HisDarkMaterials.org

We were recently informed of a new site where authors discuss, videographically, a work of theirs. There is a small bit from Philip Pullman, regarding Lyra's Oxford.

Click here to see it.

Master wood engraver John Lawrence has given the small-format pages of Philip Pullman's magical story Lyra's Oxford a spacious, airy feel, while leaving us to make our own visual picture of the characters themselves.

Read the complete article below.

The pictures in books from Treasure Island to Sherlock Holmes lodge in the mind as vividly as the stories themselves, says Shirley Hughes, who yesterday won the Kate Greenaway Medal. So why are there not more illustrated novels for adults?

Lewis Carroll's Alice struck a neat blow for illustration when she remarked: "And what is the use of a book without pictures or conversation?" Certainly, Carroll's story has been permanently linked in the common consciousness with John Tenniel's unforgettably dreamlike and sometimes unsettling illustrations. Images like these in the books we grew up with lodge as firmly in our memories as the stories themselves. The illustrator fills out the characters with details not always described in the text. It was the Strand Magazine illustrator Sidney Paget, creator of the definitive image of Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, who, I am told by those who are steeped in these stories, gave the great detective his deerstalker hat.

Illustrating another author's text (as opposed to doing your own picture book) is very close to acting, or rather being a whole company of actors, stage director and costume designer rolled into one. You do not always meet the author. Sometimes, if you do, it can be a disadvantage because the person you encounter socially may turn out to be disconcertingly unlike the possessor of the imagination at work in the text. The job involves trying to get a feeling for the story, the essence of themselves which all authors leave in what they write and which shapes the characters they invent. The aim, though you may not always achieve it, is to give your author, publisher and reader not what they want exactly, but what they never dreamed they could have.

If you were growing up in the 1960s and 70s, part of the last generation not to have been bombarded by moving, electronic imagery, pictures in books perhaps lodged themselves in your mind more vividly than they would do now. If you were just getting to grips with historical fiction then your experience would have been enhanced by Charles Keeping's illustrations of craggy Vikings, or Victor Ambruss's grave-faced warriors galloping across the page in a sweep of impeccable penwork. It is possible that RL Stevenson's Long John Silver was chillingly stamped on your memory by Mervyn Peake, whose illustrations for Treasure Island stand out among many other interpretations by so successfully catching the menace of that most charming of villains, an affability which could suddenly turn to murderous rage. All this went down well alongside Frank Hampson's thrilling Dan Dare comic strip in the Eagle, which was in colour, and Ronald Searle's incomparable line drawings for Geoffrey Willans's Molesworth.

In my own 1930s childhood (I was a late and cautious reader) I was tempted into tackling a "proper" book by Thomas Henry's sprightly illustrations for Richmal Crompton's Just William. Henry depicted William throughout the 30s and 40s in unchanging attire: a suit with waistcoat and short trousers, a school cap and wrinkled knee socks which looked as though they had been carved in concrete. I found these drawings enormously attractive. But long before this I had pored over those classic gift books with illustrations by Arthur Rackham, Edmund Dulac and William Heath Robinson. Rackham's highly finished, muted colour plates and his line drawings of elves, fairies and gnarled tree roots were fascinating and impressive, though faintly disturbing. I loved Heath Robinson's illustrations, especially his lyrical black and white drawings for A Midsummer Night's Dream and the pictures in his own quirky book, Bill the Minder.

The attraction of AA Milne's Winnie the Pooh stories for me was largely in the way Ernest Shepard's brilliantly relaxed line drawings were dropped into the text. When, years later in the 60s, I attempted this myself in a book I had been commissioned to illustrate, I was told by the production manager that it would be too expensive to reset the text, this being in the days of hot metal typesetting. I was to stick to half- or full-page illustrations only. Nowadays I sit beside a designer and watch with delight as she snakes my text in and out of my drawings on her laptop and changes the whole layout of a page before you can say "mouse".

