Evolution: A Coloring Book

A die-cut history of how the dinosaurs became birds and humans rose from the sea.

We were once amoebae, and here we are today, singing opera and typing on iPhones with opposable thumbs. That alone is enough marvel to put the petty nuisances of everyday life in perspective and fill our human hearts with humility.

As a lover of unusual coloring books and of science-oriented children’s books, especially ones that replace myth with science, I was instantly smitten with Evolution: A Coloring Book (public library | IndieBound) by London-based Finnish illustrator Annu Kilpeläinen — the best thing since Darwin’s graphic biography.

This simple yet imaginative primer on science via art explores natural selection, continental drift, what killed the dinosaurs, how birds descended from them, and all the other processes and phenomena that took us to where we are today. Die-cut delights add an element of interactive playfulness to the classic coloring-book experience.

One particularly apt application of the die-cut technique is a series of pages which, through strategically placed cuts, invite an exploration of how human facial features evolved.

Complement Evolution: A Coloring Book with Richard Dawkins’s The Magic of Reality, then revisit the wonderful science primers You Are Stardust and Professor Astro Cat’s Frontiers of Space.

For a fascinating grownup take on evolution, see the science of how bees gave Earth its colors.

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Flashlight: A Whimsical Wordless Story about Curiosity and Wonder

Shedding light on the wonderland that unfolds when you simply dare, and care, to look.

As an immense lover of smart children’s books and of cleverly deployed die-cut ingenuity, I was instantly taken with Flashlight (public library) by Vermont-based illustrator Lizi Boyd — a wordless story about curiosity and wonder, following a little boy who sneaks out of his camp tent at night and, with a flashlight in hand, discovers the whimsical world that lives under the nocturnal veneer.

Beneath the sweet, enchanting illustrations, with a sensibility partway between The Black Book of Colors and Jon Klassen’s art for Lemony Snicket’s The Dark, lies a deeper reminder about the wonderland that unfolds when one is simply willing to look.

Flashlight was preceded by Boyd’s equally delightful Inside Outside.

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Iconic Italian Graphic Artist Bruno Munari’s Rare Vintage “Interactive” Picture-Books

Pioneering visual storytelling that endures as a manifesto for the magic of paper books.

In 1968, two years after he published his hugely influential book Design as Art, legendary Italian graphic artist Bruno Munari applied his principles to a different medium — children’s picture-books — with the same boldness of vision and hunger for thoughtful creative experimentation. Nella nebbia di Milano [In the Mist of Milan] (public library) was born — a masterwork of visual storytelling and a graphic arts classic that doubles as a beautiful manifesto for the mesmerism of paper books. In vibrant mid-century colors and a cleverly engineered sequence of die-cut holes that guide the story, Munari tells the story of a foggy day that envelops the crazy world of the circus. Parchment-paper pages layer illustrations over one another for a foggy feel and different vignettes tickle the curiosity as the reader peeks from either side of each die-cut hole.

The message seems to be a sweet and gentle reminder that the world is perpetually shrouded in opacity and we only see the parts of it on which we choose to shine our attention, the “intentional, unapologetic discriminator” that it is.

The screen does little justice to the book’s analog magic, but I’ve photographed my own copy to offer a sense of the book’s timeless whimsy, along with the above animated GIF of a six-page sequence I couldn’t resist making.

But Nella nebbia di Milano wasn’t actually Munari’s first foray into this singular form of storytelling. More than a decade earlier, in 1956, he had created a long-out-of-print gem titled Nella notte buia [In the Dark of the Night] (public library), experimenting with a more textured version of the same tactile techniques.

Printed on black and gray paper, this book features similar die-cut storytelling, but adds to the round holes some wonderfully jagged-edged ones, as if clawed and gnawed-through by the creatures — ants, birds, grasshoppers, fish — that take over the world after nightfall.

Complement Munari’s gems with more die-cut magic from other parts of the world — The Hole from Norway, The Book about Moomin, Mymble and Little My from Sweden, and I Saw a Peacock with a Fiery Tail from India.

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A Picture-Book Like No Other

The gloriously illustrated story of an errand turned adventure turned existential parable.

The Moomin series by Swedish-Finn artist, writer, comic strip creator, and children’s book author Tove Jansson (1914–2001), recipient of the prestigious Hans Christian Andersen Medal, is among the most imaginative storytelling of the past century. Partway between children’s books and comics, her lovable family of roundish white hippopotamus-like creatures have captivated generations since their birth in 1945. The crown jewel of the series is arguably the 1952 picture-book The Book about Moomin, Mymble and Little My (public library) — a playful and philosophical tale that falls somewhere between Øyvind Torseter’s The Hole (which was possibly inspired by Jansson) and Dr. Seuss, with a touch of Edward Goreyesque creaturely magic and Alice in Quantumland mind-bending. Parallels notwithstanding, Jansson’s singular sensibility makes this vintage treasure one of the greatest children’s books of all time, so unlike anything else that ever existed before or since that it inhabits a wholly different yet timelessly welcoming universe.

The story is driven by a clever what-comes-next guessing game as we follow little Moomintroll on an errand that turns into an adventure that turns into an existential parable. Moomintroll, brimming with the boundless optimism typical of Jansson’s Moomin family, sets out to help the distraught Mymble find her sister, Little My — an irreverent, independent-minded, sharp- and even acerbic-witted heroine who stands as the naughty but necessary anchor to the Moomin buoyancy. That dynamic — the eternal tussle between skepticism and openness that keeps life in balance — is one of the story’s powerful underlying themes, and yet it only amplifies rather than detracting from the joyful hopefulness of the overall message.

Beautifully illustrated and hand-lettered in rhythmic verse, the book features gorgeous and brilliantly placed die-cut holes, reminiscent of I Saw a Peacock with a Fiery Tail, which lend the story an enchanting quality that plays into our human restlessness for knowing what’s around the corner, cleverly reminding us that what we think we see is often a distortion of what actually is.

And while the book was Jansson’s first to be adapted for iPad, what screen could possibly replace the immeasurable tactile magic of this beautifully, thoughtfully designed paper masterpiece?

Tove Jansson with her Moomins in 1956. Photograph by Reino Loppinen.

The Book about Moomin, Mymble and Little My, translated into English by Sophie Hannah, is impossibly wonderful in its entirety. Complement it with a contemporary counterpart of Scandinavian storytelling sensibility, Øyvind Torseter’s The Hole, one of the best “children’s” books of 2013 (with scare-quotes for the reasons Tolkien so memorably outlined).

Thanks, Jad

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