― David Wiesner
I heart words. Printed, online, skywritten, painted... On billboards, in eNewsletters, books, subtitles on tv shows... I love them all. Yes, even the curse laden ones. Every time I read something it's like a mini-celebration that I can do so. It makes me squee. Which is possibly why I was thrown a little when I came across my first wordless picture book as an adult.
One of my earliest memories of reading is sitting with my dad and re-telling my own version of Sleeping Beauty - it had words but I was too young to read them (I was 3 years old, give me a break), and dad would flip the pages while I babbled away about what I thought was happening. (You can laugh at this bit: There had been a nits outbreak at kindy, and mum had had to check my hair, so of course that was in mind when reading Sleeping Beauty who had her head in somebody's lap and so I said "Shes' looking for nits, isn't she?" Gran was silenced, mum was mortified, and dad pretended he hadn't heard). My rendition of the story probably wasn't as good as the real thing, but it didn't really matter. As far as dad was concerned, as far as I knew, I was reading pictures.
It's very likely that I had come across wordless picture books as a kid, and just never noticed. But as an adult, it sorta blew my mind that whole stories could be told without words. And, as is usual with me, I requested any and all I could find in our libraries, and inhaled them like chocolate. (If you tell me you can't inhale chocolate then I will tell you to your face that you are wrong). It became one of those things that I then had to share with everyone. Mostly my nephews (who are now Mr15 and Mr16 and too cool for school, oh how I miss the days when they were little and books were magic). Mr9 doesn't like my help when choosing books anymore, and fair enough, otherwise I'd be angsting over why he hadn't gotten to War and Peace or Great Expectations yet. (Give me a break! I was an intense 9 year old).. But Mr3...he can't escape me. Yet. We're going to work our way through my favouritest wordless picture books (I suspect his mum thinks I'm being overly ambitious with expecting him to understand Robot Dreams and The Arrival but I don't think so) and see where it takes us.
If you have wordless picture book recommendations of your own (their subject heading is stories without words in the catalogue), then leave them as a comment, and we'll try those, too. Enjoy the list!
