to 14, most acquired since February 22 2010. True to our original vision, these are books that children will really enjoy reading: when we acquire a book, we do so with a strong sense of who it’s for. Our books are by established names like Axel Scheffler and Penny Dale and from newer exciting talents. The list – and we’ll be announcing the first six months of 2012 before Bologna – will grow in 2012.
We have one e-book published. Small Blue Thing is our only black-and-white book so far and was the first ebook we created with the support of Faber Factory. I decided that we’d focus our digital aspirations on illustrated publishing and apps.
This year, we will publish 5 straight ebooks.
We have one app published. Last week, we published a cutting-edge story book app, The Three Little Pigs, to quite remarkable reviews (including one from FutureBook, The Bookseller’s digital publishing blog).
This year, we will publish at least 5 highly-interactive, cutting-edge, multimedia apps.
From the beginning, we were interested in using websites and social media to communicate with potential consumers – mainly parents in our case – as well as with potential suppliers in the form of authors and illustrators and customers. We launched with a lively website that has evolved over time but remains true to our original plan. We wanted to create something with real personality, that was professional but also warm, honest and informal… and that was updated constantly: we blog several times a week to provide a window into what we do. In our first year, we’ve had a over a quarter of a million page-views from over 20,000 visitors in 129 countries, and, since we’ve had books and apps on the market, visitor numbers have risen sharply. Thank you very much for visiting us.
We’ve sold in our first list via Bounce and have promotions with Sainsbury’s, Tesco, ELC/Mothercare, WH Smith, WH Smith Travel, Waterstones and Foyles. Our books are in shops from museum giftshops to Toys ‘R’ Us.
We’ve been active internationally too. In May, Allen and Unwin begins distributing our books in Australia and New Zealand. So far, we’ve sold rights in our books to Germany, France, Holland, Norway, Finland, Sweden, China, Korea and Israel with more good news lined up for announcement over the next few weeks.
There are 11 of us now. We’ve been able to attract the most extraordinary talent to work with us, from games coding genius, Will Bryan, to picture book supremo, Kate Burns. Most of us are parents; several of us work part-time; and several of us work from home and only come into our (slightly bigger) open-plan office occasionally.
There have been challenges and disappointments, and there will undoubtedly be more ahead! There has been constant, grinding, sometimes dull hard work.
We worry – of course we do – about the book market and our place in the print and digital future that is unfolding. But it’s been fun.
It’s been a good year!
Things we haven’t loved so much about this year:
Queuing at the post-office.
Being responsible for all the boring stuff like printer maintenance.
Cold-calling people without a big name behind us.
Things we’ve loved:
Being able to buy great books from authors and illustrators we want to work with as they develop.
Being able to act quickly and decisively.
Selling our books!
The conversations that have opened up online between us and readers, parents, creators and sellers.
Working with great colleagues in a relaxed and fun environment fuelled by cake.
In this case, we had planned the book, but when the roughs were done and the text in place, we felt that the pacing wasn’t spot-on. The pacing of a picture book, particularly what is revealed when you turn a page (as opposed to what you can see already see on the right-hand side of a page when you are reading the left-hand side of a page), is tremendously important, and one of those things that makes creating a really good picture book such a challenge and a skill.
Anyway, we got to work with photocopies of Axel’s rough sketches, bits of paper with the text on it, a pencil and some really big scissors to redesign how the book worked. I know it’s not hi-tech, but for us, it’s the best way.
Here’s Camilla, hand sketching so fast that the camera couldn’t catch it, at work.
The reworked roughs went back to Axel, who redrew some of the images, and we’ll have a full book of art to take to the Bologna Book Fair at the end of March.
Yesterday, Kate met up with Neal Hoskins (pictured) of Winged Chariot in the Crow’s Nest to talk about the opportunities for collaboration amongst apps publishers, and, specifically, children’s apps publishers. For all of us involved in apps publishing, the challenge is how people – parents in our case – find good apps among the ever-growing sea of apps on the store.
They also talked about the Bologna Tools of Change Conference 2011, which Neal is heavily involved in, and at which Kate will be a keynote speaker.
