Chart a course to the world's best book museums

Between the lines: Explore interesting book museums around the world

Tuesday, 02 July, 2013

Annie Holife@scmp.com

Eric Carle is the famed author and illustrator of The Very Hungry Caterpillarand Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? as well as 70 other picture books for the very young.

His collage technique, using bright colours, is instantly recognisable. After a long and successful career, Carle could have settled into a comfortable retirement. Instead, in 2002 and at the age of 73, he and his wife founded The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art in Amherst, Massachusetts.

The Museum Book is a good introduction to the history of museums and what museums are for

Located midway between Boston and New York City, the museum houses an extensive collection of more than 10,000 picture book illustrations, as well as three art galleries, an art studio, a theatre, and picture book and scholarly libraries.

It also organises educational programmes for families, scholars, educators and children.

The picture book library has more than 3,000 picture books from around the world. But the big draw is the bookshop, where visitors can buy contemporary and hard-to-find picture books.

If your family holiday takes you to that part of the United States, then you must try to visit the museum's special exhibition this month called "Seriously Silly: A Decade of Art and Whimsy by Mo Willems".

Willems is one of my favourite children's book creators, and he will be signing books on specific dates during the exhibition.

The Pioneer Valley area where the museum is located is also home to a number of other museums suitable for family fun: the Dr Seuss National Memorial and Springfield Museum, the Norman Rockwell Museum, Amelia Park Children's Museum, Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame and the Magic Wings Butterfly Conservatory.

If you are on the other side of the Atlantic this summer, then you may consider heading to northern England to visit Seven Stories, the national centre for children's books.

Located in Newcastle upon Tyne, the centre is housed in a seven-storey building, and its special archives contain draft illustrations, and handwritten author's notes and correspondence.

With a mission to make books an essential part of every child's life, the existence and accessibility of Seven Stories is especially meaningful in this northeastern region, where the number of children living in poverty is double the average in England.

Meanwhile, The Museum Book: A Guide to Strange and Wonderful Collections by Jan Mark is a good introduction to the history of museums and what museums are for.

And for those staying in Hong Kong, the summer months bring plenty of book-related activities.

The Hong Kong Book Fair runs from July 17-23 at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, and there will be special activities and events for children and young adults. Besides stocking up on picture books from Taiwanese publishers and speciality books such as those on religion or cooking, it's also the best one-stop shop for stationery and art supplies.

Another annual summer event is the Hong Kong Public Libraries' "Summer Reading Month", with music and puppet shows, storytelling sessions and parent-child reading activities.

A book-themed summer vacation awaits!

Annie Ho is the board chairwoman of Bring Me A Book Hong Kong, a children's literacy charity (bringmeabook.org.hk)

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as Chart a course to the world's bestbook museums

Book Gift Ideas for Children's Book Lovers - Everything I Need to Know I Learned from a Children's Book (Anita Silvey)

Picture books that speak volumes

Sunday, 09 December, 2012, 12:00am

Annie Hofamilypost@scmp.com

I always enjoy the challenge of finding the right book gift for my friends. This year, I think food aficionados will enjoy Melanie Dunea's My Last Supper,which comprises interviews with 50 great chefs about their choices for a last meal on earth.

For fashionista friends, there's Andrew Bolton's Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty. The cover was created with lenticular printing, so that the image changes from a haunting headshot of the clothing designer to his signature skull motif when viewed from different angles.

I have a cache of staples for lovers of children's books, and I am always delighted to discover new works. Here is a selection of anthologies.Everything I Need to Know I Learned from a Children's Book is a collection edited by former children's book publisher Anita Silvey and is subtitled Life Lessons from Notable People from All Walks of Life.

Each double page comprises the notable person's own written account of the book that deeply influenced their life, plus an image of the cover with a description of the book and its author, and a 500-word excerpt from that book. Contributors include actor Kirk Douglas and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.

Leonard Marcus, a professor of children's literature who has written extensively about children's books and their illustrations, compiled and edited Show Me a Story: Why Picture Books Matter. I picked up a copy as soon as I saw that my beloved Mo Willems provided the illustration for the cover.

