ARTISTS' STUDIOS

Here is Helen Craig in her studio with a prunus subhirtella autumnalis blooming mid-winter just outside her window. Wonderful to work up among the branches of a tree along with the birds.

    Helen has illustrated many books besides Katherine Holabird's Angelina Ballerina stories. She's currently working on a posthumous picture book story by Philippa Pearce for Walker Books, Amy's Three Best Things which is coming out next year.  

 

She signed this box set of This is the Bear that she did with Sarah Hayes - perfect for my two very young grandsons, as the stories all have the nursery rhythm of This is the House that Jack Built and Helen's gentle, humorous pictures are just right for that age.

ZOE'S BOAT

The first ten copies of Zoe's Boat have arrived from China. The cover is quite heavy and there are front and back cover flaps which make this paper back feel half-way to a hard back. The Chinese printer WKT have done a great job as the colours are spot on. I discovered that WKT is a family-run business which pleases me; it was started just before the end of WW2 in 1944.

    The next bit of excitement for Plaister Press will be the arrival of the forty or so cartons of books. When the re print copies of Selkie arrived in the autumn, the lorry was too big to get down Trafalgar Street and the palette of books was deposited outside the typographer's house. I'm hoping we might avoid that this time.

THINGS CHINESE

When a large New Year card arrived through the post from my Chinese printer WKT, with names printed on the back –Alex Yan, Frankie Chan, Niki Wong and others – suddenly there were real people behind the rather anonymous ‘printed in China’ on the imprint pages of Selkie and Zoe’s Boat.

    WKT will never have the personal touch of Lavenham Press who printed The Little White Sprite but they have been a very reliable, high quality printer and have helped cut the unit cost of my books.

 

Also arriving through the post from China via my publisher Bloomsbury was the Chinese edition of Tom Finger which left me admiring the Chinese characters of the title and wondering whether the Scottish Mc in McClure had ended up as just a dot.

THE XANADU MANUSCRIPT

I really enjoyed reading John Rowe Townsend's The Xanadu Manuscript both for its Cambridge setting and also for it's clever time travel story. It  was first published in 1977 and has been re issued by Oleander Press, a small publisher of books with a Cambridge interest. The Xanadu Manuscript, however, will interest young readers far beyond Cambridge as it has such a popular and universal theme.

    John is a very good friend, living close by and I'm delighted to see his book back in print again with its new, eye-catching cover.

4 DECEMBER DIARY ENTRY

For most of my life I kept a diary. I used to like to compare my own day, especially if it had been a bad one, with the days of other diarists in The Faber Book of Diaries edited by Simon Brett.  Now the blog has replaced the diary with posts that are not quite as personal as diary entries. Here are the entries of  The Reverend John Skinner, Jane Welsh Carlyle , George Gissing and Joan Wyndham for 4 December in 1823, 1855, 1893 and 1940 respectively:

And here's my own for 2011:

Woke at 10.30 after a bad night relieved it was Sunday and not Monday.  The last few days have been manic; trying to get Zoë’s Boat off to China for printing with the worry the huge files are still stuck somewhere out in cyberspace - hopefully nearer to Hong Kong than Cambridge.

     It was all so old fashioned and easy last year when Lavenham Press printed The Little White Sprite and the printer drove over to collect everything from my house; staying for tea and cake. But all that costs money and, now we’re in 'a time of economic crisis', costs have to be kept down. Though yesterday, 'the economic crisis story' didn’t ring very true at Hitchin Waterstones – or for that matter the ‘death of the book story.’ I’ve never seen so many people in a bookshop before and I’ve never had such a good signing session before – 47 copies sold.

  

PUNCTUATION

Commas, full stops, colons, semi-colons, hyphens and dashes are like the bones of a skeleton lying beneath the meaning of a sentence.

    As a Royal Literary Fund Fellow, I have to help students at Essex University with their writing. Last week, a very able student from Pakistan brought along a close reading of an excerpt by Dickens from Sketches by Boz. It would have been a first class essay except the student had not looked closely enough at the length of Dickens’s sentences nor thought about the way those sentences were punctuated. 

  On my non RLF days, I’m proof reading Zoë’s Boat before it goes to press. Looking at my own writing is somehow a much harder task than looking at someone else’s - all those punctuation marks and how they affect the rhythm of the page, not to mention the wider punctuation of the page turns in a picture book when you have to imagine the reader, a Mum or Dad, reading aloud to a child and turning those pages; quickly or slowly or deliberately holding back the page turn where there’s a cliff hanger.

SMALL CHILDREN ON THE 5 NOVEMBER

Last night was bonfire night and we watched the fireworks reflected in the river Cam at the bottom of my garden. Despite austerity times, Cambridge didn't skimp on its firework display or its bonfire; the explosions of colour were as bright as ever, the bangs were as big as ever and the smallest children were as scared as ever  - just as they would be reading this poem:  Please to Remember. Small children on 5 November