Bedtime stories

One for the mamas and the papas out there...
Go the F*ck To Sleep is described as 'a bedtime book for parents who live in the real world, where a few snoozing kitties and cutesy rhymes don't always send a toddler sailing off to dreamland. Honest, profane and affectionate, Adam Mansbach's verses and Ricardo Cortés' illustrations perfectly capture the familiar - and unspoken - tribulations of putting your little angel down for the night, and open up a conversation about parenting in the process.' 
Here's a sample:

The cats nestle close to their kittens now.
The lambs have laid down with the sheep.
You're cozy and warm in your bed, my dear
Please go the f*ck to sleep.

Order your copy here!

Get the message

The New York Public Library spelled it out to the people this month, promoting the Read Across America campaign via a 9x13m display of 25,000 Dr Seuss books. As the good doctor said: 'The more you that read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go.' - I Can Read With My Eyes Shut

Golden Books glamour

Remember Golden Books ...Who have imagined someone would turn them into a princess gown one day...? Check out Ryan Novelline's website to see how he constructed this gown from the pages of hundreds of fairytale stories. 

Little Red's makeover

Swedish artist Daniel Egnéus has brought Little Red Riding Hood back to life with an 'ethereal' and 'romantic' 21st Century makeover, in conjunction with a new movie version of the classic story. No doubt fairytale collectors will send this 80-page hard cover, described as an art book-graphic novel hybrid, straight to the pool room.
Egnéus says that in his version of the Brothers Grimm fable the characters are elegant and upper class. 
'Making them more pompous and living in enormous castles allowed me to have more fun. I purposely dressed them in extremely big clothing.'
One image, set in palatial surrounds, shows Red and her mother wearing Pre-Raphaelite-style gowns five metres in length. And in this iteration, the wolf adds 'debonair' to his scary, calculating character. 
'The wolf has the clothing of Casanova,' says Egnéus, who dressed him in an elaborate, floor-length cape and cavalier hat with a plume. 
Run ladies run! We've all come across wolves of that description in the wee small hours of a Sydney Friday night...

Curious George

Recognise this face? The gorgeous illustrations? Curious George, the famous storybook monkey who was spirited away from Africa and escaped his captor to lead a life of adventure travelling the globe (moved to America, joined the circus) and beyond (became an astronaut), has delighted kids everywhere with his cheeky exploits.
But his creators' exploits were equally epic and they're being celebrated in an exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York. Curious George Saves the Day: The Art of Margaret and H.A. Rey uncovers the real life dramas of the artists whose lives played out against the dark historical backdrop of the Holocaust.
English readers may know the little rascal as George but as 'Zozo' - UK publishers changed his name thinking it would be disrespectful to have a mischievous monkey with the same name as the sitting king. 
Pity, I reckon the Royals could do with a little monkey magic.

Peas on earth

It's a little late for more Christmas cheer, but this is pretty cool. Chris Cleave, who I've mentioned here a few times and who wrote the excellent Incendiary and The Other Hand, penned a Christmas tale. Peas on Earth is a little thing he wrote and illustrated himself to entertain his young kids and it presents the writer in a private light as a regular funny, silly dad - quite a departure from his novels.
Cleave has published it as a free e-book on his blog so you can give your kids a laugh.

Fun for kids

Remember the last time you used a public telephone to make a call? 

No, neither do I.

Came across the blog of illustrator Max Dalton and found his great work on a new book for kids. Written by Peter Ackerman with graphics by Dalton, The Lonely Phonebooth is a story of a public phone that suffers a crippling identity crisis after being rendered redundant by the cellular generation. I won't go into the plot but this is a children's book so... all's well that ends well. Cool idea for a kid's Christmas stocking. You can get your copy here.

A bit of light reading...

What richer fodder could an occupation provide for a writer than the life of a lighthouse keeper? 
Think To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf; By the Seaside: The Lighthouse, Longfellow; the recent Australian film South Solitary; the children's story The Lighthouse Keeper's Daughter, Arielle North Olson...
But what if you really were a lighthouse keeper, and you lived in a spiral tower on some godforsaken rocky outcrop battered by tempests with only passing seagulls, the odd shipwrecked sailor and thousands of miles of oceans for company...?
That's what it must have been like in the 1800s....and then someone came up with a brilliant idea. 
In 1876, the Light-House Establishment in America started distributing portable libraries to lighthouse keepers in remote off-shore stations. A system was set up for distribution via light vessels, exchange and updating of texts, so that once a box-load of books had been read by one lighthouse keeper and his family (if he had one) they were shipped off to the next recipient and replaced with a new delivery.
The books were largely fiction but technical volumes were included when requested. All books remained the property of the The Light-House Establishment and were marked in the front with an official bookplate.
Check out these crazy titles from a typical lighthouse library:
Lamont, James. SEASONS WITH THE SEA-HORSES; OR, SPORTING ADVENTURES IN THE NORTHERN SEAS. New York. 1861. 282p. Describes sailing and sporting adventures in the northern latitudes. Illustrated.
Taylor, Bayard. AT HOME AND ABROAD - A SKETCHBOOK OF LIFE, SCENERY AND MEN. New York. 1893. 500p. Decorated cloth. With black and white engravings, etc.
Torpelius, Z. THE SURGEON'S STORIES - TIMES OF CHARLES VII. Chicago. 1884. 349p. Third in a series of six Swedish historical romances, translated from the Swedish.
Chaillu, Paul Du. MY APINGI KINGDOM: WITH LIFE IN THE GREAT SAHARA, AND SKETCHES OF THE CHASE OF THE OSTRICH, HYENA &c. New York. 1879. 254p. Beautiful brown decorated cloth. With black and white engravings, etc.



