Comments on: The Blog Post with No Pictures* http://www.dystel.com/blog/2014/10/the-blog-post-with-no-pictures/ Mon, 26 Jun 2017 15:15:14 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=4.2.15 By: D. C. http://www.dystel.com/blog/2014/10/the-blog-post-with-no-pictures/comment-page-1/#comment-38818 Sat, 04 Oct 2014 14:37:16 +0000 http://www.dystel.com/?p=10684#comment-38818 Books for kids have several purposes/functions:
– to help out a parent who isn’t imaginative, or gifted as a storyteller;
– to teach, via illustrations, pre-speech children (18 months to 3 years) the names of things they may or may not see in daily life;
– to prompt young children to describe things not really and immediately present (i.e., things in the illustrations) and thus develop language;
– to enable non-reading children to “read” stories themselves, by talking about the illustrations to adults, siblings, pets, or toys;
– to inspire artistically-minded kids to draw.

Colorful text and varied fonts seem like a good gimmick — but they do not achieve most of the ends described above. Words and letters in and of themselves have no meaning, so dressing them up colorfully is pointless if there is no compelling story to tell or skill to teach.

Alice, before entering Wonderland, sagely asked, what is the good of a book without pictures? I would say, if the book is designed for young children, the answer is, not much good at all.

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