I’m not quite sure when it is ‘appropriate’ to introduce ghost stories to children but I reckon if there are tooth fairies who exchange money for enamel and calcium, and trolls that might leave treats under the bed, then there must also be less savoury magical creatures too.
In the late 60s and early 70s Ruth Manning-Sanders published a great series of fairy tales from around the world in volumes organised by the creatures present. This one, A Book of Ghosts & Goblins, is one of the best in the series with some quite scary short stories for children.
I was reading the short Spanish story The Ring to my 6 year old and it brought back vivid memories of hearing it the first time as a child myself. A man finds a ring on an unearthed skeleton in a disturbed graveyard and gives it as a present to his wife. Then that night the ring’s owner comes back to claim it . . .
There’s some great Estonian stories of nasty goblins as well as some enjoyable African and Siberian contributions too.
Try to find a copy in your local public library.
I’m not quite sure why I ended up with this as a child. But here it is, a 1974 propaganda book from the People’s Republic of China’s Foreign Language Press.
Essentially a pictorial guide with English text to being a ‘good child’ it offers helpful guidance on how to behave on International Working Women’s Day, and how to make the most of what you have, repairing broken toys, putting friendship first, helping old people. These are good upstanding things to do and the quaint pictures are, well, quaint. In fact, if it wasn’t for the ‘shoes for a people’s soldier’ page, this is entirely what you’d expect from a Sunday School book of the period.
In an age where children seem to get whatever they want it is a good idea to show them that it doesn’t have to be like that, and for the vast majority of the world, it isn’t like that at all.
Gerald McDermott’s The Magic Tree is a not a tale with a happy ending – indeed the final pages are deliciously ambiguous.
First told as an animated short film in 1970 and then published in book form in 1973, The Magic Tree is apparently adapted from a traditional Congolese folktale. It tells the story of two brothers, one favoured by their mother, Luemba, and the other ‘ugly’ and cast aside, Mavungu. Mavunga leaves his family home and travels down the river to where he finds a tree and frees a beautiful princess from its magic spell.
Mavungu is transformed and a village springs up around he and the princess. Eventually Mavungu’s family hears of his fortune and travels to visit him. Mavungu feels the pull of the family home but is reminded by the princess that he has promised never to speak of the magic tree and its spell. His family leaves but Mavungu decides later to pay his despicable mother another visit and he cannot hold his tongue – all is revealed. Mavungu flees only to find that everything is gone.
The story’s end – told entirely without words – is jarring in a way that opens up the narrative for discussion. What happens now to Mavungu? Why was his mother so wicked? Why is this so unfair? Although these are unpleasant questions, you can almost see them playing out in the little listeners minds.
Beautifully illustrated with an almost wood-cut feel and with great use of dark blues and orange tones, the story’s atmosphere carries well. Also, I think that this book must of have been my first mass exposure to Helvetica as a child. The contrast between the jerky lines of the illustrations and the straight functionalism of the type is lovely too.
I’d be keen to see the short animation the story was evolved from. McDermott has some of his other animations from the period freely available via the Academic Film Archive and the Internet Archive.
A Halloween story illustrated by J.Otto Seibold was almost certain to be a winner. Seibold is probably best known for the slightly demented digital illustrations and his Mr Lunch series. You might also know his work from Olive.
I picked this one up at the Giant Robot store in San Francisco after a surprisingly short stop at Amoeba Records.
In Vunce Upon A Time a vegetarian vampire called Dagmar finds his secret supplies of lollies have run out. Despairing, one of his friends, a skeleton, tells him of a human tradition called Halloween where lollies are in plentiful supply. Although the prose is rather clunky, and the story convoluted – far too little is made of Dagmar’s vegetarianism – Seibold’s garish and colourful illustrations carry the attention and interest of the young ones. There’s a fantastic double page spread where Dagmar soars high above the town on Halloween night – revealing a town swarming with a cornucopia of costumed beasts which makes for a good bit of ‘spotto’. And, in fact, the assorted lollies on the inside flap always end up being “shared” between us, the readers.
This book used to be my mum’s. She got it at “Christmas 1946 from Auntie Nellie”. Published during World War 2, I’m pleased to report that inside it has a little insignia stating – “This book is produced in complete conformity with the authorized economy standards”. It has stood up pretty well considering that, just a couple of frays on the spine, and a bit of dusty mould.
I remember studiously reading several Blyton series as a child – Wishing Chair, Magic Faraway Tree, and, of course the 21 odd volumes of the Famous Five (In fact I vividly remember watching the late 70s TV series after school and was excited to find much of it on YouTube recently). No doubt my mum read me this when I was small, too. For all the criticism of Blyton’s stories – and there’s been a lot of it over the years – this collection of very short stories is great reading in these modern times.
It is full of all the things ‘we’ don’t do now – whacking the kids when they misbehave, letting them run wild on the streets and the like. Whilst parenting styles have changed for many in the West nowadays, I quite enjoying reminding my children that things weren’t always like that. The look of horror on their little faces is always priceless.
There are of course, gollywogs, which need a little more contextual explanation.
Being a hoarder I managed to keep several boxes of children’s books from my own childhood. They’ve moved house with me and I’ve been paring them down slowly.
One of the first to be retrieved from the boxes upon the arrival of child #1 was Yellow Yellow. Dating from 1971 (although the edition I have is from 1973) and one of the earler books from Frank Asch, Yellow Yellow is the story of a boy who finds a yellow workman’s hat which changes his life. The real action for small children, of course, takes place in the illustrations from Mark Alan Stamaty – one of his first contributions to children’s books it seems.
