Man of TIN Advent Calendar Day 7 – another old blog post draft finally published!
Some of you may be familiar with the “First Thousand Words in …” series of children’s picture books for language learning by illustrator Stephen Cartwright (1947-2004) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Cartwright
These books by Stephen and long term / collaborator writer Heather Amery have been published by Usborne Books in many different languages (at least 55 languages according to his 2004 Guardian obituary) since 1979.
Stephen Cartwright is famous for putting a little yellow duck hidden slightly in many of his pictures and picture books.
http://www.usborneonline.com/cartwrightobit.htm
I have several of these attractive books, all pretty much the same illustrations, but with the different language words. There is a highly attractive pre-digital Toyshop page.
Without wishing to infringe Stephen’s copyright by showing a whole page, I was interested to see how he illustrated “Toy Soldiers” .
Drawn in the 1970s, the fascinating detailed cartoon pages in each book show lots of interesting details including typical toys from my childhood (and presumably those of his own 1950s/60s).
Looking through the rest of the book, the odd chunky computer creeps into a classroom, whilst a video camera or TV set might be updated easily to a more modern design flatscreen but otherwise the heart of the book remains as it was first made in the late 1970s.
Soudoryon is the Cornish (Standard Written Form) for toy soldiers.
Interestingly the French version still calls them soldats de plomb – lead soldiers – even though by the late 60s / early 1970s these had vanished from toy shops.
I shall have to look out what ‘Toy soldiers’ or ‘Tin Soldiers’ are called elsewhere in the world.
https://educalingo.com/en/dic-en/tin-soldier
Blogposted by Mark Man of TIN, Advent Day 7, Friday 7 December 2018
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