The Red Thread (1988)

The Red Thread (1988)
Tord Nygren
Hardback, casebound, sewn. H305 x W 215 mm. [30] including pastedowns. Acquired from Better World Books, April 2025.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

The Swedish expression “den röda tråden” translates best as “the common thread”, the thing that links together otherwise disparate things and experiences. The literal translation, however, works best for Tord Nygren’s Den Röda Tråden (1987), leaving us to follow the red thread that the clown offers to the children on the front cover. The thread wraps around to the pastedown and across the fly leaf chased by the runaway carousel horse …

and on to the strandline spread of the title page

then onto a strange scene of famous characters and historical figures from art, literature, music, and science gathered around an egg about to hatch. There’s Leonardo da Vinci, Dürer, Van Eyck, Modigliani, Picasso’s girl with a dove and his harlequins, the Phantom of the Opera, Mona Lisa, young Mozart, and more. The thread makes its way into surreal tableaus of an artist’s sketching table come to life, a garden/jungle/hothouse, a troll-infested forest, a magician’s table, a landscape with a puppet show, and still more until we come to the last fly leaf where the alphabet is swept onto the floor and characters lose their color until …

on the pastedown, the red thread loops over the artist’s paint brush depicting a large this-way manicule to take us, the children and the thread to the back cover and over to the front cover to start again.

Children’s books and artists’ books share Nygren’s common thread. The Books On Books Collection carries the red thread to Transformations (1977) by Ellen Lanyon, Detour (1989) by Jan Voss, Chimere (2020) by Alessandro Baldanzi, and who knows where next?

Further Reading & Viewing

“Alessandro Baldanzi“. 24 June 2020. Books On Books Collection.

“Ellen Lanyon“. 25 June 2024. Books On Books Collection.

“Jan Voss“. 25 June 2024. Books On Books Collection.

Beckett, Sandra L. 2013. Crossover Picturebooks : A Genre for All Ages. London: Routledge.

Bossio, Paula. 2013. The Line. Toronto: Kids Can Press.

Cave, Roderick and Sara Ayad. 2017. A History of Children’s Books in 100 Books. London: British Library Publishing Division, pp. 26-27.

Lehman, Barbara. 2006. Museum Trip. Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin.

Liu, Joanne. 2018. Kunst für Max. München: Prestel Verlag.

Nikolajeva, Maria, and Carole Scott. 2007. How picturebooks work. New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group.

Nodelman, Perry. 1988. Words About Pictures : The Narrative Art of Children’s Picture Books. Athens: University of Georgia Press.

Nodelman, Perry, Naomi Hamer, and Mavis Reimer, eds. 2019. More Words About Pictures : Current Research on Picturebooks and Visual/Verbal Texts for Young People. London: Routledge.

Scott, Carole. 2014. “Artists’ books, Altered books, and Picturebooks”. In: B. Kümmerling‐Meibauer, ed., Picturebooks: Representation and Narration. London, New York: Routledge.

Walters, Clare. Wordless Books. Collection website.

Weitzman, Jacqueline Preiss, and Robin Preiss Glasser. 2000. You Can’t Take a Balloon into the Metropolitan Museum and You Can’t Take a Balloon into the National Gallery. New York, NY: Puffin Books.

 Wondriska, William. 1963/2010. A Long Piece of String. San Francisco, Calif.: Chronicle Books.