1: Picture Books

The idea that picture books are an often complex fusion of art and literature which are not only educationally valuable but are also able to be aesthetically appreciated and enjoyed by both adults and children is now an established notion within educational circles. The last twenty years in particular have produced a great deal of significant research focusing on the wide range of picture books available, the unique ways in which they function and the sophisticated reading skills which they require from their readers in order to be fully appreciated (Nodelman 1988; Meek 1991; Doonan, 1993; Baddeley and Eddershaw 1994; Watson and Styles 1996). A picture book offers a reading and, indeed, a looking experience unlike any other. The best picture books are, as Evelyn Arizpe and Morag Styles state, ‘composed of pictures and words whose intimate interaction creates layers of meaning, open to different interpretations and which have the potential to arouse their readers to reflect on the act of reading itself’ (2003: 22). Traditionally, the picture book has relatively little written text and instead places a greater emphasis on pictures due to the fact that the medium as a whole was, and still is, primarily aimed at younger children and emergent readers. Yet in recent years, picture books have begun to move out of the realm of children’s literature and emerge as a valid art form in their own right. As with any medium, the strongest examples demonstrate a clever ability to employ the accepted conventions of the format as narrative and thematic strengths rather than considering them to be limitations. One such convention is that picture books often contain very little written text, some perhaps consisting of only fifty or sixty words. Yet why should this be considered detrimental to a reader’s enjoyment of the text? After all, a poem or a song may contain a similar amount of words, yet both have the ability to move us profoundly and engage us intellectually. Similarly, in many picture books, the emphasis is placed on the artwork to help tell the story but this does not necessarily mean that it is a simplistically constructed narrative. Indeed, if we went to an art gallery and looked at paintings which contain no written text, we would not consider them to be simplistic or childish for this reason. Picture books, of course, have not achieved the crossover into the mainstream adult book market to anything like the same degree as the fiction read by older children, such as the Harry Potter series and Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy.1 It is highly unlikely that you would glimpse an adult reading a picture book on the train, and they are certainly not read by many who are not parents nor even read by older children (who may well view reading picture books as taking a step backwards in their literacy devel-

opment). Yet the reading of a picture book – with or without a child present – can be a delightful and often moving experience and one which provides a refreshing alternative to a novel. As with any sophisticated art form they can, as Margaret Meek states, offer ‘ways of presenting the world’ but can also offer ‘scandalous, excessive, daring possibilities’ (1988: 19).