These are very simple rhyming touch-and-feel books that would, I think, be exactly right for a baby aged between 6 and 18 months. When we were looking for an illustrator (Marion Billet is French, and none of us had worked with her before), we were influenced by the look of Japanese packaging, and Camilla had a line up of various Japanese biscuits and sweets on her desk.
We’ve sold rights to the books to the US (they’re going to be published under the Nosy Crow imprint by Candlewick). And that was an interesting process: Noodle was originally eating (chopped up) sausages and strawberries (not together, of course: that would be revolting), but Candlewick thought that sausages would be viewed as being bad for young children, and said that US paediatricians discouraged parents from giving strawberries to babies and toddlers because they were allergenic. So we changed the sausages to pasta (you can see on the “sausages” version, which is a proof, the line that indicates where the card will be cut so that the green, bumpy fabric can be felt through the hole):
Noodle with his sausages
Noodle with pasta
And we changed the strawberries to raspberries.
This was expensive and time-consuming (I mean, we love Candlewick, so nothing’s too much trouble, but still…). However, the only way that illustrated books (and particularly touch-and-feel books) are financially viable to produce is if we can collect together a really big print-run, printing our own (UK and Australia/New Zealand) copies together with copies for as many other countries as we can sell rights to. So, if you’re creating illustrated books, you have to accommodate the taste (literally, in this instance) and the cultures of different countries.
There are people who argue that this “internationalisation” leads to bland books. I don’t think it does, and looking round the halls at Bologna, I am always struck by the variation and I am very sure that many really great books wouldn’t get published if you only had the UK market to rely on: the example that I always give is that of The Gruffalo, of which, I think, perhaps 1,500 hardback copies were printed for the UK/Australia/New Zealand, but a financially viable print run was made up of this quantity plus quantities in other languages.
We’ve also so far sold rights in these books in Dutch, Portuguese and Italian – to countries where, it seems, pasta and raspberries are absolutely fine for babies – so it all ended well for Noodle.
It may well be true that Father’s Day is without a jot of authentic tradition to its name, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t fun to celebrate. At Nosy Crow we’ve been listing our favourite dads in children’s literature all week, and what started out as a harmless pub game between Kate, Camilla and me has spiralled rather dramatically into a mammoth collection of categories, sub-categories and clauses.
Being a bit of a purist about these things, I initially protested to Kate that our list should be comprised only of nice dads, and that bad dads would go against the spirit of the exercise somewhat – this is for father’s day after all! – but we all realised pretty quickly that a lot of the best characters are really awful fathers.
This initial concession led to a proliferation of different categories.
Here are our best categories and our strongest nominations, with, where I felt it necessary, some context or justification. Please add your own categories or nominations in the comments below or on Twitter with the hashtag #kidsbookdads or Facebook!
Good dads:
William from Danny, the Champion of the World (written by Roald Dahl and illustrated by Quentin Blake, see the picture above). This is a pretty uncomplicated one – I think we can all agree that William is an amazing and exciting dad (even if he does lead his son into a life of crime). The opening chapter is a really lovely and quite moving tribute to the relationship between father and son.
The dad in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang by Ian Fleming is another good example of an exciting dad.
The dad in Millions by Frank Cottrell Boyce is a favourite of Kate’s.
Big Nutbrown Hare from Guess How Much I Love You (written by Sam McBratney and illustrated by Anita Jeram). Big Nutbrown Hare is never specifically referred to as Little Nutbrown Hare’s father, but I think we’re invited to assume as much.
Gorilla from Gorilla and the dad in My Dad by Anthony Browne are pretty good entries from the outgoing Children’s Laureate…
… And we have two from the incoming one: Stick Man from Stick Man whose quest is to get back to his family tree, and the Gruffalo, from The Gruffalo’s Child, who tries to warn his adventurous child against the mouse. Both are written by Julie Donaldson and illustrated by Axel Scheffler.
Pa Ingalls from Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder.
John Arable from Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White.
And Tango Makes Three, by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson and illustrated by Henry Cole, is an inspired choice by Camilla – the true story of the two male penguins in New York’s Central Park Zoo who raised a baby penguin together.
Two excellent suggestions by Kate B were Mr. Brown from Paddington (by Michael Bond) and Pongo from 101 Dalmations (by Dodie Smith).
