What a book! What a beautiful, beautiful book! Play Pen is a compilation of “new children’s book illustration.” The book showcases over 30 illustrators from around the world, categorized by “genre,” if you will: Picturebooks, board books; Alphabets, wordplay, and novelty; Older Children; and Non-fiction. Each illustrator has four or five pages with choice illustrations from children’s books they’ve done, along with a brief biography about their background and career. Below are excerpts from the well-crafted and keen introduction.
… The aim of this book has been to represent a broad range of stylistic and conceptual trends and a range of cultural characteristics from around the world, across what is increasingly a global market.
Some of these issues and questions are explored in depth in academic literature, where the verbal and visual texts of children’s books are examined with specific regard to their role in the educational development of the child. This book is more concerned with the art itself, and with the thoughts and motivations of the artists themselves.
There is much debate about what constitutes an ‘appropriate’ visual diet for children. It seems that different cultures still have widely divergent views and traditions here. A tour of the annual Bologna Children’s Book Fair, for instance, reveals that, at present, UK publishers are deeply conservative in their use of illustration as compared to, for example, their French, Italian, Norwegian, German and Scandinavian counterparts. When asked about this, most UK publishers will claim that, much as they love the ’sophisticated stuff’, they can’t sell it. It is never easy to know who is leading whom where, but it is hard to believe that some countries produce innately more sophisticated and visually discerning children. A more plausible explanation perhaps lies in a tendency towards the self-fulfilling prophecy approach to marketing.
The rich diversity of artwork from across the globe is increasingly threatened by the growing necessity for publishers to sell co-editions of their books to other countries, most importantly the USA. This has initiated a worrying tendency for artists to be given long lists of ‘dos and don’ts’ and being encouraged to avoid overtly ‘local’ visual references. This would seem to be a misguided idea, and as the influential writer on children’s literature, Joseph H. Schwarcz pointed out: ‘It is fortunately true, though, that as in all good art the universal significance found in the most excellent examples arises from a background with a strong local flavor.’
Pictures in picturebooks will mean many things to children. Often the pictures themselves are the meaning now, rather than a mere subservient clue to the meaning of words. And besides, I would argue that pictures in picturebooks have a far more important role to play in the development of the child than a mere aid to reading.
The introduction makes a lot of good points, I feel. The only sad thing about Play Pen is that the illustrations inside are all so beautiful, and yet the books that contain them are not so readily available! Hopefully, as the world becomes a smaller place (take that how you will), we’ll all be able to realize the importance of celebrating our “local flavor” rather than subduing it in the name of some asinine concept that it would be inappropriate or too confusing. How else is the imagination sparked than by experiencing the new and exciting - the familiar unknown? I think I can safely speak for thousands of people when I say that I wouldn’t be learning Japanese and traveling abroad to study in Japan if it weren’t for randomly discovering Japanese animation and music, so different from what I knew at the time that I was instantly infatuated!
These babies are peppered with sans-serif French writing, too. Extra chic.