There was a lot of illustration work to be had when I first started doing the rounds of publishers with my folio in the 50s - magazine stories, fiction for older children and adults, classics, poetry and adventure yarns, not to mention comics. Most of it was in black and white. Some of the children's stories I was commissioned to illustrate were fairly run-of-the-mill and much of the work I did I cannot contemplate now without extreme embarrassment, but it was a wonderful apprenticeship. It was a long time before I seriously got to grips with colour and even longer before I could use it with anything like confidence. I got this by splashing about with gouache water colour and chalks in my sketchbooks.

At that time there was a great pantheon of illustrators from whom one gathered inspiration: Edward Ardizzone, Anthony Gross, Lynton Lamb, Leonard Rosoman, Ronald Searle, Edward Bawden, among many others. They were not confined to children's books, though they took them very seriously. They designed posters and advertisements, encompassed a whole range of graphic work in strongly recognisable styles. They shone out of the pages of the Radio Times which, for a few pence weekly, went into millions of homes.

Ardizzone is probably the most influential of these and is regarded with the greatest affection. His humorous, avuncular style was enormously adaptable. He was a distinguished war artist in the second world war. He was also one of the first winners of the Kate Greenaway Medal, and wrote his own Little Tim books which he illustrated in pen and wash. He was largely self-taught (he copied Daumier, whose influence can be clearly seen). Just as some musicians are endowed with perfect pitch, he had a perfect sense of tone and with a few lines dashed on with his dip-and-scratch pen could tell you exactly the distance from foreground to background he wanted you to see.

It was Ardizzone who first gave me the idea that a picture book is like a theatre (except that it has a division at centre stage where the sewing is). You open it and up goes the curtain. But this is a very intimate theatre, which the audience can return to again and again. The characters you draw are like actors on a stage carrying the narrative along with gestures and facial expressions. In my recent book Ella's Big Chance, which is a retelling of the Cinderella story, I designed each opening like a theatre set, which afforded me plenty of space for some big, full-colour spreads, and put the text into tall panels on each side. To my joy, I found these would spaciously accommodate not only the type, but a lot of small black and white line drawings which are a counterpoint to the main illustration and carry the story along. Only after I had finished working it out did I realise how strongly those illustrated classics I loved as a child, with the tipped-in colour plates offset by line drawings, had stuck in my memory.

Clothes and disguises of all kinds are very important in fairy tales. I set my Cinderella story in the jazz age on the French Riviera with the dresses inspired by the great Paris couturiers of that era. The ballroom and dance sequences are inspired by the RKO Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers films with those curving Art Deco staircases and wide, reflective dance floors that in my childhood represented the essence of glamour.

Today young children are nurtured on a huge choice of large-format picture books bursting with colours as bright as the TV and video imagery with which they are surrounded. There are television tie-ins, pop-up books and board books. All form an important part of what is now a major children's book industry. Conversely, the number of illustrated books for older children and adults seems mysteriously to have dwindled in recent years. Publishers argue, very reasonably, that it makes books more expensive. Readers of fantasy fiction have their imagery packaged for them in the all-powerful special effects of the big screen. But there are signs now that the illustrated novel, which aims to elicit a more leisurely, intimate response, is due for a comeback.

The graphic-strip cartoon novel has, of course, survived triumphantly, especially on the Continent and in the US. Its narrative invention and multi-track storytelling are very difficult to manage in conventional prose. Although it is often delivered to the reader as a deliciously light souffl

The only thing wanting in the audio version of "Lyra's Oxford" (Listening Library, 55 minutes, $14.95) is its brevity: In a story complementing Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" trilogy, fans will want more, not less.

What they get here, or in the hardcover version (Knopf, 64 pages, $10.95) is a return trip to the magical Oxford that co-exists with England's town of scholars. In this alternate universe, everyone is paired with a daemon - an embodied soulmate. Lyra, one of the heroes in the trilogy, and her daemon Patalaimon see a witch's daemon alarmingly alone and pursued by birds.

Lyra and Patalaimon hurry to the daemon's help, but find that things are far more complicated and dangerous than they'd first assumed. The Listening Library's CD of the story is lush and mesmerizing, with Pullman as the narrator. (If you didn't know how to pronounce "Patalaimon" before, you will after hearing the story.) John Lawrence's elegant woodcut illustrations are reason alone to buy the book version. Ages 10 and up.

