Pop-up books and paper engineering

When I was a kid I loved pop-up books. We didn't keep any of my childhood pop-up treasures, probably because the tabs had torn and bits no longer popped up. Now as an adult I'm collecting them in a new guise, starting with some amazing 'paper engineering' books by Robert Sabuda and Matthew Reinhart.

I first came across the term 'paper engineering' after I bought a couple of little gift books by Robert Sabuda one Christmas. I gave Winter in White to my aunt, and kept Christmas! for myself (my aunt probably would've preferred a specifically Christmassy book, and I really wanted to keep Winter in White, but the corner of Christmas! was dinged so I couldn't give it as a gift).

These books, while small and much simpler than many of Sabuda's works, were far more sophisticated than the pop-up books of my childhood. Those 1970s books had tabs that you pulled down, to make an image pop up from the page, or pulled sideways, to make an image slide across the page.

Christmas! has a double-spread page for each letter in the word Christmas, including an elaborate Snowflake, Icicles hanging from a building's eaves, and a pull-along Toy horse. Winter in White has a twirling skater on a foil pond, a reindeer with ornaments dangling from its antlers, two doves tying a red ribbon, and other gorgeous moving images.

I was so taken with these that I looked for more examples of this kind of work, and thus discovered that there was such a thing as 'paper engineering'. Since then I've bought a pop-up alphabet book, ABC3-D, two books from the trilogy Encyclopedia Mythologica by Reinhart and Sabuda - Gods & Heroes, and Dragons & Monsters...

Maurice Sendak's first pop-up book, Mummy? (co-created with Arthur Yorinks and Matthew Reinhardt)

a book of dots - abstract art, really - 600 Black Dots by David A. Carter,

and Snow White by Jane Ray.

And in a stroke of good fortune, I won a copy of Matthew Reinhardt's brilliant Star Wars: A Pop-up Guide to the Galaxy in a competition run by Infinitas Bookshop.









Some photos I took of my copy of Dragons & Monsters:

and a video (taken with my digital still camera) of one section of Dragons & Monsters unfolding.

Polish your first page till it sparkles!

I find it interesting, that in writing courses you're always told that the first page and the first chapter of your book have to be absolutely captivating if you want to get it published. "You must have a hook!" "It must be easy to read." "Publishers will stop reading if they're not won over by the first page." "Readers will give up, and give bad word-of-mouth, if the first chapter doesn't grab them."

And yet everyone I know who's read the Stieg Larsson Millenium trilogy says the first couple of chapters of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo are slow, difficult, boring, annoying - but once you get past them, the rest of the trilogy is fab.

So are Swedish publishers different? Do readers feel a sense of pride in slogging through difficult text? Or is Larsson the exception that proves the rule?

Resolutions and Flexibility

I recently resolved to cut back on buying books (and dvds and t-shirts) because I am currently unemployed. To help myself remember this resolution, I wrote a list:
Don't buy anything more from amazon.co.uk, even though they have the best tv on dvd, at great prices, or from amazon.com, even tho it's great for US tv on dvd, and US books that aren't available in Aus;
Don't buy anything more from fishpond.com.au, boomerangbooks.com.au or booktopia.com.au, even though they're good, and Australian/New Zealand owned;
Don't buy anything more from threadless.com, even though they have fab designs, not even if they have a $10 all t-shirts sale.

and I knew without needing to list it that I should stay away from actual bookshops as well as online ones - frustrating given that I've just moved to a suburb that puts me conveniently close to Shearer's on Norton (where I bought some nice books in their sale the other day), and Gleebooks (always a delight to visit any of their stores - new, secondhand, children's, etc), and not that far from Better Read Than Dead.

so today I was in the city, having gone to a meeting at the Centre for Volunteering, and saw that Dymocks was having a sale. I don't often get to the big Dymocks in the city, and even tho the company supported the lifting of Parallel Importation Restrictions (which I was against) and used their Booklover email list to try and persuade customers that ending PIR would be a good thing (which I disapproved of, and emailed them about), they do have a great range of fiction & non-fiction, and are at least an Australian-owned chain bookstore, even if no longer the independent bookshop that Dymocks once was.
(I was pleased to see that they had several copies of F2M by Hazel Edwards and Ryan Kennedy - it's by local Aus/NZ authors, it's YA, and it's about gender identity and transitioning - a first for local YA - and it's a good read. hopefully they'll sell the copies!)

