My Back Pages is what I would call an irregular feature that I’ve got going here. Essentially, every now and then, I dig out a book from my old shelves and my childhood to examine it with a new perspective and more than a hint of nostalgia. I have no idea why I’m doing this, and what I’ll end up with, but I figured that it might be slightly interesting. More interesting than what usually happens here anyway. Yes, it takes its name from the Dylan song, and yes, this is a standard introduction. You can read more about it from the introductory page I’ve written for it.

A Block Of Information

Title: The Emerald Conspiracy
Author: Mark Fowler
Illustrator: Mark Burgess
Other folks: Gaby Waters (Series Editor), Rachael Robinson (Assistant Editor)
Publisher: Usborne
First publication: 1993
Edition: 1994 (I think; it doesn’t say specifically), 9780746005088

Puzzle Adventures!

Usborne Puzzle Adventures! If I had to pick the primary childhood indulgence of mine, it just has to be this one. Slim, A5-sized books each with its own self-contained adventure, with puzzles to solve, a neat little adventure packed in, colourful illustrations, and nice luxurious paper. Come to think of it, it’s a little like Doctor Who, the way it works out, a brand-new adventure each time, sometimes science fiction, sometimes horror, sometimes Indy-styled thrillers. A bit hit-and-miss too, as I remember, just like the TV series.

And today, we’re going to take a look at The Emerald Conspiracy, number 18 of the series.

Question And Answer

Here’s how it works: We have a standard adventure setting, usually with precocious teenagers or endearing heroes (the stuff kids would tend to aspire to) having to foil some nefarious plot. Every two pages or so, we have a few sentences of text, lots of pretty drawings, and a line in bold presenting you with a puzzle of some sort. The puzzles include deciphering coded messages (there are plenty of these, as I recall), deduction (such as that someone is a crook in disguise based on earlier photographs), Where’s Waldo/Wally-type things, piecing together fragments or matching colours and shapes (no doubt cognitive tests for kids), and mazes (quite rare).

Solutions provided, of course, all at the back of the book. Because I was quite dumb, I checked these quite often. It was a bit of a discipline issue, I think, being so tempted just to flip to the back to see how simple it all was and then being overcome with that sinking feeling that I had let myself down. It was almost as if I wanted to let myself down. I probably checked about 50% of the time, which didn’t make these any less value-for-money, because I would forget or sometimes not understand, so I could always read again and face that damning moral dilemma all over.

There are also clues, which are usually almost as good as solutions, so I never got why they bothered putting in clues in the first place.

Synopsis

I had plenty of these. I still have them. I didn’t have the whole series of course. There were spin-offs too. Advanced Puzzle Adventures, Superpuzzles, Whodunits (which didn’t have puzzles but just clues that you were supposed to spot; you could otherwise read it like a storybook), and Spinechillers (exactly like Whodunits, but with a horror twist; I couldn’t read the word at first and pronounced it as spin nee chillers, which is one of those childhood things that continue to embarrass me up to this day). More on these next time, I suppose. (And those childhood embarrassment things.)

I don’t have the whole series though. There are quite a few pockets in my collection, I think. My parents always told me that they were very expensive, and that’s probably true because children’s books tend to go at a premium anyway. But I absolutely adored them, and made a half-conscientious effort to collect them.

In this one, Annie and Joe visit Exotiki, some strange little island with funny animals. They’re looking for Polly, who has disappeared and has thought to leave them clues so that you have something to solve. On the way, they discover some plot to steal a giant emerald and that the police are mostly useless.

Perfect set-up for an adventure.

Different Folks, Different Strokes

The books are all written by different people, with different illustrators to boot. It’s funny looking at it now, though, because when I picked out The Emerald Conspiracy yesterday, I noticed a number of others with art styles that I didn’t used to care for when I was a kid. On the other hand, the art of Mark Burgess in The Emerald Conspiracy was something that I thought was fantastic back then.

But things change, and those art styles that I didn’t much care for before look great to me now. Not that there’s anything wrong with Mr. Burgess’s art now, of course. Certainly brilliantly effective for children, with a clarity in presentation that I think is great, especially given how many of the puzzles depend almost completely on the illustrations.

The writing’s also great because there really is very little space to work with, and you’ve got to make the reader root for your heroes almost immediately. That takes work.