Margaret Bechard's "Hanging onto Max" (Simon & Schuster, 204 pages, $6.99) is the knowing narrative of a high school senior, Sam Pettigrew, who inadvertently finds himself the single custodial parent of an infant son.

Sam is unprepared for the news that his girlfriend is pregnant, and even less prepared for the way he feels when she announces that instead of keeping the baby, she's giving him up for adoption. Sam claims his son and finds himself immersed in the intoxicating and infuriating reality of caring for a baby.

Instead of playing hoops, he's changing diapers, grappling with burp pads and hospital bills, and trying to write his English paper as he teaches Max to drink from a cup. Another teenage parent befriends him and goads him into studying for and taking the tests required for college entrance exams. Sam desperately tries to balance the life between Sam the high school senior and Sam the father. Will he succeed? Should he succeed? Bechard's unflinching but compassionate story belongs in the libraries of any school that offers a program for teen parents. Ages 12 and up.

In Janet McDonald's "Spellbound" (Speak, 138 pages, $5.99), another teenage parent, Raven, struggles with a similar dilemma. For her, being a mother still feels like she's "babysitting someone else's baby."

Instead of being in school, she works at "a fast-food joint on a crowded side street in the middle of Brooklyn." When customers ask if the catfish ("frozen in crates from God-knows-where" and shelved "in basement freezers for God-knows-how-long") is fresh, she gives the answer she learned in freshman orientation: "Fresh as a newborn's smile!"

Raven's big sister has plans for her, prodding Raven to enter a spelling bee that offers a college prep program and a full college scholarship to the winner. Can Raven hone her marginal spelling skills to contend for the prize when she's vehemently opposed to the idea? Ages 12 and up.

Mary Beth Miller's "Aimee" (Speak, 276 pages, $5.99) is a dark, desperate story about two friends, one of whom is dead before the first sentence begins. Zoe is convinced everyone blames her for Aimee's death, and nobody judges Zoe more harshly than herself.

This story of adolescent experiments - drinking, sex, drugs and suicidal behavior - is as far from Nancy Drew and "Girl of the Limberlost" as New York City is from Mayberry. Parents, your stomachs may clench, but your teenagers live in or uncomfortably close to the world described in this book. You need to read it as much as they do. Ages 12 and up.

[

There

FOR CHILDREN

Midnight, by Jacqueline Wilson (Doubleday,

This captivating, slight, somewhat overpriced stocking-filler of a book has one outstanding merit for Philip Pullman's legion of readers. It answers, encouragingly, the question left hanging by the His Dark Materials trilogy. Having created, then parted, Lyra and Will - two of the most enticing heroes in children's or any literature - what more can Pullman do with them?

A future together for the children and their developing love seemed to be closed in the last volume of the trilogy, The Amber Spyglass. It was apparently debarred by the terms of the voluntary self-sacrifice needed to save their alternative Oxfords, and the multiple worlds around them. The ending brought thousands of readers aged between eight and 60 to tears.

If you delve among the inconsistencies and incomplete plot threads of The Amber Spyglass, you can find authentic grounds for a reprieve. Angels, we are told, can still move freely between worlds, and other routes exist. If this is permitted to angels, the highest (and bossiest) beings in the author's republican theology, why not to the children who have done more for the universe than any being? It can be argued that these radical rebel angels are behaving like true oligarchs, hoarding knowledge, resources and privileges for themselves. However, it is Pullman, inconsistent or otherwise, who is running the show. And curiously this gentle, agnostic liberal-humanist visionary is resolute in imposing on the children an ethic harder than his reviled Christian predecessor CS Lewis would have dared in the Narnia books.

He has promised further stories about aspects of the trilogy's characters. On paper, this sounds a dubious enterprise. Who wants to know more about the separate lives of Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde, before the great dramas began? Lyra's Oxford shows it to be viable. The 49-page story is cut from the living wood of the author's imaginative world and comes instantly to life in its own right.

