All About: Tigers

In celebration of our Tiger, Mog and Pink Rabbit: a Judith Kerr Retrospective exhibition opening at The Jewish Museum in London this month, we have a post looking at all the other terrifying tigers hiding in the Seven Stories Collection. If you want to find out more about Judith Kerr, and her archive held by Seven Stories, click here.

Cover artwork by Pat Marriott for Tiger Adventure, by Willard Price (Jonathan Cape, 1979) © Pat Marriott's Estate

This arresting cover illustration was created by Pat Marriott for the Adventure series by the North American novelist Willard Price. Hilary Hinckley, Marriott's niece, donated the full suite of illustrations in 2011, following the illustrator's death in 2002.

"At that time The London Zoo only opened on a Sunday morning to its 'members' and my brother and I used to accompany Pat. She studied and drew the animals, and developed a terrific facility to impart the essence of the creature through simple line drawings, the result of many hours of sketching." 

Hilary Hinkley, June 2011 in a letter written for the Seven Stories archive PM/03/02

Tiger Adventure is part of the 14 part book series by Willard Price. It follows two brothers, Hal and Roger Hunt, as they travel around the world capturing animals to return to the US and their father's wildlife collections. It was based on Price's love of adventure, he even went on expeditions for the National Geographic Society and the American Museum of Natural History! The series has been picked up again in recent years by Puffin, with Anthony McGowan commissioned to produce 3 new titles. In the new books, instead of capturing the animals, the protagonists are conservationists.

Marriott's archive also contains artwork for The Stolen Lake and Is by Joan Aiken, and preliminary artwork for two more books by Aiken. The two had a working friendship for over 40 years, and of Marriott's illustrations, Aiken writes:

"[She] has an absolutely magical gift for presenting landscapes and characters just as they were in my mind. She can get wonderful sympathy and terrific action and pace into her drawings of people... I can hardly envision them other than as Pat draws them." 

Joan Aiken, quote taken from joanaiken.com

Notes on the novel Tiger in the Well, Philip Pullman c. 1991 

© Philip Pullman

Our second 'tiger' this month is more of a metaphor, a page of notes from Philip Pullman, written during story development of one of the books in the Sally Lockhart quartet, Tiger in the Well. Key elements of the story shown here actually go on to be published under another title - The Tin Princess. The crucial passage shown above describes a central theme in the story:

What is the tiger? What is the well? A tiger in the well is when a terrible danger prevents your getting to something you need - you can't get to the water unless you take out the tiger but in doing so you may die. But if you don't you'll die anyway because there's only one well. 
So it's a riddle - a sort of Sufi koan.
What's the answer?
Leave the tiger where he is and drink wine.

Philip Pullman, notes on the novel Tiger in the Well, c. 1991

Pullman's archive was donated in 2002 and contains a collection of drafts, draft material and notes relating to fourteen of Philip Pullman's published titles for children.  There are notes and drafts for all other three books in the Sally Lockhart Quartet - The Ruby in the Smoke, The Shadow in the North, and The Tin Princess; and typescript drafts for the first two books in the His Dark Materials trilogy. Pullman also donated material relating to several school plays he wrote when working as an English teacher in Oxford, four of which went on to be developed into full-length novels.

Dinner Time, by Jan Pienkowski, Anne Carter and Marcin Stajewski  James Roger Diaz (Walker Books, 2007)

Finally, this month’s feature book is Dinner time, illustrated by Jan Pienkowski and published by Walker Books in 2007.  The humorously dark text was written by Anne Carter, and the pop-ups were engineered by Marcin Stajewski and James Roger Diaz.  This book was originally published in 1981 and the fact that it has been reprinted and published in different  editions and formats several times since then is testament to its enduring popularity.

Dinner Time tells the story of six animals, a Tiger, a Gorilla, a Frog, a Crocodile, a Shark and a Vulture, who pop out at the reader and teach us about the food chain. Can you work out which order they might eat each other!

Jan Pienkowski has won the prestigious Kate Greenaway medal twice and illustrated and written hundreds of books. In 2009 Jan kindly donated this copy of Dinner Time to Seven Stories Collection along with 80 other books he has illustrated.  His collection includes many more pop-ups (some with sound effects), board books, sticker books, large format and mini editions, Touch & Feel, and Flap books, as well as many of the highly popular Meg and Mog books which he created along with author Helen Nicoll.

If you'd like to find out more about the Seven Stories Collection, then 

email: collections@sevenstories.org.uk or phone: 0191 495 2707 or comment on this blog.

All about pop-up books! (1 of 2)

In the first of our series on pop-up books, our guest blogger Lena Kleine Bornhorst, browses through the Seven Stories book collection and looks at some of the milestones in the history of moveable books:

On the bookshelves in the Seven Stories Collection Department you can find lots of copies of a very special kind of book: pop-up books. These books – full of surprises and wonderful 3D elements – are worth having a closer look at. Pop-up books have a very long tradition and had their beginning in the area of ‘toy books’ – also called ‘movable books’. All of them have special interactive functions or attributes, which make them different to a traditional book. The first known toy books date from the thirteen century. Rotating discs were included for example in mathematics books, where they were used for changing a maths formula when the disc was turned.