So if you think about it, it’s all a really nice package. Succinct writing, nice illustrations, an imaginative adventure and puzzles to occupy yourself with. I dug into these time and time again, and because there were so many of them, I could always find the adventure to suit my mood. <3

The Acrobatic Bear

I always remembered this bear. I’ve always loved teddy bears, but apart from that, it’s expression is simply brilliant. And that it looks so ridiculously relaxed and alive in this scene made it particularly outstanding. You see, this is Polly’s room, ransacked for what it’s worth, and Annie and Joe rush in to see that their friend is nowhere to be found and probably in some danger. And in these dire circumstances, you have a little bear in the corner, just doing its thing, hanging around, relaxing, practically in defiance. That’s awesome.

Last Words

In The Emerald Conspiracy, the crook finally gets put behind bars, the emerald recovered, Polly is found, and the world is safe again by the time you get to the last page. I never liked this. Almost every Usborne Puzzle Adventure is like that, as I recall. There’s always a perfectly happy resolution. I think this is what made me a little tired of happy endings a few years into the future.

But happy endings work. I was reminded of that when the slightly bittersweet ending to the local drama The Little Nyonya became the subject of some discussion a while back. I thought the ending was great, honestly, especially compared to some of the other shows we put out, though I didn’t care too much for the show. Just not my cup of tea. In any case, my point is just that happy endings work, but they’re also perhaps playing it too safe.

I started by comparing this to Doctor Who, and it’s true that the similarities are plain to see. The format, the diverse settings, the sense of adventure, and so on. Unlike the show, however, Usborne Puzzle Adventures are not designed to ask the difficult questions. Good people don’t usually die. The bad guys have terrible morals and are always apprehended. Everything fits into a picture that’s perfect. Yet it’s this sort of thing that makes it harder, I think, for a child to grow up and to realise that the world is a little less certain, that things don’t always happen as they’re meant to or supposed to, and that there’s the bad guys aren’t always wrong.

Still love my Usborne Puzzle Adventures, though, and you should give them a shot too, if you have a kid around the house or the like. The Emerald Conspiracy, in my opinion, wasn’t the best of the lot, but it’s certainly not bad. You can get it at Amazon [via Amazon]. though I don’t know if Mark Burgess did the illustrations for the current edition. Inexpensive too. Give it a shot, because one of the best things you can give a child is an adventure.

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My Back Pages is what I would call an irregular feature that I’ve got going here. Essentially, every now and then, I dig out a book from my old shelves and my childhood to examine it with a new perspective and more than a hint of nostalgia. I have no idea why I’m doing this, and what I’ll end up with, but I figured that it might be slightly interesting. More interesting than what usually happens here anyway. Yes, it takes its name from the Dylan song, and yes, this is a standard introduction. You can read more about it from the introductory page I’ve written for it.

A Block Of Information

Title: Dilly The Dinosaur
Author: Tony Bradman
Illustrator: Susan Hellard
Other folks: No other folks
Publisher: Dean
First publication: First edition, though separate volumes published in 1986 and 1987
Edition: 1992, 0603550533

World’s Naughtiest Dinosaur

On the cover, it says: “Dilly the Dinosaur: Contains the first four books about the world’s naughtiest dinosaur”. In a corner, it also proudly says in a little yellow triangle: “16 fun stories”. And that really is the premise of this collection of very short stories. It seems to conveniently forget that there aren’t actually many dinosaurs left in the world, so ‘world’s naughtiest dinosaur’ isn’t really anything to be proud of.

And don’t ask me why he wears that dreadful purple-and-white chessboard.

All The Names

Here’s the title page. You’ll notice an Easter-specific chop that says “You’re Egg-stra Special”, with a little troll creature underneath it dragging an egg along, no doubt to the kitchen. I can’t remember what the troll creature is called, though I’m sure someone will be able to remind me.

I can’t remember who stamped it there. I tended also to stamp my name onto the books I owned. Don’t ask me why. Nowadays I always think I should inscribe my book, like you always imagine Samuel Beckett or T.S. Eliot doing on their books, a name and a date and a place, but my handwriting is awful.

Family Matters

As I look at it now, I can’t help but remember that I used to love this book. Every story is almost exactly the same thing, really. It’s structured in roughly the same way, has the same plot elements, and even uses some of the same devices time and time again, and yet I could keep going back to it time and time again. I was very young when I was reading this. Must have been somewhere in the period of about six to nine.