It opens with Lyra, two years older than in the trilogy, on the roof of Jordan College with Pantalaimon. She is now at school, but she bunks off that as she once did her college duties. Flying towards them, they see a thrush-type creature which is being attacked by other birds. It's a witch's daemon, and it brings a life-or-death appeal to them from the Arctic, the setting of the first Lyra novel, Northern Lights.

To say much more would be to mar the surprises of a brief tale. It introduces two new characters who clearly have legs for future adventures: the shrewd, friendly young scholar Dr Polstead, and the reputedly mad alchemist Sebastian Makepeace. There is a wound from the past: "Since she and Will had parted... the slightest thing had the power to move her to pity and distress; it felt as if her heart was bruised for ever".

The binding on my copy has not adequately stood up to use of the engraved fold-out map of Lyra's city as chronicled in the trilogy, with its Zeppelin station on Oxpens Road and steam trains at Oxford station. What I expect to remember longer is a new image from the story, of all the animate creatures of the city striving clumsily to protect this obdurate girl, in gratitude for what she has done for their universe.

It is one of those grand narrative strokes that Pullman can sometimes pull off with such casual-looking ease and faith. This book is that gift working in miniature.

[

The following article is about books: "with the sort of appeal that wins readers before they've even read a word". Top of the list? Lyra

Very often, the way a book looks is what tempts a child to pick it up and read it. All those mentioned here are beautiful and would be additions to a school or class library which would never be left neglected on the shelf. They would all also make wonderful presents.

The Pullman is small, bound in silky fabric of exactly the right shade of red, and enhanced by glorious engravings by John Lawrence. These include a fold-out map of "Lyra's Oxford" which will entrance readers long after they've finished the story, a postcard, and various advertisements filled with references to the world of the Dark Materials trilogy (and at least one good in-joke).

The story is short, exciting and atmospheric. Lyra is at St Sophia's College after parting from Will at the end of The Amber Spyglass. Her daemon, Pantalaimon, is with her and together they solve a little mystery which is self-contained, but which might well lead to other things in a longer book. Pullman allows himself the possibility of expanding in all sorts of directions, and lovers of the trilogy can go through the text making a mental note of themes and plot possibilities that may occur again.

Birds play an important part in this story, and the description of a flight of starlings on page 5 is quite perfect. A book to return to, and to treasure.

Tony Mitton's The Tale of Tales deliberately echoes Kipling's Just So Stories, with old-fashioned silhouettes illustrating the journey of various creatures to hear the very best story in the world, due to be told this very day. The animals, in best Chaucerian tradition, decide to tell some stories of their own as they go. These have Peter Bailey's more characteristic illustrations and he's a master at introducing a spooky edge to innocuous-seeming scenes.

Mitton is well known as a poet and the animals' "tales" are in verse. Some, such as Rip van Winkle and the Anansi story, are familiar. Others are invented by Mitton and they're all lively and engaging. Be warned though: the ending might be a let-down after the build-up. Perhaps the moral is: beware of hype.

Carol Ann Duffy, one of our best poets, has adapted fairy tales for the stage. Here she imagines new tales for the modern child which have all the darkness of the traditional kind. The title story is perhaps the best, with the stepmother, "silent as poison", cutting the shadow from her stepdaughter in order to steal the girl's youth and beauty for herself.

Duffy's prose is clear and full of memorable images, and the inimitable Jane Ray has provided a silhouette to illustrate each story and a most magical cover image.

Fritz Wegner creates a wonderfully detailed Victorian world for Ahlberg's strange and delicious tale of a nameless woman and man who pick a cat baby from Nurse Doodle's babyshop. The adventures of this creature are both entertaining and slightly unnerving. The strangeness is accounted for by Ahlberg's recurring assertion that "in those days" the times were "topsy-turvy". It's a lovely book for cat lovers, baby lovers and lovers of Ahlberg's unusual and enchanting imagination.

[TES, 31/10/03]

Sarah McWhinney reviews Philip Pullman

It

Partick Lloyd, of Waterstones, informed us that the Philip Pullman booksigning to celebrate the release of Lyra

An article about saturday

The appearance by the Oxford novelist at his local Waterstone's will be his only public event to promote his latest book, Lyra's Oxford.

