Bookbookins have been a minor pic-lit trend over the past decade. They continue the tradition of using gastronomic metaphors to describe the experience of reading, as in: do you gulp books down, or do they swallow you up?
In Oliver Jeffers' The Incredible Book Eating Boy (2006), Henry literally eats his literature. He favours the flavour of non-fiction, but he sometimes also savours:
Note the joke in this picture (which is really a doodle in the corner): Moby Dick is served with chips. However, it's not long before Henry dreams that the tables are turned and books are trying to eat him:
Henry also vomits books up, having gorged on them to the point of indigestion.
But all's well that ends well once he starts reading rather than eating books and loves them that way, too. And they no longer make him sick. "And," the book says, "he thought that if he read enough he might still become the smartest person on Earth. It would just take a bit longer." Moral: by reading, you learn stuff.
Some of the most interesting visual cues in Jeffers' work come from the backgrounds: different types of graph paper and latin dictionaries, some just visible through paint.
Elsewhere, a blackboard in a class room is a ripped-off hardcover which faintly reads: "Board of Education" . Hee.
Meanwhile, in Lauren Child's* Beware of the Storybook Wolves (2000), the emphasis is not on the danger of predatory books, but of predatory book characters, who slip off the page and into Herb's bedroom with their appetites intact:
Herb (named after a tasty morsel?) already knows stories need to be contained within book covers, and by the end he achieves this:
I like that this image echoes the mattress scene in The Princess and the Pea (which Child has also illustrated), but the moral seems conservative: mixing fantasy and real life will lead to Being Eaten.
Beware is the first of a pair of Child bookbookins, and in the second, Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Book? (2002) the reality/fantasy border is crossed the other way: Herb gets lost in the storybook himself - and is falsely accused by Goldilocks of scrounging for food (if everybody else is hungry, it makes sense to assume he is too).
The aim of the game is still to restore order and everyone to their proper place, but it goes further: Herb learns not to draw moustaches on royal women and cut bits out of their palace with scissors because they'll get all cross and command him to draw them thrones. Herb tries to please:
Child's already eclectic style blunts the immediacy of the humour somewhat - Herb's orange and green chair isn't so out of place here as it would be, say, in amongst demure Kate Greenaway illustrations - but it's still hilarious.The lesson here is in what Anne Fadiman calls "courtly love" of books: "the book's physical self [is] sacrosanct, its form inseparable from its content". This is truer of picture books than of text-only literature - particularly for illustrauthors such as Child, who uses the text as part of her images. So her scolding moral - don't scribble on books! - can be forgiven.
And in spite of the border patrol, Child's main message is that reading brings the excitement of experiencing other worlds. Book (1999) illustrated by Peter Catalanotto and written by George Ella Lyon makes the same point but the images are more dreamlike (the worlds aren't recognisable and well-defined, as fairytales are), and the text terribly mawkish. Reading here is shown as a transcendental drug experience:
The girl in red on the right of the page is the reader who has fallen into the book within the book. The book is shown as a way to "meet" the author - this is him on the right:
The book ends with the lines:"BOOK BOON COMPANION
Field
Home
Treasure
May it hold you.
May it set you free."
Eurk. The medium of the book really does have a hold over our romantic imagination - did anybody talk like that about scrolls? Possibly only 1980s raptures over LP record players (in defence against the evil CD) come close to such solemn intonation.
It's interesting that Book - which is pre-internet-explosion and pre Web 2.0 - presents reading as a very interactive experience. In contrast, Lane Smith's It's a Book (2010) deliberately compares the book to the bells-and-whistles of computing:
In contrast to Herb's fight to the teeth, the jackass is specifcally told "no" to the question: "can you make the characters fight?". The book in question is Treasure Island, shown with old-timey woodblock illustration:
It's interesting (if perhaps statistically insignificant) that both Jeffers and Smith use nautical 19th century tales as their examples of storybooks (as well as Moby Dick, Henry eats War and Peace - 19th C if not nautical - and The Hunt for Red October - nautical, if not 19th C). Perhaps it's because they're robust rollicking yarns made in the days before books had to compete with radio, cinema, televison and the internet, and they're about journeys, echoing the journey the reader makes into the book-world.
Anyway, here's how the jackass wants to update the page shown just above:
LJS: rrr! K? lol!JIM: :( ! :)
To which I say myself: lol!
In the end, the jackass keeps hold of the book, in spite of - or maybe even because of - its lack of interaction. In keeping with Smith's calm illustration style, reading is shown as a far quieter, more passive pastime in It's a Book than in any of the preceeding stories.
Not sure if that'll sell it, but the restfulness makes a lovely change.
*warning! the link is to the happily-named Child's annoyingly slow and cutesy celebrationary website which at first glance gives the mistaken impression that Child wrote Pippi Longstocking. She wishes.
