Winter (2019)

Winter (2019)
Ianna Andréadis
Softbound with a waxed thread loop. H210 x W150 mm. 48 pages. Acquired from Happy Babies, 30 July 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with artist’s permission.

The language of the book is one we learn well before we learn to read. It has many rules and parts. One part is the single page, and one of its rules is to turn it. Another of its rules is that the page behind may affect the page before. Another part of book language is the double-page spread. One of its rules is that facing pages may affect one another and that the space between them might disappear. As with any native language, we absorb its rules and parts and use them without thinking about them. Ianna Andréadis’ Winter revels in the language of the book and invites us to page through a winter wood and confusing thicket to begin learning again what we absorbed so long ago.

Like our earliest children’s books, Winter‘s only word is its title. Inviting touch, its front cover reproduces the main image of the title page but with debossing, and the book paper that follows is heavy and translucent.

With a turn of the title page, the bird is behind us, and the branches and trunks obscured by the title page’s “winter fog” loom large in black with the woods beyond appearing through the fog continued with the translucent paper.

As we move further into the woods, we look down on a bush or small tree weighted with snow whose trunk and branches sink into the snow beneath. Having passed it, we find a stand of four saplings and the one furthest from us also sunk in snow.

But now look up. The tangle of black branches and the winter fog barely hide the broken limbs of the tree just behind.

Several more pages of thicket and fog come before we reach the center of the book. There the imposition imposes its mechanics. The two facing pages both bear black ink, and the viewer may wonder whether these are birchtree trunks or black trunks with footsteps and branches or clumps of tree fall in the snow-covered ground between them.

Whatever that view is, the shift in inking according to the imposition envelops us in a winter fog on the following double-page spread.

Andréadis and her imposition, however, will lead us out of the fog and thicket, and the “lightening sky” over the next several pages encourages us to look up and find another bird perched above.

After several more pages and perhaps too tired to keep looking up, our eyes turn back to the tree trunks and branches sunk in snow, until at the end, we can finally look back up, turn around and see the clear fork of a trunk behind which the wood has disappeared again in winter fog.

And if at the end, prompted by the feel of the back cover and perhaps childhood memories of first books to press the covers flat, we’ll find we have come full circle. The next-to-last page’s forking tree trunk now appears debossed on the back cover matched to its other half and the bird on the front cover. Let’s read it again!

Andréadis’ Winter is now scarce, but through the link behind the title, you might be able to locate an institution with it near you. To enjoy more of the artist’s work, several of her illustrations of others’ books are available in libraries and the used-book market. One such book is Le papillon et la lumière by Patrick Chamoiseau, which deserves publication in translation not only for its charming story but for greater access to Andréadis’ artwork.

For another means of re-experiencing the first encounter with the language of the book, try Bruno Munari’s I Prelibri, first published in 1980 and still available in a second edition from Corraini.

Further Reading

Andréadis, Ianna. 2019. Winter. Tokyo: One Stroke.

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

Chamoiseau, Patrick. 201). Le papillon et la lumière. Ill. Ianna Andréadis. Paris: P. Rey.

Munari, Bruno. 2015. I prelibri = prebooks = vorbücher = prelivres. Second ed. Milan: Corraini.