The main draw, now that I look back at it, was that Dilly belonged to a family that was exactly like mine. Each story is narrated by his elder sister. Wait, can’t remember her name… Hang on… Hang on… Dorla! Yes, that’s it! (I was about to say Dora, actually, but hey, I was close.) So it’s kind of a Dilly the naughty kid brother, Dorla the wiser and constantly frustrated elder sister, and the two parents dynamic that you find in much of children’s fiction. And that’s almost precisely my family. Except I hope I wasn’t quite as irritating.

Ultra-special, 150-mile-per-hour super-scream

In any case, the one thing that I still remember is Dilly’s scream. You see, every story unfolds in the same way. There’s some object, something that Dilly has to deal with. Sometimes this is a day out, sometimes it’s a rainy day, sometimes it’s the dentist’s. Something about this will make Dilly extremely upset, and there he unleashes his “ultra-special 150-mile-per-hour super-scream”.

I should tell u that I did some calculations and this is actually 67.056 metres per second. That’s a ridiculously slow scream. I’m not even sure anyone can hear it. I think dinosaurs just have very slow ears.

(Of course I didn’t worry about this back then.) The parents will get cross, of course. Dorla will also get exasperated because Dilly is just unreasonable and impossible to understand. And then something will happen and Dilly will realise, hey, that’s not so bad after all, and he’ll change a little and everyone will be happy.

That’s a basic Dilly story outline.

Drawing Dinosaurs

Illustrations in this book are done by Susan Hellard, and I just want to say that although I don’t like her smug Dilly very much (like the one on the cover), sometimes she draws a very cute Dilly, like this one, where he has the dinosaur measles or something. (I realise I shouldn’t have taken these at an angle, but ah, what the hey.)

Or this one, where it’s just a little Dilly sitting there.

Dinosaur!

I loved dinosaurs. I still do. I think it has more to do with my numerous non-fiction dinosaur books than with Dilly. Still, looking back now, I have to admit that the idea of a nice happy dinosaur family must have fuelled the imagination somewhat. I think it helped to give me some sort of perspective on it, that dinosaurs weren’t so far removed from us, even if they had sharp teeth and huge feet. It made it easier to imagine clusters of dinosaurs, living out their lives.

Of course, the short story probably got to me at about this time. While I’ve been writing less and less short fiction, there’s nothing I quite love in the way I love a good short.

Last Words

I don’t think you can get the same book any more, that is to say, the same volume collecting the same four books. (There is a book with the same title, but that’s actually just the first book in the series, I think, so it’s four stories, and is in fact collected in mine.) That said, Dilly is still alive and well, with spruced up covers and all that fancy stuff. For example: [via Amazon]

A while ago, I started building up a personal library of sorts. I became very protective of my books for a period of time. I was sad when they turned yellow, was upset when an accident happened, and so on. I think it was just a period of silliness. While I don’t like books getting seriously damaged, and believe in taking good care of them, it also seems to me that sometimes, the blunt corners and yellowed pages have their place on my shelf.

There’s a tear in one of the pages of Dilly The Dinosaur. I don’t even remember how it got there.

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My Back Pages is what I would call an irregular feature that I’ve got going here. Essentially, every now and then, I dig out a book from my old shelves and my childhood to examine it with a new perspective and more than a hint of nostalgia. I have no idea why I’m doing this, and what I’ll end up with, but I figured that it might be slightly interesting. More interesting than what usually happens here anyway. Yes, it takes its name from the Dylan song, and yes, this is a standard introduction. You can read more about it from the introductory page I’ve written for it.

A Block Of Information

Title: Birds Do The Strangest Things (Revised Edition)
Authors: Leonora and Arthur Hornblow
Illustrator: Alan D. Singer
Other folks: No other folks
Publisher: Random House New York
First publication: 1965 (text), 1991 (first paperback edition)
Edition: 1991, 0679911596

Wings

Here’s our second book. It’s a science book. Well, not exactly science. Natural history at its most basic, perhaps. It’s called Birds Do The Strangest Things, as you can probably tell, and I seem to remember reading it quite a bit when I was very young, say, when I was seven.

Essentially, it’s a series of short pieces (and by short, I really mean short) on birds and their strange habits. There’s no particular theme as far as the birds or the habits are concerned, so it just jumps from this bird to another quite freely, quite happily. For instance, it could be about the cuckoo and its deceptive call on one page, and on the next, it’s the toucans who hide in the trees.

It’s the sort of non-fiction book you hang on to when you’re a child, thinking that you’ve got the whole world in your hands. No one can no better about birds than you now! And you always feel slightly invincible, and you just want to dive in the next day to read it again.

