18th February Barbara Firth (1928 - 2013)

Sad news this week, reading that Barbara Firth had died on 18th February, and so soon after Jan Ormerod. Two wonderful illustrators that we will not see any new illustrations from. Luckily so much of their work is well known and still in print.

Barbara Firth is  the English illustrator responsible for the wonderful Little Bear that Martin Wardell created, but she brought to life, firstly in Can't You Sleep, Little Bear? which won the Kate Greenaway Medal and the Smarties Prize in 1987. There were then four more titles and the series went on to sell more than seven million copies.

When I was a young teacher and mother, Can't You Sleep Little Bear? was new and a must read. Then Martin Waddell was in Australia and visited our school to talk to Year 1. The children were enthralled. His publisher left posters which we displayed in the library and all over the school. We had a small toy Little Bear that the children read with and ever since then I have felt the need to share these books because their gentle messages work so well with young children.

Currently, my parents and children are newly involved in the Premier's Reading Challenge and therefore are on a mission to only take books with red stickers on their spines. This means any book without a sticker is going to languish in the library for a couple of months until they have read their thirty books.

No matter, I was going to honour Barbara Firth and yesterday I got out all her books that we have in the library and put together a small display. A few had red stickers and they were gone by home time, but so had a few others...good, parents with taste who will hopefully come back looking for more now that they have been introduced to her work and the series of five books about Little Bear:
• Can't You Sleep, Little Bear?
• Let's Go Home, Little Bear
• Sleep Tight, Little Bear
• Well Done, Little Bear
• You and Me, Little Bear

 "I have always been biased toward illustrating natural history, so it was a joy to be able to draw pages and pages of bears," Barbara Firth says of her collaboration with Martin Waddell on Can't You Sleep, Little Bear?, the first of their classic Big and Little Bear series. As part of her research, she spent hours at a zoo, carefully watching and recording the movements and habits of bears. 


Barbara Firth has illustrated for other writers besides Martin Waddell and they too, show her aptitude for animals. See Karen Wallace's Bears in the Forest and Peter Hansard's  Wag Wag Wag, a book about dogs.

26th December

It is Boxing Day and I maybe should be thinking about boxes, but having done boxes before for a great display in the library and the box construction club (see http://pinterest.com/kinderbookboard/cardboard-boxes/) I feel inclined to write about something else I have observed lately.

A couple of days ago I bought The Bear with the Sword by David Cali and as I read it and looked at the bear and his behaviour I was reminded of  two other bear picture books I had bought this year,  Bear Has a Story to Tell by Philip Stead and Erin Stead and Bear in Love  by Daniel Pinkwater and Will Hillenbrand. How do illustrators make bears have such human expressions? Each bear is different but so imbued with human mannerisms. My favourite bear is the one in Sebastian Meschenmoser's Waiting For Winter. He makes me smile every time I look at him trying to work out what snow is. None of these bears appear to be 'wild' or 'grizzly'. None are bad-tempered or look as if they could do harm, and for someone who lives in a country without bears (except in zoos) it is so hard to remember that we should keep our distance from these animals. They do not look anything like teddybears either so they have become pseudohumans. They are easy to empathise with, so easy to see their point of view, and so easy to fall in love with and want to hug. Look at their eyes!

Here are some of my favourite bears and bear stories and this is without including any of Barbara Firth's for Martin Waddell, Kady MacDonald Denton's for Bonny Becker or Karma Wilson's.

20th September John Prater (1947) Barbara Firth (1928 - 2013)

John Prater and Barbara Firth are British illustrators of children's books. Between them they have produced a large number of favourite books with endearing animal characters, in particular bears.

John Prater both writes and illustrates. He has written many books with mischievous children as characters. He is also a master at storytelling with minimal text. He says, "my own daughters and their mischievous ways were the source of my early books...When they grew bigger I began sifting through my own childhood experiences. "He has also illustrated many of Vivian French's picture books.

Barbara Firth is best known as the illustrator of the award-winning, Martin Waddell written series of picture books about Little Bear, which began with Can't You Sleep Little Bear. In fact many of her books were written by Martin Waddell and many feature bears. She says, "I have always been biased toward illustrating natural history, so it was a joy to be able to draw pages and pages of bears." She spent many hours at a zoo, watching and recording the movements of bears.