I decided to check the sale out - not committing to buying anything (I have on occasion actually made it out of a book sale without buying anything - not often, but it has happened), just having a look. the stickered sale prices were good - lots of recent fiction at $5, some at $10, and $20 for big hardcovers - so I picked up a few titles - a script book of Little Britain reduced from $39.99 to $5!, John Barrowman's autobiography in hc for $7.50 - and passed over others that were more than $10 and/or not something I'd be sure to re-read.

then a staff member made a charming announcement over the PA "shoppers, if you are in the store right now, consider yourself lucky, we are making you an offer you can't refused. all books and other items on sale tables are now reduced by 50% from the sticker price, so pick up a basket and go crazy, treat yourself, buy gifts for loved ones without costing a fortune. we want to sell all the stock so we don't have to pack it up!"

I did indeed pick up a basket and go crazy, as did many other shoppers. the nice announcer repeated his spiel a few times, changing "so we don't have to pack it up" to "we're doing this as a thank you to everyone who's shopped with us during the year" and adding "consider yourself lucky, it's like a Lotto win!".

so, I decided to be flexible and accommodate this amazing lucky opportunity to help the staff avoid packing up all the stock again, and suspend my "no buy" resolution for an hour or so. and just look at what I got!:

(I'm using pb to mean paperback, not picture book; hc is hard cover; tpb is trade paperback; gn is graphic novel)

Laurell K Hamilton - Blood Noir (hc) $3.75
John Barrowman - Anything Goes (hc) $3.75
Archimede Fusillo - Last of the Braves (pb) $5
Matt Lucas & David Walliams - Little Britain: Scripts and Stuff from Season 3 (hc) $2.50
Justina Robson - Going Under (trade pb) $3.75 (book 3 of Quantum Gravity; I have book 1, now looking for book 2)
Pamela Freeman - Full Circle (tpb) $2 (it's book 3 of the Castings Trilogy, so I'll want to buy or borrow the first two before I read it)
Elizabeth Honey & Heike Brandt - To the Boy in Berlin (pb) $3.75
ed.s James Gunn, Marleen S Barr, Matthew Candelaria - Reading Science Fiction (pb) $10
Kathy Reichs - Devil Bones (pb) $2.50
Brian Caswell - Cruisin' (pb) $2.50
Amanda Lohrey - Vertigo (pb) $1
Gabrielle Bell - Cecil and Jordan in New York stories (hc graphic novel) $7.50
Cristy C Road - Bad Habits (pb gn) $2
Dark Horse ed - My Space: Dark Horse Presents (pb gn) $2
Rehannon Pompey - Smashing Aunty Kathy's Car (pb) $1
Nicki Bloom - Tender (pb playtext) $1
Debra Adelaide - The Household Guide to Dying (pb) $2.50
Hunters & Collectors - Great Australian Albums 2: Human Frailty (dvd) $5
Powderfinger - Great Australian Albums 2: Odyssey Number Five (dvd) $5
Zach Braff - Garden State (dvd) $7.50
Alyssa Brugman - Girl Next Door (pb) $5
ed. Sherman Alexie - Tell the World (pb) $3.75
ed. Amy Goldwasser - Red (pb) $3.75
John Marsden - So Much To Tell You (pb playtext) $2.50
Simmone Howell - Everything Beautiful (pb) $3.75
David Walliams, read with Matt Lucas - The Boy in the Dress (audio cd) $7.50
James Manos, Jr/Jeff Lindsay - Dexter Season 2 (dvd) $10
Melissa Rosenberg/Stephenie Meyer - Twilight (dvd) $5 (now I can make my own Buffy/Edward mash-up!)
Sean Williams - The Dust Devils (pb) $3.75
Jane Godwin - Falling From Grace (pb) $3.75
Cathy Park Hong - Dance Dance Revolution (pb) $2.50
A. Koford - The Laugh-Out-Loud Cats Sell Out (hb gn) $2.50
Quentin Blake - You're Only Young Twice! (hb) $2.50

so I got 34 titles - books of poetry, prose fiction, criticism and plays, dvds of movies, tv series and docos, graphic novels and picture books, and an audio CD - all for $134.25!

and I'm obviously having a lucky book day, cos I just received an email from Text Publishing to say that I'm one of several new subscribers to their e-newsletter who has won a copy of a book published by them! yay!