The writing in itself is a mix of facts and stories. It’s a lovely mix because, the way I see it now, it allows the child to learn something new and also opens up possibilities, allows the imagination to breathe. A loon carries its babies on its back; but its cry is also “like a terrible scream for help” or a “ghost laughing on Halloween”. Gulls eat shellfish and compete with one another for food; but they also “help keep the beaches clean”. It’s mostly quite factual, but with a tiny dash of the fabulous, and I think I really liked that bit of it.

Illustrated

Every section/chapter/two pages comes with its own illustrations, and those illustrations, I always thought, were fantastic. Even now, as I look at them with these grown-up eyes and a grown-up heart, they still look marvellous to me. They’re fairly realistic illustrations by Mr. Alan D. Singer, with the birds usually placed in their natural habitat, doing some thing you would imagine them doing in their natural habitat. There’s usually not much of that habitat on the pictures, but I think as a kid, all you really need is to see an ostrich running alongside a couple of zebras and you already see yourself there watching the whole spectacle unfolding.

Many of the illustrations, like the pigeon above, don’t even have any background, but they’re still great things to see, these anatomically accurate and fairly exciting drawings. Yesterday, when I took it out, I realised that I hadn’t forgotten most of them, and that feeling was just fantastic.

Two Names And A Class

Upon opening the book, you will realise that I had my name written on it twice. I don’t know why I had that done. I think I might have been afraid that I would forget my name. Since it’s been fifteen years now, I suppose it worked.

With my wonderful handwriting, I’m sure I didn’t perform the actual writing.

It also says Random House, and I think it wouldn’t be far-fetched to guess that it was my first Random House book.

And 1C. That was my class in Primary One. So I was six going on seven when I got this book.

A Love Of Nature

I had two main kinds of non-fiction books when I was young. The first type was dinosaur books. The other type had to do with nature in general. (I wish I had more space books, come to think of it.) I think that explains why up to this day I still love dinosaurs, and I also have a passion for natural history. I suppose it’s true that the stuff that inspires you as a kid sticks with you for practically all your life.

I remember seeing this picture for the first time, this lovely blue bird, and I kept wondering that if I would spot one outside if I kept looking out of the windows, kept hoping and praying and keeping my fingers crossed. I never did, of course; I was in the wrong half of the planet. Still, it was just so beautiful, and I could imagine a real one just flitting around, navigating the shrubbery expertly, and to look back now and see how it’s affected me since is just the most wonderful thing.

Quotes

Just two.

“Pigeons don’t care about medals. All they want is to get home.”

I found this hilarious because, taken out of context like that, I get a picture of a cigar-smoking, rifle-toting bunch of pigeons in their own Dirty Dozen.

‘Owls make all kinds of sounds. But their best-known sound is “hoo-hoo.” And who-who wants to be an owl?’

Not exactly poetry, but I remember thinking that it was very clever when I was a kid.

Last Words

You can still find the book, though, quite possibly not my edition. I found this Amazon link that appears to be the one, though the picture seems to indicate that it’s the 1965 paperback with a different illustrator. I haven’t been able to find a vendor with an edition that’s definitely the same as mine, so it does make me a tiny bit sad.

Still, I’m flipping through it again, and this last page here has a rather peculiar effect on me, I realise. There’s a line on it that wonders if crows are actually laughing at us when they’re cawing, a shred of a fable and a hint of a cosmic secret combined. And I think the reason I look back at this so fondly is precisely that, that it was one of the things that was there at the beginning of a love of not simply nature, but of myth and fable, of stories within stories, of imagination and secrets and dreams and wonders.

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My Back Pages is what I would call an irregular feature that I’ve got going here. Essentially, every now and then, I dig out a book from my old shelves and my childhood to examine it with a new perspective and more than a hint of nostalgia. I have no idea why I’m doing this, and what I’ll end up with, but I figured that it might be slightly interesting. More interesting than what usually happens here anyway. Yes, it takes its name from the Dylan song, and yes, this is a standard introduction. You can read more about it from the introductory page I’ve written for it.

A Block Of Information

Title: The Usborne Detective’s Handbook
Authors: Anne Civardi, Judy Hindley, Angela Wilkes
Illustrator: Colin King
Other folks: Donald Rumbelow (Consultant), Heather Amery (Series Editor)
Publisher: Usborne Publishing Ltd
First publication: 1979
Edition: 1989, 9780860202783

Just Like Dick Tracy

So here we go, with our first book and the truth is I almost couldn’t start with any other book because this was a book I just went back to time and time again. I suppose you could very well think of it as one of the favourites, in that case.

