After 35 years as an adult-non-fiction publisher, Penny Phillips learnt how to appeal to young minds in her new book
Children’s books aren’t child’s play
O
nce upon a time, there was a woman with plaits in her hair who worked as an editor in book publishing. For 35 years, she worked chiefly in adult non-fiction (at Bloomsbury, Piatkus, André Deutsch, then Bloomsbury again) across a range of genres, from political memoir, celebrity biography and cookbooks to popular science, miscarriage-ofjustice exposés (remember the Guildford Four?) and military history. Those titles were usually illustrated – and finding the illustrations was a job in itself. A gardening guide might need a diagram showing how to prune a pear tree. Film director Fred Zinnemann’s autobiography called for a film still of Burt Lancaster in a clinch with Deborah Kerr. A memoir by an ex-SAS soldier needed photos of the 1980 Iranian Embassy siege. In the pre-internet era, picture libraries such as Hulton-Deutsch and Bridgeman
were physical spaces where the woman with plaits could while away an afternoon in search of the perfect image. That woman was me. Why did I write all that in the third person? Perhaps because even though – or maybe because – I worked as an editor, I was always also drawn to story-telling. Stories are what life is made of. And stories for children are where it starts. At Bloomsbury in the 1990s, the children’s department was bang next to my office; I got used to the shrieks of enthusiasm or frustration coming from the other side of the wall – and, yes, Harry Potter was born within earshot. Long before he became a worldwide phenomenon, I twice sent a first edition of the very first book to friends’ children, who, many years later, sold them for… But that’s another story. Choosing illustrations for adult non-fiction may have taken time, but it was quite straightforward. I probably vaguely assumed the same applied to children’s books. My own childhood favourites had included Babar, Winniethe-Pooh, Ameliaranne and the Green Umbrella, Uncle and Struwwelpeter. The pictures just told the story, didn’t they? Nothing complicated about it. The illustrator drew what was in the text. You read the words and looked across the page and – pfff! The words were brought to life. It wasn’t until I worked as a picturebooks editor, at children’s publisher Walker Books, that I paid proper attention to how children’s illustrated titles really work. It’s not simply a question of having images that depict exactly what the words say. Animal magic: Rose the rabbit and bedtime (right)
26 The Oldie Spring 2022
The relationship between the text and the pictures, whether it’s direct or oblique, hinges on a kind of active symbiosis: they work together to create something that tells a bigger story. The illustrator’s approach might be inspired as much by what isn’t in the text as by what is. A sentence that reads ‘Katy put on her green boots and hurried out into the storm’ is not, obviously, going to be well-served by a picture of Katy wearing red boots under a sunny sky. But is a green-booted Katy stomping through the wind and rain enough? Might she have a hat? An umbrella? A puppy running beside her? Is she feeling excited or grumpy? Why is she in a hurry? An illustrator will often add either bold clues or fuzzy layers of suggestion that aren’t explicitly in the text. A picture might portray a past event, or capture the present moment, or anticipate the story’s direction – for example with an unexplained footprint, or a broken gate.