Devotees travelled from as far as Middlesbrough, Liverpool and south Wales, many queuing for more than three hours to meet their hero.

Pullman's Dark Materials trilogy has sold more than each of the four Harry Potter books and is the best-selling book on the BBC's Big Read list.

His last book, The Amber Spyglass, was the first children's book to win the Whitbread Prize in 2002.

The author said: "It is great to come to these signings when there are so many people and such a wide range of people.

"The books seem to appeal to all sorts."

Mark Wilson, who travelled to the signing from London, said: "I am a huge fan of the books because they are so creative.

"It has been great to meet the man behind so many exciting stories."

Fellow fan Angela Johns, a writer from Oxford, said: "I would love to be as successful as Philip Pullman. He has been my inspiration."

[BBC News, 08/11/03]

Ara was so kind to send us the images from the new Lyra

The Guardian is giving five copies of Lyra

Philip Pullman's introduction to Lyra's Oxford

This book contains a story and several other things. The other things might be connected with the story, or they might not; they might be connected to stories that haven't appeared yet. It's not easy to tell.

It's easy to imagine how they might have turned up, though. The world is full of things like that: old postcards, theatre programmes, leaflets about bomb-proofing your cellar, greetings cards, photograph albums, holiday brochures, instruction booklets for machine tools, maps, catalogues, railway timetables, menu cards from long-gone cruise liners - all kinds of things that once served a real and useful purpose, but have now become cut adrift from the things and the people they relate to.

They might have come from anywhere. They might have come from other worlds. That scribbled-on map, that publisher's catalogue - they might have been put down absent-mindedly in another universe, and been blown by a chance wind through an open window, to find themselves after many adventures on a market-stall in our world.

All these tattered old bits and pieces have a history and a meaning. A group of them together can seem like the traces left by an ionising particle in a bubble chamber: they draw the line of a path taken by something too mysterious to see. That path is a story, of course. What scientists do when they look at the line of bubbles on the screen is work out the story of the particle that made them: what sort of particle it must have been, and what caused it to move in that way, and how long it was likely to continue.

Dr Mary Malone would have been familiar with that sort of story in the course of her search for dark matter. But it might not have occurred to her, for example, when she sent a postcard to an old friend shortly after arriving in Oxford for the first time, that that card itself would trace part of a story that hadn't yet happened when she wrote it. Perhaps some particles move backwards in time; perhaps the future affects the past in some way we don't understand; or perhaps the universe is simply more aware than we are. There are many things we haven't yet learned how to read.

The story in this book is partly about that very process.

[Guardian]

The site of the most famous park bench in the universe will be revealed to an avid public on Thursday - an event to be trailed by the flight of a "Zeppelin" airship over Oxford today.

The bench plays a central - and to the books' millions of fans, heartbreaking - role in Philip Pullman's trilogy, His Dark Materials, by far the highest-selling children's books after Harry Potter.

The air balloon, mocked up to resemble a first world war German Zeppelin bomber, will herald the publication of Lyra's Oxford, Pullman's first book since his 1,000-page epic of war and adventure in heaven and earth.

The new volume, only 50 pages long, is set in the same alternative Oxford as the trilogy, a place where steam trains still run and dawn Zeppelins fly travellers to London. And, for the first time in print, it includes a photograph of the bench, now almost as celebrated as Dr Who's phone box

The old, lichen-blotched seat has a climactic part in the shadowed love of Lyra and Will, the early teenage heroes of the saga. It is described as existing "under a spreading low-branched tree" both in Lyra's world, where the internal combustion engine has not been invented, and in Will's, which is the same as ours.

In real life, the bench Pullman had in mind stands in Oxford University botanical gardens, beside the river Cherwell, near a tall black pine tree. A faded plaque on it is inscribed: "In memory of Jane Tomkinson and Mary Monteath". Nobody now working in the gardens knows who they were.

In the two years since the bench appeared in the final novel of the trilogy, The Amber Spyglass, it has grown into the rich literary fabric of Oxford. The pine tree is said to have been the favourite tree of Professor JRR Tolkien, author of Lord of the Rings.

