Notes and photos from Germany: children's books and other goodly things

A few photos and commentary from the Germany trip. Apologies about this being a mishmash of children’s publishing and sightseeing - too lazy to do separate posts. Will put up more notes when I get around to doing the official pieces.

(Click pictures to enlarge)

Our first two days were in Frankfurt, which is full of these strange juxtapositions – walk about the town centre and you’ll find the scenery changing every 20 metres or so; parts of it are like something thought up by a hallucinogen-affected mind. Down the road from our hotel was this vista: a quaint, Legoland-style tower (the Eschenheimer Turm, it’s called) in the foreground, with an oversized modern glass building just behind it.


To my (no doubt untrained) eyes it was the Turm that seemed the newer, more artificial construction. The impression I got was that someone had decided to erect the little tower as an afterthought, as a contrast to the gleaming glass-and-concrete buildings. Later I was told that it really is the oldest construction in the area, dating back to the 15th century. I’m sure there’s been some refurbishing though; the thing definitely couldn’t have looked exactly like this 600 years ago. I mean, how old is Lego?

Our stay in Hamburg was brief but it was a much more picturesque place – lots of nice lakes and bridges. This is during a walk around the warehouse district, or the Speicherstadt.

Lots of, um, old warehouses, but all very good to look at. The weather was great too. And Hamburg is something of a pilgrimage spot for me because of the tennis Masters series of 2008. (If the Hamburg Masters hadn't been downgraded and replaced by the Madrid Masters this year, I would have been in the city just a couple of days after the final!)

The TV tower in Berlin...

...and a close-up of the graffiti on its sides (including “Berlin, Ich liebe dich!” or “Berlin, I love you”). East Berlin is full of colourful graffiti and building-length artwork.

The Alexanderplatz, where I took a long and most satisfying walk one fine evening.

The Brandenburger Tor, one of the city’s most famous sights and a popular congregating ground for hundreds of tourists. Also just a short walk away from an Indian restaurant called the Bolliwood.


Cafes on the waterfront. One of the buildings on the right is the theatre set up by Bertolt Brecht (who I'm told is better known in Calcutta than in Germany).


A German Shepherd with his human at one of the cafes.


I liked the fact that pets were allowed almost anywhere - into the local trains, in shops and restaurants - and that many of them weren't even wearing leashes while out on a walk. You see a collared dog coming out an alley and ambling about by himself for a bit, and just as you're wondering if they have strays in Germany you notice a human trailing behind as the dog looks back impatiently.

The German Cathedral and Concert Hall, near which much ginger ale was consumed.


At the “speed-dating” session we had with a few German publishers’ representatives in Berlin. On the right is the redoubtable Anita Roy (Young Zubaan). With her is Susanne Pfeiffer of Ravensburger AG.


Susanne holds up a Ravensburger picture book that uses flaps on every page.

Peel back the flap on the right page here and the exterior of the aircraft’s cockpit gives way to reveal the pilot and the first officer sitting inside, fiddling with knobs and levers and looking immensely cheerful, like they’re in Disneyland or something.

Renate Reichstein of Oetinger poses with the resourceful cat Findus who stars in Sven Nordquist’s Old Man and the Cat books.


An Oetinger book that comes with a DVD containing an animated version of the story.


Atlantis Verlag, an imprint of Orell Füssli, has a picture-book titled Mutig, Mutig (literal translation “Brave, Brave”, official English translation “The Test of Courage”) about various animals in the forest deciding to undergo suitable tests of courage to “prove” themselves.


When the sparrow’s turn comes he refuses to participate, saying he doesn’t need to prove anything, whereupon the other animals recognise that “saying no is a form of courage too”. Very nice little lesson, I thought – particularly apt for those of us whose lives are not governed by an urgent need to win MTV Roadies.

Love this picture of the frog, the sparrow and the rat patiently waiting as the slowcoach snail returns after performing his task.


Books for girls aged 12 plus.


The one on the right translates as “Love, Chaos and Summer Kisses”. These are relatively “clean”, I was told (“girls dream about boys but nothing really happens”), but there are a number of books for readers aged 12 and upwards that deal more explicitly with sexuality. Apparently it’s quite the norm for parents and teachers to get such books for their children because the kids are embarrassed to be seen buying them!

Before our ferry ride in Hamburg: Sayoni Basu, director-publishing, Scholastic India (and big sister to Samit the Duck) with our super-efficient tour guide Katrin Hoenemann.

At the Carlsen office, a company mascot holds a basket full of the little “Pixi” books that have acquired national-heritage status in Germany over the past few decades.


