library – Bookmarked!

Hello from AFCC 2014!

Greetings from Singapore, where I have just attended the first day of the Writers and Illustrators Conference of the Asian Festival of Children’s Content. It was an amazing first day featuring a stellar ensemble of speakers and inspiring talks, great company (hello friends, old and new!) and a stack of signed books to go in my luggage.

It’ll take some time for me to transcribe all my notes from the conference, and upload the photos from my camera, so in the meantime, here’s a look at the National Library of Singapore, where the Festival is being held. In previous trips, I’ve always passed by the huge library building on book hunting jaunts at the Bras Basah Complex right next door, but I’ve never actually been, so I was quite excited to set foot in this library.

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More Po-Mo picture books (Picture book roundup 10)

Wolves

I’ve been fascinated with postmodern picture books ever since I took a course in children’s books back in college. Since then I’ve been building up my collection of po-mo picture books, and I’ve now got over 20 of them, mostly from rummaging through bargain bins.

I love how po-mo picture books challenge the reader to look at things in a different way, offering an enjoyable experience to both the young reader, the parent reading to the child, and even an older reader randomly picking up the book and flicking through the pages.

The multiplicity of meanings also encourages creativity and imagination in constructing the meaning of the text or illustrations, as well as the interest to reread a book.

I also marvel at the writers and illustrators’ creativity in taking the craft of picture books one step further, defying convention and structure

I have several books in this picture book roundup: The Story of a Little Mouse Trapped in a Book by Monique Felix; Wolves by Emily Gravett; Zoom and Re-Zoom by Istvan Banyai; Bamboozled by David Legge; and Pinocchio the Boy, or Incognito in Collodi by Lane Smith (books 175-180 for 2009).

(In case you missed it, I previously discussed the characteristics of po-mo picture books in the post I did on The Three Little Pigs.)

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Making the mark

I’ve always wanted a way to establish my identity on my books. I usually scrawl my name and the date inside, but I’ve longed for a more “official” mark for a long time now, and I’ve grown tired of running out of book plates and stickers to label my books.

I thought of a rubber stamp, but I didn’t really want to mess with ink, and I was still not sold on the self-inking kind. And then one day, I mooched a book that had a dry seal on it, and I got the idea of having my own dry seal made for my library.

Luckily there was a dry seal maker next to the post office and I was finally able to get mine made yesterday.

The results? Here you go:

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