Discovring Miroslav Sasek

Discovering Miroslav Sasek

Well, you may know that I have a love for children's books, but I especially have a love for beautifully illustrated and vintage children's books. I do not have a lot of these specific style of books but I am slowly growing our collection. I also love collecting foreign children's books and especially love french books. We always try to pick something up when we are overseas for the kids.

This weekend our church had its Christmas fair and with that comes a lot of stalls offering homemade food produce, bric-a-brack, toys, and one of my favourites; a book stall.

That is pretty much the only stall I wanted to get to as soon as we arrived, and thank goodness I did as I found what could possibly my best find to date.

For a mear 10p I was lucky enough to purchase a book called ''This Is Paris'' by M.Sasek. I had never seen anything like this before. Quirky illustrations, lovely descriptions and a whole lot of information teaching children about the lovely little parts of Paris. This book was printed in 1960 and shows signs of it being passed through many hands. Its spine has broken but the the pages are all still fixed in place. Each page is perfect though and is printed on thick paper which has the vintage stain that runs around the whole of the book. But it is pretty perfect and pretty amazing.

I decided to do a bit of investigating into this series as in the front of the book it gives Sasek's other publications. I have discovered that he was born in Prague in 1916 and worked as a painter and illustrator for most of his life. When he was young he trained as an architect in Prague because his parents didn't want him to become a painter. He travelled to Paris to study and through life ended up in Munich where he settled with his wife and then went on to write the ''This Is'' series beginning with ''This Is Paris'' in 1959. Now I feel especially lucky as the book I got was a reprint in 1960 so just one year after its first release.

  

What I love about this book is that it is the retelling of someones experiences. Each page explains who someone is, what they do and where they are. As a teaching tool it is a beautiful depiction of a place.

Looking on Amazon, the ''This Is'' series have all been re-released in the last 10 years so there are new printed versions available. I would love to start a collection of these books so I am glad that they are now easy to get hold of but this version that we now have will always be precious. I am going to write in the front where we got it and our names so that wherever it might end up, someone will be able to find interest in it and who it belonged to.

Post by Emily