Bound to be Beautiful!

At this stage of our Bookmarks project – just over halfway through – the children are often  a little overwhelmed at all the drawing and writing they still have to do. It might be a good time to have a look at some of the books from previous years, and see that other children have managed to finish their books – and so will you!

Here are three books from 2014 that are all clearly written without mountains of text. They also have some very beautiful drawings. I hope they give you the confidence to know that you too will get to the end of your books, and we will all be just as proud of you as we were of the children from other years…

Enchanting Efforts at Enda’s

Yesterday Hannah, Maura and I went to St Enda’s in Whitefriar St to see how Casha’s class was getting along with their Bookmarks book-writing. There was beautiful work being done, with drawings of characters such as Blackbeard the pirate, Anubis the jackal-headed god, a giant ant, and a mermaid. The colouring and writing were going on at a feverish pace while I was there. In the mosaic above, you’ll see a picture from each of the children’s books, and a few pictures of students, Maura and Hannah hard at work. Click on any picture to enlarge it, and keep clicking to look through larger versions of all the pictures.

Marvellous Marist Masterpieces

It was magical to visit the Marist school and see the marvellous work being done by the girls last Friday, Valentine’s Day. There was plenty of love being poured into the Bookmarks books. It’s still early in the process, so most of the authors and illustrators have done three pages or so. The stories feature helpers in the shape of unicorns, aliens, an angelic bat and even a devil! I can’t wait to see the finished works. Well done to you all!

Best buddies with books

Hannah helps out

Bright bookmaking

Careful colouring

Concentration

Maura checks it out

Ssshh! Sleeping on our Stories

Hannah takes us to our Home Place

In my own space…

You can see at least one picture from each book in progress above. Click on any picture to enlarge it, and keep clicking to see the whole gallery photo by photo.

The Elephant in the Room

When people talk about ‘the elephant in the room’, they mean the big subject that everyone is ignoring. If you imagine an elephant in your living room or at a party, you’ll understand how very hard it would be to avoid mentioning it. Elephants don’t get a fair deal when it comes to the turns of phrase they find themselves in. Besides being ‘the big ignored subject’, they used to be part of the name of a stall at sales of work or jumble sales – the white elephant stall. This was a stall of unwanted and odd things, often gifts that weren’t appreciated, such as ornamental elephants. When someone is described as being ‘like an elephant’, it means they’re big and clumsy. The only good thing about the elephant in phrases is that he ‘never forgets.’

And yet elephants have many other fine qualities. They’re intelligent, sociable, loyal, slow to fight and great at communicating. I’ve always loved them, maybe because they seem so slow and wise. I like their wrinkly tough skin, their beautiful tusks and their unusual trunks. The elephant in my room (pictured above) is not ignored at all, he is often talked about. He’s a tea-cosy made in India and bought in a charity shop, although I prefer to use him as a cushion.

There are many books about or including elephants in the Pollard collection (yes I am getting around to that!) One of them is A Visit to the Zoological Gardens, by James Bishop, published around 1840. The book is full of beautiful engravings of animals in London zoo.

This elephant picture from the book has been hand coloured and features a border of animals in black and white around it. The elephant was one of the many animals in London Zoo, which was founded in 1828 for the ‘scientific study of animals’, and as a popular attraction for ordinary people. Dublin Zoo, by the way, is just three years younger than its relative over the sea.

The first half of the nineteenth century was a time of great interest in the study of animals, as you will see from another book in the Pollard collection, also published around 1840. Stories Illustrative of the Instinct of Animals, Their Characters, and Habits was written by Thomas Bingley, and has this elephant (below) in one of its stories.

Here the usually patient creature gets revenge on two cobblers who were tormenting him. This particular elephant was so well-loved that he was allowed to wander freely in the town. The cobblers took a dislike to him, however, and used to poke the poor creature’s trunk with their awls when he passed by. (An awl is the tool a cobbler uses to pierce holes in leather). The elephant got his own back, though – he filled his trunk with dirty water from a puddle and came back to squirt it all over the cobblers.  You can read the complete book, or just have a look at some more of the engravings, here.

Triple Trip to Trinity

We had a great day here in Trinity hosting St Enda’s, The Marist School and City Quay on their triple trip to the college on Wednesday January 15th. There were writing and illustration workshops, tours of the Long Room and the Book of Kells (above) and a peek at some of the precious books in the Pollard collection.

Librarian Lydia Ferguson showed us many illustrations of ‘creatures great and small’ in Pollard, to give us some inspiration on the theme for the books you’ll be writing this year. We saw mythological creatures, of course, such as dragons, including the ones I posted here.

We also saw real creatures, the kind that are still to be found on the earth, and the kind that are long vanished, such as the Dodo.

This particular Dodo was drawn by Basil Temple Blackwood, who signed himself B.T.B., to illustrate one of the funny poems about animals in The Bad Child’s Book of Beasts, written by Hilaire Belloc and first published in 1896.

No wonder Blackwood shortened his name to ‘B.T.B’. His full name was Lord Ian Basil Gawaine Temple Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, not an easy name to shout across the playground. He was born in Northern Ireland in 1870, in a place called Clandeboye, which is now part of Bangor, County Down. Clandeboye is from the Irish Clann Aodha Buí; ‘the family of yellow Hugh’. (Hugh wasn’t yellow because he was a coward – it was the colour of his hair, as Aodh Rua would be red-haired Hugh.)

Basil came from a family very well-connected with the British establishment, at a time when Britain ruled all of Ireland. He spent part of his childhood in Canada, where his father was Governor General. Basil met Hilaire Belloc at Oxford University, though ‘B.T.B.’ himself never graduated from Oxford. He later studied Law and became a barrister, but continued to draw pictures for Belloc’s books. Basil worked for the British government in South Africa and Barbados, and ended up fighting in World War 1. He was badly wounded at the Battle of Mons in Belgium in October 1914 and was sent back home to recover. Before he was fit to go back to the army, he worked as Private Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, based in Dublin Castle, and was there in 1916 when the Easter Rising took place. He went back to the war front later that year and was killed in action near Ypres in France on July 4th 1917.

Here Be Dragons

Among the strange creatures that feature in the Pollard collection is the Dragon. This legendary animal is found in both European and Asian myths. The Asian dragon traditionally resembles a large snake, while the European one is more lizard-like, with two or more legs. The word dragon comes from the greek word for a water snake. A dragon-like creature, Humbaba, appears in one of the oldest stories in the world, the Epic of Gilgamesh. This was written down in Mesopotamia in the 18th century BC. In the story, King Gilgamesh and his friend the wild man Enkidu fight the fire-breathing Humbaba. Here is one description of the creature, from a translation by Georg Burckhardt: ‘He had the paws of a lion and a body covered in horny scales; his feet had the claws of a vulture, and on his head were the horns of a wild bull; his tail…ended in a snake’s head.’ I think that qualifies as the first description of a dragon. Let me know if you agree.

One of the dragon books in Pollard is called Tuflongbo and Little Content – Their Wonderful Adventures in the Enchanted Forest, written by Holme Lee (real name Harriet Parr) in 1861.  The edition in Pollard is from around 1889, and the illustrations above and below are found in its pages. You can read the first edition of the book, digitised by Google from the Bodleian library, by clicking here.