tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3758609568631190155.post483156569538367384..comments2024-03-29T07:12:24.516+00:00Comments on Picture Book Den: Shrunken Heads and Scary Fish. The Case for More Unpredictable Weirdness in Picture Books. Moira ButterfieldUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger6125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3758609568631190155.post-41388972229166549292012-02-25T16:50:38.504+00:002012-02-25T16:50:38.504+00:00How exciting to be taken on a trip to Pitt Rivers,...How exciting to be taken on a trip to Pitt Rivers, seeing it from your perspective Moira. For me, shrunken heads and a waterproof mac made from finely sewn seal bladders. Oh yay.<br /><br />This relates to Karen King's post in the Picturebook Den about texts that are considered too dangerous for children e.g. the thoroughly reasonable objection to having an apple fall on a character's head.Alison Boylehttp://picturebookden.blogspot.com/noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3758609568631190155.post-60167988436148029312012-02-06T18:57:20.241+00:002012-02-06T18:57:20.241+00:00I just love the Pitt Rivers Museum - all that grue...I just love the Pitt Rivers Museum - all that gruesomeness, the possibility of stories. Such an astonishing collection of, well - of everything!JOhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03127111575563904349noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3758609568631190155.post-62899143721109508812012-02-05T10:06:31.484+00:002012-02-05T10:06:31.484+00:00Isn't it interesting that we have such vivid m...Isn't it interesting that we have such vivid memories of certain illustrations,and looked at them all the time. There's a thesis there for a child psychologist! Pippa, your example is really gruesome. A friend told me she was obsessed by the giant picture of an eye in her local optician's window, which sounds quite scary. I was also obsessed by a Beek illustration in a Noddy book. It showed bakers rushing anxiously along with a giant iced gem on a stretcher, as if there was some kind of cake emergency in Toyland. It wasn't scary, just odd..and I was greedy, I guess.Moira Butterfieldhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17355420549929911500noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3758609568631190155.post-27642871654715436052012-02-04T22:00:31.118+00:002012-02-04T22:00:31.118+00:00Ah, what a lovely post! And I *love* the Pitt Rive...Ah, what a lovely post! And I *love* the Pitt Rivers!<br /><br />My brother and I used to look *all the time* at a picture of a seal in an encyclopaedia and it made us laugh so much my mother (with no sense of humour) threatened to tear the page out. A couple of years ago, he scanned the picture in and sent it to me and it *still* makes me laugh. But as for picture books - the picture of Mr Todd lying in the fox's bed in Beatrix Potter's Tale of Mr Todd was very scary. I loved the picture of the girl finding a dead bat on the pavement in Edward Gorey's La Chauve Souris Doree, which I borrowed from the library repeatedly. And the picture of Bluebeard's wife holding the bloody key in a compendium of stories - very scary. There was an Arthur Rackham, too, of trees reaching out to grab a girl who was running past. But the scariest of all, which I kept going back to, was in a book my father brought back from Russia in the 1960s which showed how to recognise a wolf hiding behind a tree. God knows why. And I wouldn't go out to get the firewood for years in case there was a wolf.<br /><br />Pippa, that Poe story is scary.Stroppy Authorhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16560035800075465845noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3758609568631190155.post-66579889446123694312012-02-04T19:26:47.852+00:002012-02-04T19:26:47.852+00:00Pippa, the picture you describe freaks me out and ...Pippa, the picture you describe freaks me out and I haven't even seen it!<br />Moira, one day I must visit the Pitts River Museum. I adore eclectic collections, although some Victorian animal dioramas can be downright creepy. As to creepy pictures in picture books, I agree they can be intriguing and thrilling, although I like the story (the words) to have a measure of safeness (to counterbalance the threat of the pictures). Perhaps it's because I have a son who still doesn't enjoy being scared and when he was tiny he was freaked out by 'Not Now Bernard' (the ultimate scary picture book that doesn't end with hope - though it's the story that's most scary, not the illustrations). Personally, I think scary can be great fun if it's delicious fairytale/supernatural scariness, and not 'real life' terrors.Paeony Lewishttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13129555451791248798noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3758609568631190155.post-11513412798808515132012-02-04T14:24:50.733+00:002012-02-04T14:24:50.733+00:00If I wanted to scare myself as a child (and I did ...If I wanted to scare myself as a child (and I did sometimes - why, I wonder?) I would open the glass-fronted bookcase of special, all adult, books, take out the large volume of Edgar Alan Poe stories, and look at the totally nightmare illustration for The Pit And The Pendulum. I can see it in my mind's eye now - a skeletal man wearing just a rag, hair on end in terror, tied with ropes and lying on a floor as an a glinting axe head on a rope swings, slicing, lower and lower. He's sucking his stomach in to put off the inevitable cut ....urgh! I have never yet, and suspect I never will, actually read the story because that picture was as far as I dared go!Pippa Goodharthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17709422048047155208noreply@blogger.com