The years 1880 – 1910 were seen as the first enormous height of toy books. One of the big names in the field at this time was the British publisher and printer, Ernest Nister, who used different interactive elements in his books. The Seven Stories Collection holds reproductions of some of his titles. For example, his book Revolving Pictures, which was originally published in 1892. When you revolve the tabs around the illustration in this book, you can see a hidden picture appear.

Detail from Ernest Nister's Revolving Pictures (1892)

A significant person at this time, and an important figure in the development of paper-engineering books, was the German illustrator Lothar Meggendorfer. He used many different techniques in clever ways and published numerous books – for example Internationaler Circus (International Circus) in 1887. Meggendorfer's books were translated into many languages. His German Publisher house J.F. Schreiber Verlag exists today under the name Esslinger Verlag (http://www.esslinger-verlag.de/) and many of his great books have been reprinted. The Seven Stories Collection includes a copy of his title Das Puppenhaus (The doll’s house). Meggendorfer’s wide and lasting influence on the pop-up industry is demonstrated by the fact that the American Movable Book Society (http://www.movablebooksociety.org/) named their prize for outstanding paper engineering after him.

Cover of Lothar Meggendorfer's Das Puppenhaus (1889)

Internal spread from Lothar Meggendorfer's Das Puppenhaus (1889)

The first book with the definition ‘pop-up’ on the cover was already published in 1912. Very often, though, the beginnings of the term ‘pop-up’ is associated with Jack the Giant Killer, which was published by the New York publishing house Blue Ribbon in 1932. It became a big success and Blue Ribbon published other pop-up fairy tales which developed as a big seller.

The Blue Ribbon pop-up books were based on a British example. In 1929 publisher, S. Louis Giraud in his publisher house Strand Publications in London, produced the first book of his successful series Bookano Stories. The books contained five coloured double pages with 3D-elements, which Giraud called “pictures that spring up in model form”. The books were printed in a large run and became a big success. At the Seven Stories Collection you can find a copy of a later volume of the Bookano Stories from 1947.

Front cover of S. Louis Giraud's Bookano Stories no. 16 (1947)

Paper engineered Tower Bridge from S. Louis Giraud's Bookano Stories no. 16 (1947)

Blue Ribbon worked closely with Walt Disney to create pop-up books of Disney characters beginning in 1933 with four Micky Mouse pop-up books. A lot of Walt Disney-Pop-ups followed and the licenses were sold all over the world. There have been numerous Disney themed pop-up-books over the years.  At Seven Stories you can find for example a copy of Pocahontas – Meeko’s Busy Day from 1996 or The Aristocats from 1971 – made by (but not credited to) the internationally regarded pop-up artist Vojtěch Kubašta.

Internal spread from The Aristocats (1971)

Kubašta’s characteristic style is obvious throughout this book: the spine of the book is at the top rather than the left, the paper engineering-elements emerge at the left and right side of the book when you open the pages, and the pull-tabs are cleverly integrated. These characteristics can all be seen in The Aristocats as well as in his many other books. Kubašta produced over 70 titles and his particular style makes him another important person in the history of paper engineering.

In the middle of the 60s began the so-called second golden age of pop-up books.  In 1974 the American Waldo Hunt, set up the pop-up production company Intervisual Communications. Hunt produced also the pop-up book Haunted House by the British author and illustrator Jan Pieńkowski (paper engineering for this book was created by Tor Lokvig). In 1979 this became the first pop-up-book to win the Kate Greenaway Award – a very remarkable honour for a pop-up-book. A signed copy of this special book is available at the Seven Stories Collection Department.

The cover of Jan Pienkowski's Haunted House (1979)

Internal spread from Jan Pienkowski's Haunted House (1979)

Waldo Hunt also worked with some other great known paper engineers, like David Pelham, David A. Carter, and Robert Sabuda. Many of their books can be found in the Seven Stories Collection.

Beyond the well-known paper-engineers, many successful illustrators and authors, such as Anthony Browne and Maurice Sendak, have worked with paper engineers to make wonderful pop-up books. Animal Fair (2002) by Anthony Browne is available at the Seven Stories Collection Department and here you can see a short film about a conversation about Maurice Sendaks Mommy? http://vimeo.com/32596506, published 2006.

There have been a lot more exciting and creative pop-up-books over the last years and some very innovative paper engineers like Robert Crowther, Ron van der Meer (who specialises in pop-ups for adults), and the paper engineer Matthew Reinhardt.  But why not come along and explore all the wonderful books here yourself?

If you'd like to find out more about the Seven Stories Collection, the pop-up books we hold, or our extensive library of children's books and related literature, then 
email: collections@sevenstories.org.uk or phone: 01914952707.