A German friend of mine, Clara, is a graphic designer and illustrator in Hamburg in the North of Germany. If you follow the @misterRobe Twitter account that you can see on the blog here, you will see her from time to time. As you would expect, she is very talented at drawing and designing things. We are lucky at school because she is currently doing some work for us to improve the library. I told Clara that I am organising the books into different categories and would like to find some drawings that I could use to represent the different categories. If a book is fantasy, for example, there might be a picture of a wizard or a dragon. Being a lover of books, she offered to help.
Like most illustrators, Clara keeps a sketchbook, regularly drawing things that she sees or that she thinks about. We spoke last night over the internet and she told me that her mother thinks she should try to publish one of these notebooks. Clara thinks this is a silly idea. She mainly drew the notebook for her parents, to thank them for the little things she played with, enjoyed, or remembers from when she was little. She thinks nobody else would really be interested in what she remembers from when she was little.
I am not so sure. I think that some great books are very specific, very personal, meaning that they are only about what one person knows, but in being personal, they become universal, meaning that everybody can understand them. I think this might be one of those examples. I don’t have the same experiences as Clara from when I was little – not all of them anyway – but still, I know the exact feeling she is talking about, and even when she is describing something that I didn’t know at all when I was little, like dolls, I can understand how she feels about it.
Now what is great is that Clara made a video of the sketchbook for her parents. The video is on the internet so you can all see it. Take a look.
What do you most love now? What are the little things you enjoy? What are the things you most remember from when you were younger than you are now? Can you draw them and write a few words about them? You could make a sketchbook of your own.
Now and again Clara and I talk about working together on a comic. I write fiction. She draws. We both love comics and comic art. Now and again I send her a dictation of me describing an idea for a comic. A year or two ago I thought of a funny, playful, but also sad, story about a basset hound called Bertie who has to save the world from body snatching two-dimensional space slugs. Don’t worry too much if you don’t know what that means. That is not the kind of fiction I write, and in fact I don’t write for children, but it was a fun idea we throw back and forth now and again for fun. Now, whether Clara and sit down and work on that properly, or on a graphic novel or comic for adults, or anything else, I agree with her mother: the video above is great, the Museum of Small Things is the kind of sweet, simple, personal but universal idea that works well in picture books, and she really ought to do some more work like it. What do you think?
The book pusher of Lesser Town 