Images courtesy of the Michigan Lighthouse Conservancy.

Classic cover

How beautiful is this! The original cover art for E.B White's 1952 classic Charlotte's Web sold at auction to a New York collector for US$155,000. The graphite and ink illustration by Garth Williams features farmgirl Fern Arable holding the saved-from-slaughter pig Wilbur, with Charlotte spinning her web above them. If you look closely you can still see the production notes around the edges. The same cover art has been used for over 58 years and in 2000, Publisher's Weekly named Charlotte's Web the best selling children's book ever. 
Williams first teamed with White for the cover of the mousecapade Stuart Little.

Updating Blyton a blight on the next gen?

Seventy years on, six feet well and truly under, Enid Blyton can still stir up a frothy conversation. Bravo! 
Outrage and dismay, it's fair to say, were the order of the day after making mention of publishers in England updating ten of Enid Blyton's fabulous Famous Five adventures. In an effort to make them more palatable to the fickle appetite of Gen-whatever-we're-up-to-now, it's goodbye to 'fancy that!' and 'splendid idea George, what a brainwave!' and hello to the dumbed-down 'wow' and 'ok George'.
Comments on Saturday's post sprang to mind today when I came across this observation from the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, on the decline of Latin as the language of scholars in the early 1800s.
He said that turning to writing in one's mother tongue, instead of Latin: "excommunicated modern scholars from the benefits of belonging to a universal community of scholars that was not restricted by the contingencies of time and place of birth. 
"By reading Latin, not only was it possible to enjoy the thoughts and insights of Roman antiquity, but one could become acquainted with Scotus Erigena of the ninth century, John of Salisbury of the 12th, and Raymond Lull of the 13th, and hundreds of others, something that could not have been the case had they written in their native languages.
"Without preserving Latin, moreover, and by not writing in Latin, one's own works could not speak to future scholars.
"...There was also the loss of the humanising effects of Latin authors, which followed from the decline in the knowledge of Latin. The humane and honest ways in which classical writers considered the individual, the community, and nature were natural tonics for the pernicious and stupefying effects of the Middle Ages, with its...half brutal, half idiotic chivalry from which modern society still suffered."
Ouch. He goes on to say that the use of national languages - which disseminated the work of scholars across a broader audience - also served to dilute the population of serious readers.
Therein lies the double-edged sword. 
Translating, updating, modernising etc serves to increase the reach and, therefore, influence of a classic body of work, but in doing so runs the risk of diminishing its value because it's received by an audience that possibly isn't well enough equipped to understand or appreciate its true worth.
A case in point.  Tony Summerfield, who runs the Enid Blyton Society, commenting in  The Guardian said that he is "thoroughly against unnecessary changes just for the sake of it, from adults who underestimate the intelligence of children."
On hearing that publishers intended to change the name of the circus boy, Nobby, in Five Go Off in a Caravan to Ned, Summerfield was dumbfounded. 
"How can you change Nobby to Ned and yet leave Dick and Fanny? It doesn't make sense."
Indeed. 
So, what the next Gen makes of Julian, Dick and Anne, George and Timmy the dog remains to be seen. Anyone have an age appropriate crash test dummy to experiment on? 
And, can anyone you know speak Latin these days?

Five meet the 21st century

Once a treasure always a treasure… even if means changing the lingo. They've done it to the Ancients - Homer, Socrates, Ovid - and the Classics - Shakespeare, Goethe, Milton - too many to mention, so that we modern plebs can access, appreciate and perpetuate the creative greats. Now they're giving the marvellous Enid Blyton a turn.

The Guardian reports that, approaching 70 years since they were written, publishers have ‘updated’ Enid Blyton’s Famous Five series because they feared her 1940s vernacular was putting off 21^st century kids.