I wish all who read this may have a lucky book day - lots of lucky book days - whether you're a writer, editor, publisher, bookseller or reader, may you find, buy, win, read, sell to a publisher or to a customer, contract, edit, or write - lots of wonderful books!!!

Pitfalls for young readers

"Look at that view!"
"Yes, it's very picture-skew, isn't it?"
"What?!"

I don't know if this conversation ever happened when I was a child, but it could easily have. As with many kids who learn a lot of words through reading them rather than hearing them, I had a great vocabulary at a young age, but was often a bit off with the pronunciation.

I knew that "queue" was pronounced 'kyoo' (now how's that for unlikely pronunciation?), and was familiar with the word 'picture', so when I encountered the word 'picturesque' I heard it in my head as 'pikshaskyoo', and worked out that it meant 'pretty as a picture'.

And a tall, impressive, good-looking woman was 'statyooskyoo', meaning 'impressive like a statue'. If ever I want to write the word, I have to look 'statuesque' up in the dictionary to be sure of how to spell it - knowing that it's supposed to be pronounced 'statyooesk' doesn't tell me whether there are two 'e's in the middle (one for 'statue' and one for 'esque') or one, or none.

I don't have a clear memory of when I could first read words, but I do have a vivid memory (as well as remembering it as a story told in the family) of sitting in the drawing room with my mother (who was reading), my father (who was reading), and my older sister (who was reading), and being very frustrated because at not quite four I couldn't read yet. Fortunately I did learn to read soon after, first in English (Ant and Bee and Kind Dog) and then some French (Pierre Lapin - which is as far as I ever got).

I also remember being so absorbed in reading that I didn't hear Mum calling me. She thought I was deliberately ignoring her, but I really was deaf to the world - something that still happens now when I'm absorbed in reading, which is apparent to me when I come out of a book and hear that my iTunes has moved on through more than half an hour of a playlist without my hearing a thing.

These thoughts were inspired by reading this post, http://stilllifewithcat.blogspot.com/2009/07/help.html, which for some reason I can't link to.

books that shaped me

Some people object to lists, but I looove lists of good books (that's why I bought Nancy Pearl's "Book Lust"). And this "shopping list" post certainly fits the theme of my blog - my life as a reader/audience.

These books are all ones that I love, by authors & illustrators that I admire; some were also childhood favourites. I decided to do a list of 100, which meant having to exclude lots, so when a book is part of a series, I have usually put just the first book, or my favourite, to represent them all (in most cases I love the whole series).

Mostly I've listed books that were published at least five years ago (except for Let the Right One In, which I made an exception for cos it's a) brilliant and b) such a good example of cross-genre writing), to give enough time to judge how much the books have stayed with me.

I've also aimed to avoid having more than one book by the same author in the same category (although some authors are included in more than one genre), cos otherwise my children's books could've been all Joan Aiken, for example, and I wanted to include as many authors as possible.

They're grouped by genre/audience/format cos I wanted to have a representative range of the books that I love and that have contributed to my world view. I started reading crime, SF and general adult fiction when I was a kid, and still read kids' books now.


Young Adult:
1. My Heartbeat, Garret Freymann-Weyr
2. Saving Francesca, Melina Marchetta
3. Boy Meets Boy, David Levithan
4. Sky Legs, Irini Savvides
5. Tomorrow, When the War Began, John Marsden
6. The Sterkarm Handshake, Susan Price
7. Lockie Leonard, Human Torpedo, Tim Winton
8. Tex, S.E. Hinton
9. Pagan's Vows, Catherine Jinks
10. Finding Cassie Crazy, Jaclyn Moriarty

Crime/Mystery
11. Justice, Faye Kellerman
12. Shakespeare's Champion, Charlaine Harris
13. Cut to the Quick, Kate Ross
14. Seeing a Large Cat, Elizabeth Peters
15. The Embroidered Sunset, Joan Aiken
16. A Running Duck, Paula Gosling
17. The Franchise Affair, Josephine Tey
18. Peepshow, Leigh Redhead
19. Busman's Honeymoon, Dorothy L. Sayers
20. For the Defense, Kate Wilhelm