It’s exactly what it says it is, Usborne’s guide to becoming a detective. All the little tips and tricks that you have to know to foil those nefarious criminals. There’s a rather large variety of things in here. Apart from a number of case studies, there’s spot-the-difference, general knowledge, sneaking around, how to judge distance, a lot about forgeries and phoneys, identifying people in disguises, exposing fake evidence or alibis, walking in the dark, making maps, scouting, what villains do, how people react to interrogations, identifying handwriting, and so on. It’s kind of like an activity book, I think, and that’s how I approached it. Every other day, I’d take it out and open it to a random page to see what I’d do on that day.

And I think it worked for me in part due to the same reason detective fiction tends to work with kids in general. Nevertheless, there was just something more about this, something special. Unlike your Famous Fives and Fantastic Fours (wait, I really don’t remember the group with four intrepid kids… Fabulous, maybe?), you weren’t trying to get in on other people’s adventures. You were on your way to your own. You were going to become a detective.

Now that I look at it, I think it’s ingenious, primarily because… a detective. It’s just one of those things that you imagine yourself to be when you’re a kid. Like in that picture just above, with the stake-outs and all that stuff. It’s exciting stuff for a child. And add that to the fact that whenever I read this, I was always quite convinced that it was entirely legit, that detectives all around the world had started out reading this. (Okay, so I was easily deceived.) So it was brilliant simply because it just fit into that imaginative pocket so well and really met my childhood expectations of what it’d be like to be a detective, and it did well enough to convince me that I was onto something.

There was always that careful balance between the real and the fantastically simple. I mean, if you looked at this page now, about detecting forged paintings, you wouldn’t seriously think that you could successfully learn it from a book like this, but back when I was still young, it just seemed perfectly realistic.

I absolutely adored this book. I always did wonder if Mr. Rumbelow was a real detective, though.

A Little Bit Of History

I actually inscribed the date on the front page of the book, a habit I’ve long since lost. Then again, someone probably inscribed it for me since handwriting is not exactly a strong suit of mine. I also used to have this lovely stamp for my name, as you can see there, and I would get so terribly amused with it that I’d put it on everything that wasn’t of immediate significance.

My mom tells me that it was my aunt who bought this book for me after she had brought me to the optometrist’s where I had my first pair of spectacles done (an ill-fated pair that didn’t last long, really). Apparently, I had been (surprisingly?) well-behaved, and so it was a reward of some sort. Thank you, Aunt!

Dodd And Trapper

These guys are the two detectives in the book. Dodd is the guy without the moustache. Trapper is the other one.

Detective Trapper was the older (from the moustache of course), more serious (from the moustache too) bloke, typically in blue, looking all so serious and proper. He barely broke a smile in the book, as I remember, and when he did, it was a smug one for having thwarted a villain of some sort. I couldn’t quite identify with him. He was just so composed and cool and apparently experienced that he seemed to be, I suppose you could say, at a distance. He was some high-ranking Jedi and I wasn’t even a Padawan, for Pete’s sake.

So I always thought of him as the big gun, the one that you’d call when the business was serious. He didn’t have time for our petty thefts. He wasn’t the one to get his hands dirty. He didn’t dash about, swashbuckling and suave. No, no, no, he was the big shot, and we were best off watching in the distance in awe of his deductive prowess and ingenious planning.

The one I found myself more able to identify with was Detective Dodd. And by identify with, I really mean aspire to, because (let’s be frank) these two detectives were really non-characters (it wasn’t a storybook) so I had nothing to identify with, and I wanted to be a detective so the goal that seemed within reach was to step into the shoes of Detective Dodd.

He was a different character altogether, a hands-on man (a fact I deduced from purely from the tone of his cases), a lower-ranked detective (he was younger so it seemed to make sense) who was all-action (I couldn’t have known but that seemed fitting). To me at that time, he also had a goofy sort of face and a goofy sort of name, a friendlier prospect than Detective Trapper, to say the least.

There was also a dog named Petal and her trainer but this pair only appeared at the beginning of the book. The trainer appeared near the end of the book demonstrating an armhold. I guess Dodd and Trapper were just too awesome.

