It is so often the case that the best children’s books are the ones adults think children won’t like – too difficult, too weird, too wordy. Graeme Base seems to specialise in these. Like his alphabet book Animalia, which has sold five million copies around the world, packed with Base’s opulent, detailed, downright bizarro illustrations and a flashy alliterative vocabulary. How many kids’ books contain sentences like: “Victor V. Vulture, the vaudeville ventriloquist, versatile virtuoso of vociferous verbosity, vexatiously vocalising at the Valhalla Variety Venue”? And how many of you reading this still remember that word-for-word?
Or The Eleventh Hour, his picture book mystery about an elephant’s 11th birthday party where, at 11 o’clock, all the food is stolen; the reader must identify the thief through fiendishly difficult puzzles including ciphers, morse code and symbols hidden everywhere in the illustrations, even the page margins.