SF/Fantasy/Horror
21. Darwin's Radio, Greg Bear
22. The October Country, Ray Bradbury
23. Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany, Jr
24. Welcome, Chaos, Kate Wilhelm
25. Insomnia, Stephen King
26. Hunting Party, Elizabeth Moon
27. Body of Glass, Marge Piercy
28. Beauty, Sheri S. Tepper
29. The Autumn Castle, Kim Wilkins
30. Always Coming Home, Ursula K. Le Guin

Picture books:
31. I Hate My Teddy Bear, David McKee
32. Eloise, Kay Thompson & Hilary Knight
33. Goodnight, Moon, Margaret Wise Brown & Clement Hurd
34. My Place, Nadia Wheatley & Donna Rawlins
35. Fungus the Bogeyman, Raymond Briggs
36. Where the Wild Things Are, Maurice Sendak
37. Just One Apple, Janosch
38. Tip-Tip, Marcelle Vérité
39. The Waterhole, Graeme Base
40. Grandpa, John Burningham

Children's:
41. The Load of Unicorn, Cynthia Harnett
42. Black Hearts in Battersea, Joan Aiken
43. The Horse & His Boy, C.S. Lewis
44. The Wind on the Moon, Eric Linklater
45. The Borrowers, Mary Norton
46. Handles, Jan Mark
47. The Ice is Coming, Patricia Wrightson
48. The Children of Green Knowe, Lucy M. Boston
49. White Boots, Noel Streatfield
50. The Phantom Tollbooth, Norman Juster

General fiction:
51. A Spot of Bother, Mark Haddon
52. 26a, Diana Evans
53. The Spell, Alan Hollinghurst
54. Not That Sort of Girl, Mary Wesley
55. Dirt Music, Tim Winton
56. The Infernal Optimist, Linda Jaivin
57. God on the Rocks, Jane Gardam
58. Three Dog Night, Peter Goldsworthy
59. I for Isobel, Amy Witting
60. The Bat Tattoo, Russell Hoban

Historical novels:
61. Gone to Soldiers, Marge Piercy
62. The Vizard Mask, Diana Norman
63. The Gentleman's Garden, Catherine Jinks
64. An Infamous Army, Georgette Heyer
65. Jane Fairfax, Joan Aiken
66. These Is My Words, Nancy Turner
67. Queen of the Lightning, Kathleen Herbert
68. Cold Mountain, Charles Frazier
69. Year of Wonders, Geraldine Brooks
70. Small Gains, K.M. Peyton

Graphic novels:
71. Sandman, Neil Gaiman & Kieth/Dringenberg/Klein, et al.
72. Y: Last Man, Brian K. Vaughn & Pia Guerra
73. Tales of the Slayers: Presumption, Jane Espenson & Russell/Kindzierski/Showman
74. The Adventuress, Audrey Niffenegger
75. Fun Home, Alison Bechdel
76. Persepolis 1 & 2, Marjane Satrapi
77. Blankets, Craig Thompson
78. 99 Ways to Tell a Story, Matt Madden
79. Black Orchid, Neil Gaiman & Dave McKean
80. Buddha, Osamu Tezuka

Classics (and ones that should be):
81. Persuasion, Jane Austen
82. Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
83. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
84. Vanity Fair, W.M. Thackeray
85. Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
86. Maurice, E.M. Forster
87. Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
88. Living Alone, Stella Benson
89. At the Back of the North Wind, George MacDonald
90. Sing For Your Supper, Pamela Frankau

Cross-genre & other favourites:
91. Drums of Autumn, Diana Gabaldon
92. Dead Until Dark, Charlaine Harris
93. Anansi Boys, Neil Gaiman
94. The Underdog, Markus Zusak
95. The Puppy Sister, S.E. Hinton
96. How I Live Now, Meg Rosoff
97. Sabriel, Garth Nix
98. Emma Tupper's Diary, Peter Dickinson
99. Cold Tom, Sally Price
100. Let the Right One In, John Ajvide Lindqvist