In this book, Marcus presents a question-and-answer format for his extensive and in-depth interviews with "21 of the world's most celebrated illustrators". The conversations are entertaining because they delve into the childhoods, creative processes, and personalities of these artists.

The big bonus is the rare display of full-colour plates in the middle of the book that reproduce the illustrators' sketches and drafts. The plates show how much attention and effort goes into each drawing.

The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art's Artist to Artist: 23 Major Illustrators Talk to Children About Their Art also features the perspective and sketches of children's book illustrators. There is some overlap between the artists featured here and those found in Marcus's Show Me A Story.

The difference is that, in Artist to Artist, the illustrators give advice to aspiring illustrators in the form of a letter to the reader. In addition to the letter, each artist also provides a photograph of himself as a child, as well as a photograph of his art studio. The most amusing contribution is each artist's self-portrait. Eric Carle, best known for The Hungry Caterpillar, conceived the idea for this anthology. It is a wonderful resource for aspiring artists.

One of the tips that I learned from read-aloud workshops is to read out the title and author of books. That helps children make the connection to other books by the same author.

When I became more diligent about reading aloud the names of authors and illustrators, I discovered how many of my children's favourite books, fromMother Goose Nursery Rhymes to Tiddler, are illustrated by Axel Scheffler. How could I have not noticed that the bulbous noses of Scheffler's characters are common to all these books?

The great joy of giving prominence to an author's name in a read-aloud session is to hear it repeated by toddlers.

My two-year-old generally only sings out the monosyllabic rhymes of a storybook. So it's endearing to hear her proclaim the words, "written by Robert Munsch and illustrated by Michael Martchenko".

Annie Ho is board chairwoman of Bring Me a Book Hong Kong, a non-profit organisation devoted to improving children's literacy through reading aloud to them and providing easy access to the best children's books for underserved communities across Hong Kong.bringmeabook.org.hk

Leo Lionni: fables, Little Blue & Little Yellow, Swimmy, Frederick

Lionni's fables show kids how to be themselves

Sunday, 09 September, 2012, 12:00am

Annie Ho

familypost@scmp.com

              

My daughters and I fell in love with Leo Lionni when we spent the summer in Canada. For this, I must thank a reader, who recommended Lionni as one of her children's favourite authors.

We last visited my parents in Canada three years ago. At that time, my elder daughter was 18 months old and starting to become interested in listening to read-alouds. Rather than load our luggage with the books that were in her repertoire of daily reading. I viewed our holiday as an opportunity to introduce her to new titles.

I ordered books from a Canadian online bookstore for delivery to my parents' home. These included boxed sets of Sandra Boynton's silly board books, plus
Polar Bear, Polar Bear and
Panda Bear, Panda Bear, the companion books to Bill Martin Jnr's
Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?, which my daughter already knew well.

This summer, my online order comprised solely of Leo Lionni stories:
Little Blue and Little Yellow for my younger daughter, and
Frederick and His Friends for my eldest. The latter is a collection of stories that is subtitled
Four Favourite Fables.

Fables use animals with human qualities to teach a moral lesson. In this collection, two of the stories feature mice, and two of the stories feature fish. The stories are visually captivating for young and old readers, and the moral lessons are about being happy with who you are. They don't focus on the perils of failing to lead a virtuous life, in the way that
Aesop's Fables do.

All four stories were written in the 1960s, and use language so rich that my elder daughter asked about a new word every time we reread a story. In 
Swimmy, Lionni described the eponymous fish as "black as a mussel shell".

I was excited to illustrate this description by showing my daughters some mussels in a cioppino I ordered one night.

In
 Fish Is Fish, the fish was not any old fish, but a minnow. When he tried to visit land, my elder daughter interrupted me to ask, "Why did the minnow go to a bank?"

I happily paused to explain that this was the slope bordering the pond where the minnow lived, and not the financial institution that she was envisioning.

With a long career as art director of
Fortune magazine, Lionni was already established as a graphic art designer when he created a simple story for his grandchildren about a blue dot named Little Blue. The dot's best friend was a yellow dot named Little Yellow.

The story became his first book,
Little Blue and Little Yellow. It
teaches young children about colours much more beautifully than a typical board book.

Lionni was nearly 50 years old when
Little Blue was published. He continued to have a long and fruitful second career writing books for children.

