Launching my Leporello: sailing from Dublin Bay to the Swiss Alps

Worse Things Happen at Sea is the title of my forthcoming Leporello book from Nobrow Press. It’s a concertina book of ships and sea monsters, a series of disasters in both its subject matter and in the history of its making. During the drawing of it I’ve been losing my mind, losing my eyesight, and lost a couple of months’ work in a burglary. Now the art is all delivered, so barring a flood at the printers, it should be on sale in the next few weeks.

To launch the book, I’ll be travelling to a couple of events in Ireland and Switzerland with fellow Nobrow artists. Next week, illustrator Bjørn Rune Lie, Nobrow partner Sam Arthur, and myself, will be going to Offset, a graphic design festival in Dublin that runs from the 21st to the 23rd of March. Sam will be telling the story of Nobrow on Friday at 12 noon on the Magenta Stage, while Bjørn and I will be talking about our latest books on Sunday at 12 noon, again on the Magenta Stage.

Then in April, Luke Pearson, Andrew Rae, and myself, will all be exhibiting work at the Fumetto comics festival in Lucerne, Switzerland. As well as original drawings for Worse Things Happen at Sea, I’ll also be showing paintings from Het Zeemans-ABC (A Sailor’s ABC) the Dutch Little Golden Book by Nienke Denekamp that I illustrated a while back. Fumetto runs from the 5th to the 13th of April, and I will be there myself ’til the 9th.

Another 100 books you might enjoy - a post for Norm

Norm is gone, but Normblog is not. The ideas are vital, the words speak, intimacy with the mind endures.

Norman Geras’s last post on Normblog was titled A book list with a difference, or alternatively, 100 works of fiction you might enjoy. As a small tribute to him, I offer a complimentary list of fiction books. There is no overlap with his list as all of these come from the bookshelves of my children. They are still young and they have as yet read hardly any of Norm’s kind suggestions. Like his, this is not a ‘best of’ or a ‘must read’ list, but a list of books that we have enjoyed, some of which you may know, and some of which you might like to try.

The first one is by Ian Beck:

• Picture Book

This is an extraordinary book for the very young, its images simple yet intensely rich. As the children have grown older they have enjoyed many more of his books, for example his edition of Edward Lear’s The Owl and the Pussycat, and a version of The Nutcracker written by Berlie Doherty, and more recently his Tom Trueheart children’s novels.

More picture books by a variety of authors:

The goldeniest Little Golden Book

Here’s a first look at the cover of Het Zeemans-ABC, a Dutch Little Golden Book, written by Nienke Denekamp, with art by me, and the shiniest gold by publisher Rubinstein. The book launches at Het Scheepvaartmuseum, Amsterdam, at 2pm on the 5th of October. Read more here.

Het Zeemans-ABC

A is for anchor and Z is for sailor, in Dutch that is. Het Zeemans-ABC (The Sailor’s ABC) is a children’s picture book written by Nienke Denekamp and illustrated by myself. Published as a Gouden Boekje, a Dutch Little Golden Book, it will be launched on the 5th of October, 2 pm, at Het Scheepvaartmuseum, the National Maritime Museum, Amsterdam.

A number of original paintings for the book will be on show in the museum shop from October ’til the end of the year. The museum has been closed for renovations for four years, and its grand reopening comes a few days before our book launch, on the 2nd of October. I visited the museum with Nienke shortly before it closed; it’s very nice that our little book can be a part of the reopening celebrations.

This little book has been some years underway, so if you’re in Amsterdam on October 5th, I hope you’ll meet us at Het Scheepvaartmuseum to celebrate making it to port!

Something is taking its course

I have been busy cooking in my kitchen, though there’s not much of it visible here. One thing has been the screen printing, an example above. That print is of the bird drawn for John Dog’s album, Battery Powered Mystery Action, as blogged on earlier here. It will also be appearing in the 3x3 Illustration Annual No.8 due out this December.

The nightingale will be added to the range in the shop shortly, along with a couple of other new prints.

Before that, the long awaited Het zeemans-ABC is to be published by Rubinstein of Amsterdam in October. This Dutch Little Golden Book, written by Nienke Denekamp and illustrated by yours truly, has of course been years in the making. It’s publication is being timed to link with the re-opening of het Scheepvaartmuseum, the Maritime Museum in Amsterdam which has been undergoing renovations for as many years as our little book has been in the works.

On the drawing table, work continues on two book illustration projects, one for Nobrow. I was happy to hear that the bird wallpaper I designed for Nobrow has been spotted in the British Library shop.

I have also been involved in the development of a horror film being produced by some of our weirder neighbours. We expect to see that go into production later in the year. More details to follow!

Golden time

Here’s something nice that arrived in the post today. Ik hou zo van... de Gouden Boekjes is a history of de Gouden Boekjes, as Little Golden Books are called in Dutch, from the first arrival of American Little Golden Books in aid parcels to the Netherlands at the end of the Second World War, to the first Dutch editions published by De Bezige Bij, to the current editions by Uitgeverij Rubinstein. The book is written by Joke Linders, and beautifully designed by Piet Schreuders and Sonja van Hamel.

As well as publishing Dutch translations of titles familiar in the US, Rubinstein have restored and reissued some Little Golden Books long out of print in their country of origin, such as a favourite of mine, Bobby and his Airplanes, or Jan de vliegtuigman in Dutch. Over the years, the standard page count of Little Golden Books has been cut, and so most current editions of old classics are missing a major portion of the original illustrations. Rubinstein have produced restored editions of some of these titles, re-scanning artwork and printing them on high quality stock in hardcover with stitched binding, so if you want to get a new copy of Scuffy the Tugboat with all the pictures included, then it’s the speciale uitgave of Sloffie Sleepboot you need.

Below: A personal pleasure for me in this book is that I got to draw a number of well-known Little Golden Book characters for this interior illustration.

Semaphore

Wave goodbye

A detail from the final sailor painting, finished at last, and sent overseas. Next, a counting book, and it will not be painted like this.

A Golden New Year

I received a little treasure in the post yesterday, from Rubinstein, publishers of Dutch Little Golden Books. It’s a calendar for the new year, with illustrations by Richard Scarry. The paintings were first published in My Little Golden Calendar for 1961. My favourite is the one above, a picnic in August. If George Grosz or Max Beckmann had worked in children’s books, might the result have been something like this?

Illustration copyright © Random House, Inc.

Wake up, Kitty Admiral!

Another drawing of the Kitty Admiral for Bo.

Our young cat comes from a long line of admirals. Here for example is Admiral Purry, who appears in one of the illustrations from Little Golden Book No. 1, Three Little Kittens, from 1942, with art by Masha.

Three Little Kittens art copyright © 1942 by Simon and Schuster, Inc., and Artists and Writers Guild, Inc.

Little Firewoman No. 5

A golden opportunity!