Then Kate and Imogen left for the Bounce Marketing sales conference for April to August titles in Islington, wrapping fizzy wine in the back of the car to give to the Bounce reps so they could drink to Nosy Crow’s first book (Small Blue Thing) being published on 13 January 2011. Kate presented to an enthusiastic audience of 18, and it was great to see how many of the reps had already read many of the titles: Bizzy Bear and Pip and Posy were being enthusiastically read by one sales manager’s two year-old. The six year-old “reluctant artist” son of one of the reps had loved completing his first Mega Mash-up book. And one of the reps told everyone how much she’d LOVEDOlivia’s First Term.
After a meeting at the Publisher’s Association about World Book Day 2012 (which’ll be the subject of another post), Kate met up with Imogen and Kirsty at Bounce’s Christmas Party, and Kirsty and Kate had to be asked to leave as the pub was closing. A fine time was had by all.
Since the beginning of October, Kate has been to Germany three times (OK, once it was for the Frankfurt Book Fair, but still…), has been to France and Holland once each and has been round the world in 11 days, flying from London to the East Coast of America and then on to Sydney (a trip that involved two 21 hour flights in 3 days).
The purpose of all this travel? She’s trying to find homes for Nosy Crow’s titles in different countries and languages. There’s lots of interest from lots of people in lots of things. Kate (with Adrian) saw 120 people in Frankfurt and 30+ publishers or imprints of publishers in the USA over 5 days (it was like speed-dating, really: her most remarkable day involved 11 appointments in 14 hours).
We’re following all the expressions of interest up diligently,and will have more to announce soon, but one important big deal has come out of all the travelling so far: we’ve appointed our Australian distributor, Allen and Unwin. As well as being Australia’s biggest and best Australian publisher (they’ve won the Publisher of the Year award nine times), they’re independent and… very nice, being enthusiastic and easy to deal with. And they’re based in Crows Nest, which is a bit of Sydney. How good an omen is that?
As well as distributing Nosy Crow, they distribute a handful of important UK publishers like Faber, Profile and Bloomsbury. It is, really, a privilege to have been added to their portfolio, because they don’t say “yes” to just anyone.
As Robert Corman, who is the CEO of Allen and Unwin, said in a press release:
“At Allen and Unwin we love partnering with clever independent publishers. That is why we are delighted to be representing Nosy Crow in Australia and New Zealand. We greatly look forward to helping them grow their business in the ANZ market.”
And Liz Bray, Children’s Book Director of Allen and Unwin, says:
“We’ve been following Nosy Crow’s activities with great interest since they announced their establishment in the UK earlier this year and admired the energy, savvy and passion of their team as well as the books they’re producing. We’re thrilled to have the opportunity to work with them in Australia and New Zealand on books from much-loved creators like Axel Scheffler as well as new stars including S.C. Ransom. Nosy Crow’s innovative, child-focused books have great potential in our markets and will be a fantastic complement to our own publishing and the wonderful children’s lists we distribute.”
So that’s another important part of Nosy Crow’s jigsaw in place, and we are very chuffed.
Axel Scheffler and his family spent the weekend with Kate and Adrian and their family on the border of England and Wales.
They ate cake and chatted and walked in the Brecon Beacons National Park and jumped into the Wye from a seven-metre cliff (well, some of them did).
But what this image shows is that you can’t keep a good illustrator down. Without his normal artistic accoutrements, and armed only with a few pebbles and twigs, Axel made this picture of a pirate and his dog, which made us smile and which we share with you.
Camilla, Adrian and Kate went to Axel Scheffler’s exhibition and sale of art at glorious independent book shop, Daunt Books, in Marylebone High Street (Axel signing, pictured).
Brilliant paper engineer, Nick Denchfield was there with illustrators Ant Parker and Helen Cowcher. Lots of old publishing friends were there including Ian Craig (ex Random House, now the wilds of Scotland), Alison Green (Alison Green Books, Scholastic), Lisa Edwards (Scholastic) and Louise Bolongaro (Penguin) together with journalists and literary agents and scouts.
It was, as always, a huge pleasure to see gruffalos, witches, ducks, rabbits and geese in all their original artwork glory.
A bunch of us went out for pizza afterwards – and Axel’s daughter, Adelie (two and a half) – joined us, and, frankly, was less tired than the rest of us by the end of the evening.