Atticus Finch from To Kill A Mockingbird (by Harper Lee). I have had to lobby quite hard for inclusion of Atticus Finch: on the one hand, he is, of course, the greatest father in any book, but is To Kill A Mockingbird really children’s literature? Well, it was treated as such on its release in 1960, and it’s taught all over the world in schools, so I think that makes it not not children’s literature.
Kate made the very interesting suggestion of Anne Frank’s father, “especially in contrast to how she portrayed her mother”.
My contribution to the sub-category of real-life good dads is Michael Rosen in his poems about his son Eddie, which reach their heartbreaking conclusion in Michael Rosen’s Sad Book.
Kate B also suggested James Potter from the Harry Potter books, which to begin with seemed like a silly suggestion to me; certainly not worthy of the Pongo/ Mr. Brown company in which it stood – James isn’t even alive in the books! – but it is, of course, actually an excellent choice. James dies protecting his family from Voldemort – a powerful symbol of fatherly love, and he’s there in Harry’s mind throughout the books.
James Potter segues seamlessly into our next category…
Absent dads:.
There are quite a lot of these in children’s books, ranging from dads who’ve abandoned their children to dads who are absent through no fault of their own.
The father in The Railway Children. I can’t remember his name, but it doesn’t matter – he’ll always be “Daddy, my daddy!” to me, in the manner of Dead Poets Society and “Captain, my captain”.
The fathers in Jacqueline Wilson’s The Illustrated Mum and Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women were both examples of Kate’s category of “Absent Dads who are the Deus Ex Machina, resolving things at the end or making the ending happy”, as is the dad in The Tiger Who Came To Tea by Judith Kerr.
Bad dads:
Interestingly, a lot of bad fathers are defined in terms of their absence (in another blog post I’m sure there’d be a lot to say about that…) Some literary dads, however, would leave their offspring a lot better off if they did disappear.
Surely the absolute worst dad ever is Huck Finn’s; the violent town drunk who locks his son in a cabin and leaves him to starve. If we can have To Kill A Mockingbird then we can probably sneak in Huck Finn.
An excellent contender for the same title must be Matilda’s dad (from Roald Dahl’s Matilda)
Kate B points out that many fairy tale dads, such as the fathers in Hansel and Gretel, Snow White and Cinderella, behave shockingly badly towards their offsping, though they’re often under the influence of wicked stepmothers.
Bad dads who become good:
This is a more heartwarming category and it seems to be an popular archetype in children’s books:
The father in our very own Olivia’s First Term, by Lyn Gardner is viewed by some of us as a bit of a bad dad, but others of us felt this was harsh, and that he really was doing his best in difficult circumstances.
Other complicated and difficult dads who are more or less redeemed at the end of the book or books include Lord Asriel, from the trilogy His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman; Mortmain, from I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith; Mr. Darling from Peter Pan; and Colin’s dad in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Secret Garden
Tom Oakley from Goodnight Mister Tom by Michelle Magorian.
Joe Gargery in Great Expectations by Charles Dickens.
The magnificent Akela from Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book.
Finally (!), here are a few that didn’t quite fit anywhere:
Kirsty called the dad in Angus, Thongs, and Full-Frontal Snogging “the best comedy dad”, and nominated the dads in Big Red Bath and Peepo“ for the title of “Best at giving baths dad”. And Charlie and the Chocolate Factory demonstrates the “Dad upstaged by grandfather” genre rather well…
As you can see, once you’ve started, it is hard to stop.
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.
Pictured here is one small boy absorbed in Bizzy Bear: Let’s Go and Play, having first fetched his own football because it’s just like Bizzy Bear’s. He enjoyed the sturdy, imaginative push-and-pull tabs and sliders and especially loved the being able to pass the ball from Bizzy Bear to his friend and back again. We stayed on that page for some time. Never has spot-the-ball been so much fun, for child or parent!”
“I was off to Waterstones today, to show them material on our books from May to August. May is the first month in which we have more than one book or pair of books from the same series, so that felt like a bit of a breakthrough.
Lyn Gardner is a terrific children’s writer and a Guardian theatre critic, who has brought her skill, her passion and her knowledge together to create the Olivia books, which are classy-but-commercial Ballet Shoes meets Malory Towers for today’s 8+ girl reader. The first book in the series, Olivia’s First Term publishes in June.
