Shelf Appeal loves to find a new illustrator or designer. The super feeling of excitement looking them up on Google to see what else they have done is akin to opening a big box of presents.
This book Silly Billy came to me by way of a favour done for a Twitter friend. How nice this book is. The size is right. The full bleed of the illustration across the cover is right. Something labeled ‘easy to read’ is right. The title is funny and right. And the illustration is just right.
Published in 1963 it is part of a series of Billy books by Betty Coombs. He also went shopping and had a birthday. I looked up the illustrator Ferelith Eccles Williams.
And I spent a lovely couple of hours following leads and posts on other blogs and piecing together a little bit of a story about the artist. The propinquity of blogging is a constant joy. Often when you look up a name someone else has done a little bit of research on them too and if you are lucky they have blogged about it. And if you are very lucky, their blog will have lots more things you might like. And so the road taken leads to another road taken and another.
Have you seen the current “Flu Jab” posters in pharmacies? Clearly they’ve been referencing illustrations along these very lines (either that or the NHS found a box from the fifties and is reusing them!).
“propinquity”; our mot de jour?!