A Couple More Memorable Things

Here’s one of my favourite pages. It’s not the most colourful or the most frightening, and it certainly doesn’t have those lovely action sequences in the other case studies, but I loved this page because it’s the only one that has a realistic-looking criminal. It’s like the sort of thing you see in Crime Watch, and you start thinking, if I was a real detective, I’d nab you for sure.

Then the opposing page had some silly game where you identified him out of nine ‘photographs’ and it really just spoiled everything.

I was always a little freaked out by this fake mermaid illustration. There was just something about the smile that really got to me. Because there were so many pages without such freaky things, and since I would dive into random pages every time, I had a very low chance of flipping to it, but a low chance is still some chance and so I saw it every now and then. On those occasions, I would just quickly turn the page away, as if her smile would turn me into… well, her.

A while later, I got used to it and could even stare at it. It was then that I began to wonder why she was always picking her nose.

Quotes

Page 130: “A good detective is very crafty. He always outwits crooks.” (I certainly hope so.)

Page 34: “A hat, dark glasses or a false moustache are all very useful disguises.”

Page 181: “Look closely at lumpy bandages and slings. They may be hiding something.” (And for some time after I read this, I thought that people with bandages and slings were all secret agents.)

Page 183: “If your suspect struggles to get away, do not hit him. Try to knock things out of his pockets. He will be confused and stop to pick them up.”

Brilliant stuff.

Last Words

You can still get the book. I discovered that it’s still being published by Usborne, and hey, that’s not bad for a book that’s all of 30 years old. So if for some reason you want to buy it, try looking around here. It has a fancy new cover and all, but I believe the inside is still mostly the same, though I suppose the section on faked photographs will have to be updated to include Photoshopping. It is a tad expensive, but my experience with children’s books has always been on the pricey side anyway.

Pretty amazing, now that I think of it, that fifteen years on, you can still get this book somewhere, some place. And somewhere, some place, another child is having the same little adventures, arranging stake-outs, arresting crooks and thieves, detecting forgeries and waiting for that realistic-looking criminal to one day appear in their lives. Somewhere, some place, Dodd and Trapper are still dashing about, sneaking around, and saving the world.

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Fact is, I think children’s books, like children’s television programmes, are important. There’s a certain nobility about it, I guess, that we should always strive for more, for better, because children deserve more and deserve better. They deserve to be shown that there’s always something greater, that they should ask for more. And I think about the books I see children reading in this part of the world (if we presume to be optimistic enough to say that most of them still do), and not forgetting the TV shows, and I always wonder if there’s more to be had. Because children should get more. They ought to be enchanted, enthralled and scared out of their wits. They shouldn’t be afraid to imagine, because a child’s imagination is precious, and it’s something you want them to hang onto. That sense of fear, that reckless abandon, that willingness to be swept by magic and wonder, those are things that help you keep your imagination, I’d like to think.

I think this fairly recent (a year or two, maybe?) fascination with children’s books came about because one day I looked back and I realised how tragically limited my childhood catalogue was. I didn’t get many really nice books like Where The Wild Things Are (which, incidentally, appeared on my shelf in 2008, about fifteen years later than it should have), didn’t have many memorable stories that I could tell. It wasn’t until much later that I dove into Alice, read fables, and actually treasured books. It made me sort of sad to note this.

What I did have, however, was plenty of non-fiction books. I had tomes about animals and Mother Nature, about bugs and the night sky and trees and geese. I had science books too difficult for myself then. I had encyclopaedias about vampires and sea monsters and geese, I mean, ghosts. I also had plenty of puzzle books, brimming with adventure and intrigue, and always affixed with the solutions so I could sneakily peek at them.

That’s not to say I was short on fiction either. I had some pretty memorable books, some of them bought (though rarely, I think) and others as prizes for placing well in class. It’s just that I think I didn’t spend so much time on fiction back then, and when I did, I pushed up a bit higher and left children’s fiction behind.

I still think it’s a pity though.

Yesterday, I took a look through the old shelves where I keep books that I don’t consider to be a part of my library. I started flipping through one at a time, those children’s books, and I got quite caught up with all the memories. It was great, really, to see them all again, with different eyes, in a different perspective. So, I thought it’d be a nice feature to have them up here, one at a time, every now and then, say, two weeks, maybe three. An irregular feature, let’s say, just to talk about what it used to be, what it still is now, and all that stuff.

I’m not sure if it’ll make a nice feature, but we’ll have a shot at it, won’t we?

