WORDLESS BOOKS: A STORIED GIFT FOR DIVERSE READERS AND THEIR TEACHERS
Today we celebrate World Teachers’ Day! We take our hats off to teachers across the world for their dedication to sharing knowledge and sparking curiosity in those they educate.
In honour of this profession and the challenges of an inclusive pedagogy, we’re sharing our Wordless Book collection as a gift to the increasingly multilingual classrooms of Australian schools. Wordless Books are a democratising form of literature that enable every reader to make their own story within the world of the book, regardless of shared language.
Bird is a stunning wordless picture book by Beatriz Martin Vidal, which brings us up to the moment of a child's flight, as she launches into life and imagination takes off.
Thinking about this unique and beautiful kind of books takes us back to the chaos of COVID during which we managed to host not one but two exhibitions dedicated to illustration and storytelling.
From 17th March - 24th April 2021, we hosted the Silent (or Wordless) Books Collection curated by the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY) with the assistance of the State Library of Queensland. This collection of 67 books came from 16 countries including Belgium, Japan, Argentina, and the United Arab Emirates. The Silent Books project is one that resonates with us to our core.
The IBBY Silent Books Collection was begun in 2012 in response to the arrival of refugees to Italy from Africa and the Middle East. The project seeks to bring together a collection of books that were ‘silent’ or ‘wordless’, and therefore, able to be enjoyed by all children, regardless of language or ability. As a multilingual bookstore and community hub in an area that is home to so many recent arrivals and diverse languages, we were honoured to hold an exhibition that is rooted in democratisting literature.
Since we started LOST IN BOOKS in 2017, we have worked hard to build a collection of Wordless Books and to champion them to educators. We are proud of our collection and the strategies we have developed for educators to use them, and other multilingual cultural resources, in classroom settings. Our Multicultural Creative Classrooms Professional Development curriculum is a NESA-accredited online course that educators can take at their own pace. We encourage you to register to take the course today.
During our launch event in 2021, we spoke to national treasure, author and illustrator Shaun Tan, who shared with us his insights on why wordless picture books are important, as well as some advice with on how to read books without words:
The thing you need to do if you’re stuck is you ask two questions. First: how does this picture make me feel, if anything? And: what does it make me think about, or remind me of? It’s basically thoughts and feelings…and all of those are in you. So, pictures are not there to really communicate anything, they’re there more to trigger a response, and for you to have an internal communication.
-Shaun Tan, Illustrator and Author
On 30th April 2021, we launched an exhibition of 56 Iranian illustrations that have largely been sourced from children’s picture books. These illustrations were curated by Margrete Lamond of Dirt Lane Press, in collaboration with Kia Literary Agency in Iran. LOST IN BOOKS created a rolling exhibition, where we exhibited 14 prints each week selected by Dr Pedram Khosronejad (Curator of Persian Arts, Powerhouse Museum, Sydney). LOST IN BOOKS is proud of the strength of our Farsi collection and honoured to bring to Australian schools, libraries and homes the artistry that characterises children’s literature from Iran.
We have recently brought new shipments of books from Iran; from across the Arabic-speaking and Chinese-speaking worlds; and soon we will welcome new Vietnamese titles. Check out the beautiful new books now in stock here. Please do not hesitate to contact us to enquire about how we can assist you to bring these books into your classrooms and your communities.