The collection of Lionni fables I have is the 2002 edition, published by Alfred A. Knopf. It contains a note of appreciation by author and illustrator Eric Carle, who is known for
The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

I have collected
Caterpillar in seven languages (out of an impressive 50 available languages), so I'm embarrassed to admit that I was unfamiliar with Carle's evident mentor until now.

It turns out that Lionni gave Carle his first job in New York, as a graphic designer at the
New York Times, and spent a lot of effort encouraging him to become a picture book artist, even though Carle was not then interested in illustrating children's books.

Lionni, a four-time Caldecott Honor winner, was the first children's illustrator to use the collage technique that is now usually associated with Carle.

Martin's
Brown Bear, Brown Bear was the first book that Carle illustrated. That started his highly successful career.

I have great hopes that Lionni's books will find renewed popularity among a new generation of children.

Annie Ho is board chairperson of Bring Me A Book Hong Kong, a non-profit organisation devoted to improving children's literacy through reading aloud to them, and providing easy access to the best children's books for underserved communities across Hong Kong.

bringmeabook.org.hk

A Wrinkle in Time; When You Reach Me; Where the Wild Things Are

Fond memories linger despite wrinkles in time
BETWEEN THE LINES Annie Ho (familypost@scmp.com) May 06, 2012
In my quest to introduce the best quality storybooks to my children, I've rediscovered some favourite book titles from my childhood. Now I have amassed a humble collection of books I read and loved years ago. My parents didn't read aloud to me and I didn't become fluent in English until after we emigrated to Canada when I was seven, so I never read those early classics like The Very Hungry Caterpillar or The Cat in the Hat. As a result, my favourite books are stories that my daughters will probably not start to enjoy until they are in primary school. One of my first purchases was A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle, science fiction for junior readers at its best. Re-reading it brought me back to those wonderful upper primary years in Mrs Taylor's class. Every Tuesday and Thursday, I would gather with a half-dozen other students to attend a special class that used an interdisciplinary approach to teaching. This class was very likely modelled on the International Baccalaureate programme, which didn't exist in Canada until I was in high school. We worked on one class project per term and were taught maths, history, science and anthropology in that context. One of those projects was "Build a city of the future", in which we spent months creating architectural models, writing descriptions of the city we each envisioned (form of government, city planning, transport, family home life) and discussing our choices. In my future city, the residents teleported. I must have been reading A Wrinkle in Time and taken the idea from the book. From there on, I went through a phase of reading science fiction and fantasy; one that sticks in my memory is a story by Ray Bradbury about a child who has moved to Venus and is locked in a closet by classmates on the one day every seven years when it stops raining and the sun comes out. I didn't read science fiction as an adult until I re-read A Wrinkle in Time. Then I learned about the new book by Rebecca Stead in the young fiction category that had just come out. What prompted me to immediately obtain a copy of When You Reach Me was a book review describing it as a story that "pays homage to A Wrinkle in Time". When You Reach Me is about Miranda, an 11-year-old girl living in New York City. Two incidents happen to her at the beginning of the story: her best friend is punched by a random kid on the way home from school, and she receives a cryptic message about her lost spare key. These two incidents end up being intertwined, and Stead spins a yarn inspired by A Wrinkle in Time. In fact, A Wrinkle in Time is Miranda's favourite book, and she carries it with her wherever she goes. It is of no surprise that When You Reach Me won many awards, including the 2010 Newbery Award. A wonderful story inspired by another book is Dave Eggers' The Wild Things, loosely based on Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are. In this case, quot;inspired" means taking a 30-page children's picture book and fleshing it out into a 300-page adventure for Max, the main character, that includes divorced parents, an older teenage sister and many new characters on the island where the beasts live. One of the hardest things to do when you write for junior readers is use the right language to communicate a young adult's point of view. While Stead does a better job than Eggers in finding that exasperated tone of innocent but all-knowing youth, their complex, multilayered stories will appeal to children and grown-ups alike, especially those of us who remember what it was like being on the cusp of adolescence. Annie Ho is a board governor of Bring Me A Book Hong Kong bringmeabook.org.hk a non-profit organisation devoted to improving children's literacy