Quite a working environment, this: inside one of the Carlsen offices. These sightings caused much envy among the members of our group, most of whom spend their days in very drab offices. And yes, that's a Robbie Williams cutout in the far corner.


Inside the Tatzelwurm, a prize-winning children’s bookstore in Frankfurt. (Picture courtesy Arun Erik Wolf of the Frankfurt Book Fair office)

It’s a small space but very efficiently used. Lots of supplementary activities are conducted here to keep children interested in books, e.g. they occasionally have groups of youngsters coming in to loll about in sleeping bags and listen to audio books.

(Left to right) The children's-book illustrators Katrin Engelking, Peter Schössow, Isabel Kreitz and Ole Konnecke, whom we met at the Kinderbuchhaus (Children's Book House) in Hamburg.

We had an informal chat with these fine artists over tea. Peter also narrated the story of his marvelously detailed picture-book Baby Dronte, about a little dodo who gets himself adopted by a ship's frog-captain.


(For more on the illustrators and their work, see their websites: Peter, Isabel, Katrin)

Incidentally, one of the things we learnt is that there’s a cultural resistance in Germany (and other European countries) to the French style of illustration, which tends to be more distorted, surreal and not instantly pleasing to the eye (if you’ve seen the animated French film The Triplets of Belleville, you might get a sense of this). More about that later.

More notes from Hamburg

At the Kinderbuchhaus, contd: a short Q&A with the freelance illustrator Katrin Engelking, who has worked on more than 40 children’s books for publishers like Oetinger and Ravensburger. Engelking has illustrated the new editions of Astrid Lindgren’s famous Pippi Longstocking books.

What is your working routine like? Do you work on more than one picture-book at a time?

Normally I work on one big project at a time, but one has make adjustments. One thing that happens is that publishers typically want you to send a book cover in advance – for the catalogue and other promotional material – before you’ve even started working on the main body of the book. So there have been times when I’m doing the inside illustrations for a particular book but also simultaneously working on the cover illustration of my next project. And if the two books require different styles, it can be tricky to shift back and forth!

Once I made a cover and they used it for a promotional CD but later I ordered it back and added a few little elements, because by that time I had a clearer idea of what the rest of the book was going to be like.

How much time do you need to finish a picture-book?

Lots of time! I have two children so I can only work until 2, which is when they come home from school. Earlier, before I had started a family, it was possible to work all sorts of odd hours, but not now.

What are the main challenges for a freelance artist?

There are no contractual problems, except that obviously you can’t draw the same characters for different publishers. But you have to manage your time and your deadlines. In my case I’ve developed a good relationship with Oetinger and we fit together very well, so I mostly work for them now. Earlier I handled two or three publishers together, and it was sometimes dreadful! (Laughs) You have to be accountable to so many people.

You must have been very excited when you were asked to do the new editions of the Pippi Longstocking books?

I was very enthusiastic about it, sure, but it was scary too. I mean, I was reading these books when I was growing up, like nearly everyone else – Pippi is such a famous character in Germany, she’s been around for over six decades and generations of people have grown up with her. Everybody loves her and knows what she looks like, so it was daunting to do these new drawings. I had to do over 50 colour illustrations, but I enjoyed every bit of it.
When you illustrate stories written by other authors, what is the extent of collaboration?

It varies. Once I told an author – whom I knew very well – that I had looked at the moon one day and thought I saw a rabbit shape on it. So she developed that idea into a story and I illustrated it! But we worked separately: she wrote the story first and then I took over. You don’t want to start interfering with each other’s work.

When I’m doing both the text and the drawings for a book, I write the story first and then work out how much space there is for the illustrations.

Is it important for a children’s book illustrator to go through a professional course?

I don’t think so, although I did study at the College of Design in Hamburg. It depends on how good you are – if you come out of nowhere but your pictures are good enough to impress a publisher, that should be enough.

On the other hand, when you’re doing a professional course, there are many talented people working together and competing, which is a useful environment to be in. The option should certainly exist for budding artists.

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I also exchanged a few quick words with Isabel Kreitz, who is very shy when she’s amidst a large of people but eloquent in a one-to-one conversation; she told me that her real area of interest is writing/drawing comic books for older readers, but that she earns money by doing children’s picture-books. “Picture-books require a different artistic approach,” she said. “You have to put everything into one picture, which could perhaps be a really big double-spread – it’s like an extract. You can’t use sequential art in a very creative way, like you do with comic-book panels – so the mindset has to be different.”

“I wish I could collaborate with authors when I’m working on picture-books, but most of them are dead,” she deadpanned (because she often works on new editions of books written a long time ago), “or the book is already made and I’m just expected to add something to it.”

