Picture books – not only for gentlefolk

BY ANDRINE POLLEN

Norwegian picture books have become increasingly diversified in recent years. For that we can thank the Norwegian Council for Cultural Affairs and their grant system – according to the mildly reserved but indisputably qualified editors Guri Vesaas and Ellen Seip of the publishing houses Det Norske Samlaget and J.W.Cappelens forlag respectively.
The Norwegian Council for Cultural Affairs expanded its grant system for Norwegian picture books in the 1990s. As many as twenty titles annually are eligible for grants of 35,000 Norwegian kroner each to develop picture books. Half of this sum is earmarked for the illustrator. In addition, up to ten titles are eligible for production grants of 42,000 kroner. If a title is awarded both sums, it will amount to 77,000 kroner in all. The total pot available for project and production grants is 1.1 million kroner, which comes on top of the Council’s purchasing system which ensures the purchase of 1550 copies of each of the twenty picture books for Norwegian public libraries every year. It is thanks to this system, says the Council’s Mari Finess, that the production of new, Norwegian picture books is in such good shape.

Diversity
“What sort of picture books are we making in Norway today – and how do they differ from picture books in other countries? ” I ask Guri Vesaas.
“There’s quite a wide range, that’s for sure,” she says, “the innovative and unconventional books set really high standards. Taste in pictures varies from country to country and up to now we have tended not to sell many picture books abroad. But at the 2002 Frankfurt book fair the amount of interest in, for example, Eva Jensen and Gry Moursund’s Tre høns på plenen og fire egg (Three hens on the lawn and four eggs), on the part of countries which have never really bothered with Norwegian picture books was extraordinary: France, Italy, Spain, not to mention Korea. Six Korean publishers are fighting for the publishing rights. Korea has actually bought five picture books from us in the past couple of years.”
“It reminds you of Fam Ekman’s success in Japan” says Ellen Seip. “Ekman has been sold to Sweden and Denmark – and Japan. But she has small, cultish circles of readers elsewhere in Europe – even without having been translated there. People who buy her books don’t understand the text, they buy them because the illustrations fascinate them so much.”

Selling texts separately from illustrations
“But picture books, what sort of genre do they belong to? Are they primarily targeted at children? ”
“You find illustrated books for children and for adults. And there are many artistic illustrated books abroad too. Picture books bring two art forms together, literature and visual art. They are probably a child’s first encounter with art, and obviously very important for that reason”, opines Ellen Seip. “Art-interested adults ought really to study some of our picture books” she says.
“Is the picture book as an artistic idiom separate from the illustrated children’s book? ” I ask.
“That’s right. The illustrations aren’t as closely integrated with the text in those types of book. So what happens is that when we sell an illustrated story to Germany, to mention one country, they buy the manuscript and get one of their own illustrators to do new illustrations for it. The Norwegian illustrations often seem to strike them as a bit too outlandish for the German market. And when we buy an illustrated book from abroad we don’t buy illustrations we don’t like. But we don’t commission new illustrations either. It’s only countries with much bigger markets that can afford to do that”, says Guri Vesaas.
“Why do tastes differ so much from country to country? ”
“Well, you do get used to new artistic idioms”, says Ellen Seip. “People’s preferences have changed quite substantially in recent years. While Per Dybvig’s illustrations were considered scrawly and nasty, today we find that many people feel they are fresh, agile, entertaining and stimulating. But in Sweden, Germany, Italy and Russia we decided to put new illustrations into Ingvar Ambjørnsen’s books on Samson and Roberto – in books we feel wouldn’t be the same without Dybvig’s pictures.”
“At the 2002 Moscow book fair, the most successful spin-off was big placards and marvellous paper bags carrying illustrations of the Russian versions of Samson and Roberto! The publishers had originally released the books with the original illustrations, but without making much of an impact on the market. So they decided to republish the texts along with their own illustrations. All of a sudden sales were rocketing up to 10,000 copies, ending on the best-seller list. It goes to show the importance of finding the right illustrator for a text. In Norway, though, the public are often quite unpredictable when it comes to illustrations. But new illustrative forms are beginning to sell, it has to be said.”

Openness
“So what do you think lies behind the fickleness in public taste? ”
“Adults generally seem to think that children’s books should be nice. But as editors we feel it’s more important to give children a range of artistic impressions”, says Ellen Seip. “There are lots of good, nice books around, but it would be pretty dull if everything was done up in the same way, don’t you agree? That’s why it’s so important to find things that break the mould, which startle us textually and visually. And adults should take care not to say that books are difficult – after all, it’s the adults who are supposed to chaperone the young gently to the texts.”
“When children come across art they have fewer preconceptions than adults precisely because they are more open. If an adult hinders a child from experiencing a picture book, that child will have had a bad experience. There’s nothing worse than adults telling children at the local library that they can borrow whatever they want, and when the child comes back carrying a book in their hands says ‘Dear oh dear. No, that’s not what you want to borrow.’ Or ‘But you’ve already read that one once!’ That’s putting a stranglehold on children’s desire to find new idioms, work through or rekindle earlier experiences and ideas. That’s how you learn to read texts and pictures after all.”
“Do you feel that there may be more behind this present gold rush in the Norwegian picture book department? ”
“The support of the Council over several decades has been quite crucial. It has given the artistic, illustrated picture book room to develop and flower without having to conform to the whims of the market”, says Guri Vesaas. “The frequent publication of good quality picture books has also helped to teach the public to appreciate – and even buy! – good quality products. We tend to believe that of the Nordic countries Norway has the greatest variety and originality as regards picture books. The others have a longer and stronger tradition, but may have stagnated a bit, while we’re ‘galloping ahead’, releasing our grip on ‘guiding principles’. We imagine that good illustrators in other countries are pretty much of a muchness, but the differences between our own best illustrators is really very wide indeed, for instance Per Dybvig, Kim Hiorthøy, Svein Nyhus, Fam Ekman, Akin Düzakin, Inger Lise Belsvik, Anders Kaardahl, Gry Moursund. We have also been fortunate enough to have several foreign illustrators settling here in Norway and infusing new, fruitful ideas into the area.”

Demanding
“But how do editors get picture books made? What comes first, the words or the pictures? ”
“With us the text is practically always the first element to appear, either spontaneously so to speak, or because we have asked for one”, says Guri Vesaas. “People do occasionally turn up with a complete product, text, pictures, the works, but they tend to be amateurs and are unfortunately turned down. Finding the right illustrator can be long and arduous, but we always do it in consultation with the author. Often the author and illustrator prefer to maintain contact with each other through the editor in charge of the project, but there are instances of relatively close collaboration between author and illustrator too. For instance, Bjørn Sortland and Lars Elling sat down together and between them created the book Raudt, blått og litt gult (Red, blue and a little yellow).”
“I’ve seen illustrators proposing radical changes in the text. Anything from deleting all the adjectives to rewriting half the story. In all cases the author has taken this type of intervention as a positive step, done for the sake of the book. The picture book is a demanding genre. The text and picture are incomplete without each other. Text and picture need to be independent on the one side, but complement each other on the other.”
“Now that we have the e-mail, it’s not always necessary to have meetings at the publisher’s offices between author and illustrator”, says Ellen Seip. “Things are often hammered out and deliberated across the net – between the west country and the capital, between Berlin and Tromsø. At the moment I’m busy working with an illustrator who lives in Canada, and it’s going very well indeed. All this has happened just in the space of a few years.”

Andrine Pollen is a literary scholar and consultant at NORLA – Norwegian Literature Abroad

Translated by Chris Saunders