I recently received a children’s book in the mail, and didn’t have to wonder very long why it was being sent to the editor of photography magazines. The book was sent to me from the publisher, Abrams Books for Young Readers (www.abramsyoungreaders.com). The title of the book was Babar’s USA. Authored by Laurent De Brunhoff, the son of the originator of the beloved elephant that was first created in 1931. The book is illustrated with photographs by Zephir. Photographs … that caught my interest.

Babar was created in a bedtime story told by Cecile de Brunhoff, Laurent’s mother. Laurent’s father, Jean de Brunhoff illustrated the story and published it. After Jean’s death in 1937, Laurent took over as family storyteller and has been bringing Babar stories to children since 1946.

Babar’s USA mixes illustrations of Babar and his family traveling across the country with digital photography. Many of the photographs were taken by De Brunhoff and his wife as hey traveled cross country. The artist then printed the images, tracing them on a light box, he drew in the figures to scale. In some instances, he scanned these collages into the computer and further manipulated them digitally.

I think it’s great that a household name such as the character Babar has “embraced digital photography” in the pages of this book. Besides just seeing the images, which unless you’d read about the manner in which the final pages were created, might have seemed to just be any old pictures mixed with drawings.

At the end of the story, Babar arranges a surprise for the elephants of Celesteville: boxes filled with computers, video games, iPods, cellphones and digital cameras. Talk about embracing technology. Laurent de Brunhoff is in his eighties now, and has incorporated not only the grandeur of many of the more photogenic national parks and other locations in the U.S.–but also includes pictures of diners; the airport in Nashville, where a musician played as they waited for their flight; a visit to Graceland to pay homage to “the King” (Elvis); and Disney’s Epcot; among other places.

Bringing such a classic figure as Babar and his family into the present day with all of its technology gadgets and gizmos adds a freshness to this well-known storybook character. It’s good for our industry whenever people are exposed to digital cameras and photography through other artistic mediums such as literature.

There is one thing that bothered me though. Near the end of the book, Celeste emails digital images to her friend Wendy, and the note she writes is in abbreviated text as if she was text messaging on a cellphone.

“Thx much for the gt time we had in NY!” it read.

Wendy’s reply is similar:

“Hi Celeste!!! There’s nothing nicer than a visit from frnds. Thx 4 coming!!! :-)”

I think it’s great that computers, email, digital cameras and other techie-items were incorporated in this story, but I wonder if children reading books like this one will will mistake text-appropriate terminology for proper grammatical expression.

Perhaps it was only meant as an homage to the way present-day children and adults communicate with each other, by email and text messaging but I wouldn’t want to see kids growing up thinking the way you text message someone is the correct way of spelling. Maybe there are other books on bookstore–and school library shelves–already that use such language, and this is only the first I’ve come across one. Language is the basis for how we communicate, and I understand texting for what it is when used on a cellphone, but it doesn’t have to translate to emails–at least for children I don’t think it should. It’s one thing for an adult who knows how to read and write to abbreviate words used for correspondence (although I doubt Miss Manners would agree), but I can only imagine what elementary school teachers see on their students’ spelling tests.

Diane

This entry was posted on Monday, August 11th, 2008 at 11:37 am and is filed under Diane Berkenfeld. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.