Dinosaur Dig! is Penny Dale’s innovative combination of two things little boys (in particular) love: dinosaurs and diggers. These dinosaurs are (spoiler alert!) digging a swimming pool and making a lot of noise about it. The book was inspired by Penny’s construction vehicle-obsessed grandson, Zachary, to whom the book is dedicated. The book publishes in May.
The Noodle books by French illustrator Marion Billet are touch and feel books with a very attractive panda character whose life reflects the daily activities and excitements of most babies under the age of 18 months. Two books publish in May and two in August.
Where possible, we try to make sure that books with a summery themes, featuring holidays, or swimming, or beaches, which are, therefore, possible summer reading promotion contenders, are published in these months, so the ocean setting of the third Mega Mash-up, the beach holiday theme of Bizzy Bear: Off We Go! and of Noodle Loves the Beach, as well as the swimming pool finale of Dinosaur Dig! all make them books we think babies and children would be in the right frame of mind for as the weather gets warmer. Trudging through the rain, weaving round discarded and dessicated Christmas trees this morning, it was hard to believe we’d ever see summer again, but publishing is always about thinking ahead: full-colour books take months to get from the printer to the warehouse, and we are selling rights and doing highlights presentations up nine months, and even more, ahead of the books being available to readers.
The first presentation – to Waterstones – went very well. Lots more presentations to come…”
It’s far too early for Nosy Crow (which, let’s remember, hasn’t published a book yet) to be submitting books to awards, but Kate loves books for babies and pre-schoolers.
Once, many years before she had babies herself (and so many, many years ago), Kate went to Wigan.
She went to Wigan because Wigan Council (forgive her: she thinks this is right, but her memory is a bit hazy as to the exact body), was excited by the results coming out of the early Bookstart research. They wanted to give books to every baby in Wigan, because they believed that early exposure to books made children:
more successful at school
more ready to start school
more likely to read and talk about books
more likely to visit libraries and borrow books from libraries
more likely to have books bought for them and read to them
Kate had just acquired independent publisher Campbell Books from its founder Rod Campbell (whose Goodnight Buster was shortlisted for the Baby Book Award this evening) for Macmillan, the company she then worked for. She’d always been interested in baby books, but Campbell Books was really all about babies and toddlers. She said to Wigan Council that she’d give them some books to give to Wigan babies, and they invited her to come to a Sainsbury’s in Wigan to recruit babies and their parents for the Wigan Bookstart scheme. She’ll never forget approaching parents of a toddler to ask if they’d be interested in joining the scheme, and being looked at as if she were mad: “He can’t read! He’s only two years-old!”. Or being photographed with a baby who stiffened in astonishment when she opened a book – a child who’d perhaps never seen pages turned before, and whose mother acknowledged that there were no books in the house.
At one point, when the National Bookstart Programme ran out of money, just before the government committed to supporting it, Campbell Books donated over 600,000 books to the programme to help keep it going.
So Nosy Crow will publish books for babies because if you don’t start at the very beginning, how can you expect to engage readers later.
This evening, three awards were made by children’s book expert Wendy Cooling on behalf of Booktrust.
The first was for the Best Book For Babies, and went to I Love My Mummy by Giles Andreae, illustrated by Emma Dodd. The book was, as it happens, designed by Steph Amster, who’s joining the Nosy Crow team on 13 September.
The second was for the Best Picture Book (for children under five), and went to evolution tale, One Smart Fish by Chris Wormell. Kate was especially pleased to see two books from the Alison Green Books list on the shortlist, one of them written by Alison herself: Alison was a colleague of Kate’s for 17 years.
The third was for the Best Emerging Illustrator and went to Levi Pinfold for The Django, for his detailed, painterly and highly sophisticated picture book artwork. The book’s published by Templar, who share with Nosy Crow Bounce as their UK and export trade sales agency.
Worthwhile awards. Nice people. Fun evening.
Oh, and Kate tweeted the awards (so apologies if this is all old news). In the course of the event someone asked her to recommend books for a one year-old. Off the cuff, these were her suggestions:
Each Peach Pear Plum
We’re Going on a Bear Hunt
Goodnight Moon
Dear Zoo
The Very Hungry Caterpillar
The Big Book of Beautiful Babies
What books would you suggest? Let us know by commenting on the post.
