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.
In February, we published Mega Mash-up: Romans v Dinosaurs on Mars and Mega Mash-up: Robots v Gorillas in the Desert. Two titles, yes, but both launching the same innovative “doodle books meet chapter books” series series. In February, we also published our first app, The Three Little Pigs, so that was a big month too.
In March, we published Bizzy Bear: Fun on the Farm and Bizzy Bear: Let’s Go and Play, our first board books. Again, two titles, and, again, one series.
In April, we published Pip and Posy: The Super Scooter, and Pip and Posy: The Little Puddle.
And, now, in May, we published Penny Dale’s Dinosaur Dig and Marion Billet’s Noodle Loves to Cuddle and (in time for summer) Noodle Loves the Beach. So three titles and two very different things.
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 children, particularly, it seems, 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.
Noodle Loves to Cuddle and Noodle loves the Beach are rhyming touch-and-feel board books illustrated in a fresh, graphic style by popular French illustrator, Marion Billet.
Here’s a little home movie of toddlers enjoying Noodle Loves to Cuddle:
And here’s one of the same children reading Noodle Loves the Beach:
Let us know, by commenting below, if you’d like to know any more about any of our three May books.