Each page is full of intricate details, quirks, MC Escher-isms and visual jokes that make repeat readings particularly enjoyable. The illustrations also have a suitably psychedelic quality to them which always elicits puzzled questions like “why does that chicken have a two bodies but only one face?” and “that man has his head on backwards doesn’t he?”.
There’s a great moment midway through where the boy finds the owner of his yellow hat – one of those rare moments where the physicality of the book as an object becomes apparent and important.
Neither Asch’s or Stamaty’s websites really mention the book at all – although it does seem to be outlandishly priced second-hand on Amazon.
But if you see it in a used bookstore snap it up. I’ll definitely be passing my copy on to the next generation.
Several months ago one of my friends was asking on Twitter about good ‘classic’ children’s books and I recommended this one as possibly the best collection of Grimm’s fairytales. I had just bought a copy and we’d started going through it as bedtime reading.
Apart from being entirely un-Disney-fied, what is especially nice about the Tatar edited collection is that each story comes with copious sidebar annotations for the reader. These sidenotes are very useful at explaining the underlying meanings in some of the choices of words and character traits in both the very well known and lesser known stories.
Snow White, Cinderella, Rapunzel – they are all here amongst the 37 stories for children – but the original versions with the witch who has to dance to her death in burning hot iron shoes, doves that peck the eyes out of the evil sisters – and all those sorts of violent and explicit moral guidances that have been removed from the modern popularised versions. Indeed, reading these the clear role that fairytales and myths played in educating children about the dangers of the forest, of strangers, and of life, comes across loud and clear – indeed, quite graphically.
The king’s mother was an evil woman . . . . A year later, when the queen gave birth to her first child, the old woman took it away and smeared blood on the queen’s mouth while she was sleeping. Then she went straight to the king and accused the mother of eating the baby. [from The Six Swans]
The contemporary sanitising of fairytales effectively eliminates the critical role of stories in allowing children to explore their own boundaries with their imaginations. Instead the sanitisation of Disney, or worse the Barbie range of Fairytopia hideousness, simply renders any sense of moral message or warning mute for the sake of shifting more branded merchandise.
Illustrated lightly with drawings and paintings from different versions of the stories, this has been a great volume to have on hand to counter the inevitable influx of pink princess dross with a bit of grit.
On Friday night I was wandering up through Newtown before a friend’s art event and stopped in at our local bookshop – you know, one where the staff actually know about the books they sell, and write little ‘reviews’ on the ‘staff picks’.
And there it was in the children’s section – the new Oliver Jeffers’ book, The Heart and the Bottle. Given the enthusiasm we’ve had for Lost & Found (which I’ll write about later), I picked it up without much hesitation.
In short, the narrative revolves around a girl who is fascinated with the world around her before she finds (her Dad’s) chair empty one day. She puts her heart in a bottle, grows up and loses her interest in the world around her until she encounters a child who shows her how to get her heart back. On first reading to G she immediately asked ‘what happened to her Daddy?’ – quickly picking up on the subtext of the story.
We’ve been back to it several times this weekend already. (K reckons we should buy a copy for a couple of our adult friends.)
Not surprisingly for a Jeffers’ book, the illustrations are full of tiny details – especially the girl’s fascination with the creatures of the sea and how they work – and I’d recommend removing the dustjacket as underneath lies a fabulous visual collage. G and I have been going through the illustrations trying to figure out their secrets.
In fact, dustjackets – yes or no? That’s another post I should get around to writing.
If there is one baby book that sums up an aspirational middle class life then it is probably Miffy at the Gallery. Apparently it has always been a big seller at the Art Gallery of NSW bookshop, as well-to-do parents think what an excellent role model Miffy will play for their child.
In fact, I came across Miffy at the Gallery via a poster shop in Tokyo in 2003. I was walking through one of the few enormous malls in Odaiba – a beach and amusement park on reclaimed land in Tokyo bay – and chanced upon a design store. Flicking through the posters – reproductions of design classics including a lovely series of 1950s Olivetti advertising – there was a simple Miffy poster featuring the image from cover of the book with no surrounding text.
Thinking of a future when there might be children around, I bought the poster and when the children came a few years later, it was framed and hung in their bedroom.
As far as the story goes, Miffy goes to the gallery and is confronted by art that seems to always reflect her being. Facing an existential crisis, she rebels and refuses to be a cute bunny.
Oh, I think that is another story.
In fact, the book ends with Miffy wanting to be an artist and declaring that “I think art galleries are fun”.
Given that Dick Bruna first published the story in 1997 it does make me wonder whether it was all an elaborating stroke of marketing genius from the Dutch museums. Apparently the book is quite hard to get now. It goes in and out of print – perhaps reflecting the current challenges facing art museums.
Or maybe that, too, is reading too much into it.
Iggy Peck, Architect is a charming rhyming story of a young fellow who loves to build buildings from whatever he has nearby – nappies, chalk, peaches, apples, pancakes, coconut pie – the list goes on. Until, that is, he meets his Grade Two teacher, Miss Lila Greer. She’s been scarred from an early childhood experience involving a skyscraper a lift and a French circus troupe.
The rhyming couplets that carry the story have a lovely rhythm and Beaty’s book has captured the imagination of both children enough to have clocked up many reads – quite a few repeat reads in the one night too! The illustrations by Roberts are great and the constructions built by Iggy Peck are splendid, and like the best illustrated books there are a few little hidden touches for young eyes to find.
I picked this book up at the SFMOMA bookshop on a visit to San Francisco but it is available quite widely including on Amazon.
Any book that excites children to consider architecture and building that doesn’t default to Bob the Builder is a welcome addition to the library!