Wordless Picture Books

Picture books

As I am creating a picture book I am also researching the most important aspects of the picturebooks.
Is a picturebook just a toy? Or is it more than that?

As an illustrator/designer of children books I know the writer is still the most important person.
The author’s name is written on the front cover and most of the time the illustrator and graphic designer are convicted to the title page. Their credits are often named in smaller fonts or in case of publications in magazines, even omitted. This hierarchy implicates that the text is more important than the illustrations and design. As I am creating a semi-wordless book this picture-text relation is something worthwhile to investigate.

I have never known quite what to do with wordless picturebooks. To me, words are at the heart of any story. I never had the patience to ‘read’ the illustrations in a wordless book in order to make meaning (Sibberson, F.).

It is unfortunately true that most discussion of children’s picturebooks has either ignored their visual elements altogether or else treated the pictures as objects of a traditional sort of art appreciation…rather than narrative elements (P. Nodelmann 1988).

The quotes mentioned above are mainly from journal papers and websites created for teachers, thus we can state that most of the information remains in an academic environment.
A quick search on the internet for flyers and guides for parents about reading children books learns that there are guides how to read a book and how to use it as a teaching aid, but it seems that the artwork is still seen as some sort of decoration rather than an autonomous part that tells its own story and at the same time cooperates with the text and graphic design and therefore creates a bigger whole.

I am wondering if parents are aware about this?
When you publish a wordless book, does it need a guide on how to ‘read’ it?
Or should we let the reader to explore and create their own guide? I prefer the last because it reflects how I see my theme. Identity is created by an individual but also by its surrounding e.g. friends, city or village etc. The book is created by me, but its identity will be transformed by every person that it reads. Their age, vision, cultural background(s) and interpretation will create a new book identity every time they read it. Age but also knowledge and experience will make that the reader can interpret the book and story in a whole different way.

Bibliography:

Picture books:

Chung, Y. Recognizing the narrative art of picture book: Word-and-image interactions in Anthony Brown’s Gorilla. Journal of Taipei municipal university of eduction (2006) Vol. 37, No.1 , pp. 1-16.

Dowhower, S. Wordless books: Promise and possibilities, A genre come of age. Yearbook of the American reading forum(199?) pp. 57-79.

Jalongo, M. Renck, Dragich, D., Conrad, N.K. and Zhang, A. Using wordless picture books to support emergent literacy. Early childhood education journal (2002) Vol. 29 No. 3 pp. 167-177.

Lysaker, J.T. Young children’s reading of wordless picture books: What’s ‘self’ got to do with it? Journal of early childhood literacy (200) Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 33-55.

Mohd Arif, M. and Hashim, F. Reading from the wordless: A case study on the use of wordless picture books. English language teaching (2008) Vol. 1, No.1 pp. 121-126.

Reese, C. Story development using wordless picture books. The reading teacher (1996) Vol. 50, No.2 pp. 172-175.

Sibberson, F. Teaching reading skills with wordless Picture books.

Sipe, L. and McGuire, C.E. Picturebook endpapers: Resources for literary and aesthetic interpretation. Children’s literature in education (2006) Vol. 37, Issue 4, pp. 1-27.