Today, Kate was interviewed by Anja Steig of Buchreport, Germany’s book industry magazine: it’s great to think that she chose Nosy Crow as one of the people she wanted to talk to while she was here: tomorrow, she’s interviewing Dominic Myers, MD of Waterstones.
Waterstones will be important to Nosy Crow when we start selling books next year, but here’s an interesting and not altogether cheering US book industry statistic reported by Jane Friedman (@JaneFriedman) from BEA (Book Expo America) today: 7% of books published generate 87% of sales and 93% of all published books sell less than 1,000 copies each.
Children’s publisher Nosy Crow has made three new additions to its fledgling list in the run-up to Bologna, including two books with illustrator Axel Scheffler.
“I’ve really noticed that once children have got the hang of walking and made a start on talking, they begin to get bored with simple board books and become interested in longer stories. Their concentration levels increase and they are able to understand plot as well as starting to relate to character more and more.
“And as toddlers, children begin to encounter all sorts of new situations and experiences, not all of which are positive! Whether they are losing a treasured balloon, falling off a scooter or having an ice cream, a toddler’s world quickly becomes much more complex – and their emotional spectrum broader. From delight, to frustration, to jealousy, to fury, and back to joy, a two year-old can experience a whole range of feelings – often in the course of a single hour!”
Pip and Posy books explore the high drama of toddler life.
Axel is, of course, one of the illustrators in our Who’s your favourite children’s book illustrator survey, and your last chance to take the survey is at before 6.00pm today, when voting will close. We’ll announce the winner in our Monday post.
We’ve received two illustrations to mark the launch of Nosy Crow. The first we received was this one, from one of our favourite illustrators, Axel Scheffler.
Thanks to those of you who suggested favourite illustrators in public comments to the web, and to those of you who wrote in directly, after yesterday’s House of Illustration post.
We said we’d do a Who’s your favourite children’s book illustrator survey, so click on the link to let us know what you think. The illustrators listed are all ones that appeared in the original post, or that you’ve suggested to us subsequently. Of course, we think all the illustrators we’re working with are great, but we felt that it wouldn’t be entirely democratic if our own choices were over-represented. We’ll tell you who your top five are next week.
Kate went to the hilariously-named Society of Bookmen dinner last night with that nice Carly Cook from Headline. The debate was, “We (or this house, or something formal like that) believe that celebrity publishing is good for the booktrade.” Carly knows her celebrity onions and no mistake. It’s a funny old society, and Kate was told that she can’t tell you the result of the debate, or she’ll have to kill you. She thought that the speakers – Mark Booth for and Liz Thompson against – seemed to hold views that were pretty similar, actually … but, of course, she’s bound by the rules of the society to conceal from you exactly what those views were. In fact, what with the secrecy thing, it all turns out to be less good post-fodder than she’d hoped …!
Yesterday evening Kate went to the Quayle Munro party, a champagney affair at the Reform Club. This necessitated a stop-off at home to change into a serious dress and real heels – very unlike what she wears to work these days. She talked briefly to her hosts including the spectacularly chic and charming Kit van Tulleken and to various familiar and cheerful people who wave the flag of independence like Andrea Carr of Rising Stars and Klaus Flugge of Andersen Press.
They all welcomed Nosy Crow to the independent fold. Though she didn’t have a clue who most of the suited men in the room were, she found out that Nigel Newton, head honcho at Bloomsbury, is very impressively learning Arabic – not at the party, obviously, but in what passes for spare time in Publishing Land. Brilliant ex-colleague and chum Denise Cripps from Scholastic was there and so was Peter Mayer (on whom Kate has always had a bit of a crush since he helped her carry her own weight in children’s book dummies at a Bologna book fair about 25 years ago), but he was so surrounded by devotees that she didn’t have a chance to get at him.
Then on, on a bit late and through the rain and wind in silly shoes to the lovely Osokool Gallery in Blackheath, above the Handmade Food Cafe and Deli which is run by Ferg and Vicki (that’s Vicki with Axel in the picture), for the opening of an exhibition of Axel’s Hand Made Food Drawings which runs from February 25 to March 27. Lots of art featuring food by Axel, most of it for sale and all proceeds to one of several charities (you get to chose which one). What are you waiting for?