Otherwise, our session with the illustrators involved several people talking at once, and a certain amount of translation going on too. Peter Schössow told us that when he does illustrations he sometimes get fed up drawing the same character again and again, and wants to create variety to make things more interesting. “Sometimes I do three illustrations featuring a particular character, then I think to myself, my god, how on earth am I going to do another 71 pages!” For this reason he finds it useful to switch between drawing characters and writing a story. “If you’re stuck with one you can move to the other, refresh your mind a little and then come back.” It reminded me of something Isaac Asimov once said about never being afflicted with writer’s block: he wrote so many different types of books (sci-fi, history, mystery stories, popular science) that if he ever got tired of one genre he could switch to a different kind of writing for a while. Needless to say, this doesn’t work for everyone!

Here’s the cover of an all-drawing Pixi book done by Peter:


And, much to the delight of the Indian contingent, the opening page of a book by Ole Konnecke, about a kid trying to learn to do magic:


(Ole’s uncle was a professional magician and had a large collection of posters – including this one of P C Sorkar)

Notes from Germany 2: the Kinderbuchhaus, thoughts on illustrations

One of the most enjoyable sessions during the trip was our visit to the Kinderbuchhaus (Children’s Book House) in the Altona Museum in Hamburg. It’s a charming place that conducts activities geared towards getting children (and their parents) more involved with books. For instance, there are workshops where children are shown how to bind books – something that helps them appreciate the process that goes into the creation of the picture-books they would otherwise take for granted; to see a book as something that has to be carefully put together so that they can enjoy the end product. Enthusiasm levels run high at these workshops: project coordinator Heike Roegler told us that children are very proud – and very possessive – about the books they make themselves.

Also held here are exhibitions of framed, original versions of children’s book illustrations, so that visitors can see these drawing as works of art in their own right. On the day we were there, a Peter Schössow exhibition was on (Schössow himself was there too, as mentioned in the last post). Illustrations like this one – a child’s-eye perspective of a little cat in the foreground of a big city – look spectacular when you see them in their full-size versions:


Looking at high-quality illustrations for their artistic value, you realise there’s a lesson here for the many Indian parents who instinctively judge the worth of a children’s book by the amount of text it contains (all the better when it’s placed in the service of a pedantic moral lesson), failing to realise the role a series of beautiful drawings can play in developing a child’s imagination. (“Ismein padhne ka toh kuch hai hi nahin” is the typical response when a parent opens a book that’s full of beautiful drawings but very little text. But as Atiya Zaidi, publisher, Ratna Sagar, and one of the most entertaining members of our party, says, “You want value for your word-count? Buy a newspaper.”)

Earlier in the day, I had spoken with Zubaan’s Anita Roy about the often-haphazard way in which illustrations for children’s books are put together in India. “The Indian arts scene is actually lively and brilliant,” Anita said, “but there’s a lack of understanding of how children’s picture-books work. Illustrators are so central to the children’s publishing industry everywhere except India, where they get sidelined. They are not used to having publishers involving them in the creative aspect of putting a book together. It’s usually done very mechanically: an author will send in a story, the editor will say okay, this needs illustrations, and she’ll choose an illustrator and a format and send the text across and say we need 10 drawings of this size. And then someone else will put the text and illustrations together – a typesetter, or a designer if you’re very lucky. Everyone works in isolation, not much thought is given to layout, which is a crucial part of the process.”

“Most children’s publishing houses in India don’t even have a proper art director, so decisions about art design, layout etc are taken by editors like me, which is not the best way to do these things. Words persons end up having to learn how to think visually. Putting together a good picture-book requires an understanding of how text and visuals have to play off each other, but this is a neglected field in India.”

(I should mention here that Young Zubaan has just published one of the best-looking Indian picture-books I’ve seen, Mister Jeejeebhoy and the Birds by Anitha Balachandran. Lots of lovely drawings, notably a two-page spread of a sweet-shop that you just can’t tear your eyes away from. I first saw some of the illustrations at Bookaroo last winter and have been looking forward to the book ever since.)

The German Book Office in Delhi has now launched a programme called Jumpstart for children’s publishing in India, and among its initiatives is a series of intensive workshops for professionals involved in children’s books: writers and editors, illustrators, librarians and teachers, and marketing personnel. These will be held starting in July this year - mainly at the Max Mueller Bhawan, Delhi - and will hopefully address some of the issues facing children’s publishing in India. Anita tells me that as far as she knows none of the design colleges or art schools in India have courses that specialise in children’s book illustrations - certainly there's nothing that's comparable to the rigour with which these things are done in the West. The Jumpstart workshops should be a step in the desired direction.

(More about our meeting with the illustrators in another post)