A nearby collection of ivies, described as "eccentric" by the curator, Louise Allen, is visited by Sebastian Flyte and Charles Ryder in Evelyn Waugh's novel Brideshead Revisited.

Now, ahead of its official identification, the bench has become a place of pilgrimage for hundreds of people a year.

The gardens are busiest on Midsummer's Day, a date which figures in the novels. But at other times, said Ms Allen, there are "a lot of people coming up and asking where the bench and black pine tree are. Some of them put flowers there. There is also a wooden love heart which appears periodically on the bench, with 'Will and Lyra' on it." Pullman's Dark Materials has so far sold 2.7 million copies in the UK, with worldwide sales almost equally large and a film in the pipeline.

Lyra's Oxford contains one short story, set several years after the trilogy. The Zeppelin is the only publicity stunt mounted for it. Yet advance orders have already brought it top rating on Amazon.co.uk.

Pullman, who lives in Oxford, is to give a rare media conference at Borders bookshop in the city. He is concentrating on finishing The Scarecrow and the Servant, a chil dren's story due out in November next year, and is working on Book of Dust, about aspects of the trilogy.

Interest in the gardens is expected to increase with a National Theatre production of the trilogy, which starts previews on December 4. Timothy Dalton plays Lyra's God-challenging father, Lord Asriel.

A website dedicated to the books, bridgetothestars.net, regularly attracts "fanfiction", in which admirers from all over the world write stories about themes in the trilogy.

Many of these stories are about the old bench. In one of them, a 15-year-old Mississippi girl, Sarah Crump, imagines a 91-year-old Lyra dying on the seat as she urges her daughter to follow the view of life expressed in the trilogy:

"You have to be all those difficult things, like curious and kind and cheerful and patient, and you have to work hard at your dreams because they don't come true all by themselves. Give all your imagination to love and living ... And learn all you can ... because it takes all sorts to build the Republic of Heaven.

[The Guardian, 01/11/03, John Ezard]

The drawings that enliven children's literature have rarely been deemed worthy of adult scrutiny. But with sketches of Winnie the Pooh going for

Next week the original painting for the cover to the 1982 edition of The Lord of the Rings goes on sale for the first time. The artist, Roger Garland, who contributed more than 40 paintings for the book between 1982 and 1985, has never before been convinced of the financial merits of selling these particular paintings, and admits he has no idea how to price them. To this end he is only selling one painting to "test the market" as he puts it, although there will be some rough sketches on sale as well. "To be honest, I've always struggled to find a market for my work," he says.

Given the current fever for all things Middle Earth, that last statement initially seems surprising. It's not just this new obsession, however, that has finally precipitated a favourable climate for Garland - whose mystical paintings capture the elusive wonder of Tolkien's fantastical world beautifully - but the recent rise in profile of illustration itself. Garland's work is appearing in an annual exhibition organised by The Illustration Cupboard, a company established to deal in and promote original children's illustration, and which has grown almost exponentially since it was established by John Huddy in 1996. "I couldn't have done this 15 years ago," says Huddy. "The market wouldn't have sustained it."

Children's illustration is a curious beast: generally considered the poor brother of fine art - if indeed it is considered art at all - yet part of a tradition that stretches back to the psalters produced by the Anglo-Saxon liturgy in the ninth century. Putting pictures to words is something the British have always been particularly good at, from the Medieval bestiaries - illustrated fables of mythical creatures - and the illuminated manuscripts in monasteries through to the decorative work of William Blake and the superlative fairy pictures of the Victorian artist Arthur Rackham. Long departed from adult fiction (the Scottish author Alasdair Gray is a living exception), the genre today tends to be perceived as largely functional. And even though the work of artists such as Quentin Blake and Raymond Briggs is adored in its own right, illustration has never had its own specialist gallery space in this country, unlike countries such as Japan and the US, where it is taken very seriously indeed. Recently its fortunes have started changing however, and it is now starting to pick up both the respect it previously lacked - and the commercial approval. An original EH Shepard can fetch upwards of

Philip Pullman will be at the bookshop Waterstones in Oxford on Novermber 8th, to celebrate the release of his new book, Lyra

It seems that Randomhouse has finally updated their Lyra