Commenting on Hodder’s decision to release ten updated versions of Blyton’s Famous Five novels, journalist Alison Flood bade “farewell’ to “awful swotters,” “dirty tinkers” and “jolly japes,” explaining:

“Hodder is ‘sensitively and carefully’ revising Blyton’s text after research with children and parents showed that the author’s old-fashioned language and dated expressions were preventing young readers from enjoying the stories. The narrative of the novels will remain the same, but expressions such as ‘mercy me!’ have been changed to ‘oh no!,’ ‘fellow’ to ‘old man’ and ‘it’s all very peculiar’ to ‘it’s all very strange.’ …

“Other changes include ‘housemistress’ becoming ‘teacher,’ ‘awful swotter’ becoming ‘bookworm,’ ‘mother and father’ becoming ‘mum and dad,’ ‘school tunic’ becoming ‘uniform’ and Dick’s comment that ‘she must be jolly lonely all by herself’ being changed to ‘she must get lonely all by herself.’”

Mercy me! The old lady might be rolling in her grave, but hopefully happily, as it signifies her perpetuity.

Literary adventures in New York

Remember the lovely story of The Very Hungry Caterpillar and its gorgeous illustrations? Author/illustrator Eric Carle has a blog where he shares his thoughts on creativity and where I found this cool picture.

He used it in reference to an article about pretzels in the New York Times that talks about bakeries in NYC where you can buy freshly baked pretzels. Carle gets drooly just talking about soft fluffy bread, in fact, he even wrote a book about a baker. Walter the Baker tells the tale of how the pretzel was invented. 

Why am I talking about this? Because as you cast your eyes upon this blog I'm in the French Alps having a bread-fest of my own...mmm...le baguette...le pain...le yummo!

Books at play...

Lucky kids in Beijing! The city has possibly the coolest children's bookstore on the planet. Kids Republic was designed by architect Keiichiro Sako. Along with picture books from all over the world, it has an activity room for storytelling and animation screenings. Check out the round reading nooks and playground style layout.

Laureate of the larrikan

Long after the clock struck 12 while tripping the Sydney Harbour night fantastic last week, my friend Angelina and I hopscotched our way along the Writers Walk at Circular Quay.
It's a personal ritual whenever I walk the Walk, that I never walk on any of the writers. I make sure I step carefully around them, out of respect. You know?
Anyway, there we were, just past A.D. Hope and James A. Michener, and a stone's throw from Mark Twain when, in my haste to get to Banjo Paterson I almost missed C.J. Dennis altogether. 
One of my childhood heroes, his Book for Kids, with its distinctly blue-ish spine and musty, dog-eared pages, still gets an airing by me a few times a year. The poems and vivid pictures in it are nothing less than awesome. (The Triantiwontigongolope - for example - a triumph of the imagination!) Dennis wrote poems for grown ups as well - Songs of a Sentimental Bloke is probably his most popular collection - but it's the rollicking kids rhymes I like best.
C.J. Dennis' plaque on the Writers Walk spruiks a quote from the man they called the Laureate of the larrikan:
It 'appened one day, I 'ad jist come down,
After long years, to look at Sydney town.
'An 'struth! Was I knocked endways? Fair su'prised?
I never dreamed! That arch that touched the skies!
The Bridge!...
       - I Dips Me Lid (1936)
Now if only some clever soul could translate C.J.Dennis' ingenious tales into a 3D animated film, a DS game or an iPhone app, perhaps the next generation of kids would come to know and love his genius too.

A rockin' read...

Haha - this is my kind of children's book! Thanks to my little friend Angus for the recommendation. M is for Metal, The Loudest Alphabet Book on Earth by Paul McNeil and Barry Divola, in which a motley crew of old rockers appears in fabulous technicolour, reinvented Spinal-Tap-style-for-kids. The Rolling Stones, Ozzie Osborne, Gene Simmons, Led Zeppelin and more metal dinosaurs get a guernsey. McNeil's artwork is perfectly pitched at the irreverent rhymes. Like this one:
"S is for Stones
That just keep on rolling
Most of their fans
Have now switched to lawn bowling"
You and your kid will laugh out loud. Not necessarily at the same thing. And I'm pretty sure you won't drift off to sleep mid-bedtime story.

A wonderfully whiffy tale...

'Did you do a poo on Mole's head. Well if not - then who?' The 'favourite characters' conversation has generated some lively discussion in Africa. My nine-year-old friend Josh presented a fabulous fictional character to his class in an English oral assignment recently.
The brief was to discuss his favourite animal character in a story. Without hesitation he chose Mole, from The Story Of The Little Mole Who Knew It Was None Of His Business, by Werner Holzwarth and Wolf Erlbruch.
It's a book I had given him for his third birthday, a cheeky tale of a mole trying to identify which of nature's beasts was responsible for pooping on him by investigating a myriad of spoor samples from the animal kingdom. Mole's story delighted Josh then as much as it does today.
Apparently it's a topic of hilarity and endless fascination among his cohort - poo.
His mother was worried his choice of character might kick up a stink but according to the teacher, Josh's speech brought the house down and he earned his best English grade ever.
Today's reading recommendation is enthusiastically endorsed by Grade 3 at DPHS Prep...!