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[This is from the actual page that I've put up, and I'll be regularly updating that page with the list of featured books.]

It started with a four-volume edition of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales. There’s a bit of history in this in that it’s from my aunt (dated 1991), and two (I think) of the same set of books were given to my other cousins (two sets: one for a brother-sister pair like in my case, and I suppose there was probably another set to my aunt’s son). It’s a fairly nice edition, and in reasonably good condition, though the box didn’t exactly fare as well. (It still holds its shape, though.) The pages have turned a bit yellow and the books smelled of mothballs when I first removed them from the shelf. They’re otherwise in great shape, though.

They now occupy a nice spot on my personal shelf.

This spurred me to look for some of my favourites when I was younger. And by younger, I mean much younger. I came across books I had long grown out of, like the random bestsellers and thrillers that I used to read. Although I had no clear idea of what I was looking for, I had a sense of it, and those were obviously not the things I wanted to see. And after much searching, I came across Ffangs the Vampire Bat and the Kiss of Truth, which is a children’s book by Ted Hughes published in 1986. The illustrations are by Chris Riddell, whose name I had recently seen on the cover of a different edition of Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book (where he did the illustrations instead of Dave McKean). I had won this book in 1994 for coming in third in class, and as I remember, this is the one book that I actually enjoyed out of all the books I had got from school.

For the most part, it’s written in (my memory might fail me here so I might be wrong about this) free verse, and has characters ranging from a talking rooster to a tiny woman. It has plenty of ghosts too, a ratty rat, and a giant whale. I remember this book fondly because the illustrations were and still are very lovely, and the text went down very easily even though sometimes I got lost and wasn’t quite sure why something was happening. (I was eight when I first read it.) There’s also a girl at the end (who delivers the kiss of truth in the title) with an asp in her mouth, which was a remarkably striking image for me, even if I didn’t know it back then.

I clutched the book to my chest and realised that I was looking for books like these.

Eventually, my search also turned up Asimov’s Little Library of Dinosaurs. It comes in a little box and has five tiny volumes each detailing a different class of dinosaur. I think it was this that began my love affair with dinosaurs because thereafter I bought plenty of dinosaur books for no particular reason. All of them were more complex than this set, but I still loved this the most. I suppose it’s true, what they say, that there’s always something special about that first one, huh?

The box is kind of coming apart, and the colours are all faded, but now it sits safely on my shelf and will hopefully not face further deterioration. The copyright says 1989, so this set is pretty old too. I was three years old when it was published, and Asimov was still alive back then.

The last of the books that I moved up to my shelf was Little Woolly Lamb by Tony Hutchings. This is the simplest of the books, marked for ages 1-4. It has 10 pages worth of content, with each page being a gigantic illustration (relative to the page size) accompanied by a sentence or two. In it, the little woolly lamb has no idea what sort of animal it is, so it goes around looking and trying to match its baa-baa with the sounds that the other animals make. I don’t know why I treasure this book so dearly. It’s just rather adorable, I suppose. The illustrations, in particular, have a charm to them that up to this day still makes me smile whenever I open up the book.

And those were the books I moved up, the ones I remembered with remarkable fondness. I didn’t have many children’s books. I stepped up quite quickly into the 10-13 year old books, and then into stuff that was probably too difficult for me even though I didn’t care. (So much so that I think by the time I hit 18 I found myself in some ways burnt out.) I think maybe that’s why I’ve always had an ambition to have a children’s section in my library. Part of it probably comes down to how I think children here don’t end up reading very good material because a reasonable amount of competence in language is considered acceptable (for administration and work). I never, for instance, read Alice until I was much older, which is all fine and dandy, except that I think maybe I could’ve have had that as part of my childhood.

That children’s section of my library is still very tiny now. I’m trying to be as selective as I can, to pick out the ones that I find really special. Apart from the two I’ve just rediscovered (I’ve placed the fairy tales in my literature section), I’ve got the classic Where The Wild Things Are, Gaiman’s The Day I Swapped My Dad For Two Goldfish, and Raymond Briggs’s The Snowman.

(A note on The Snowman: It too was one of my favourites when I was very young, except that my edition was I think a Ladybird pocket book that used a few of the illustrations and basically summarised the entire story in a few sentences. A year or two ago, my sister bought me the original version from Randomhouse.)

It’ll grow, as children grow. Give it some time. In the meantime, I’m just happy to have found these little gems from my childhood.

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