World Book Day

We love books in our house, but we're nearly at capacity for storing them in our current home. P has a huge collection of art books which are mostly kept in our living room. Upstairs, in the bigger of the two bedrooms, we have many, many more. Given that it's just the four of us (me & P and Mab & Fanny, our two crazy cats) we use this room as a second living room because it opens up on to our deck.

And, so to the point of my post... Today is World Book Day in the UK and Ireland, and so P and I have decided to share these two books with you.

P's book of choice is Sketches From A Hunter's Album by Ivan Turgenev. He says that they're beautiful, luminous stories and one day he is going to read them to me... The book is a complete collection of 25 sketches dating from 1852. As well as being poetic stories, they're invaluable as social documentation.

I have picked Ant and Bee An Alphabetical Story by Angela Banner. The reason I've picked this book, which I don't actualy own, is that when I was a little girl I would hunt this book down at the library and spend what seemed like hours studying the pictures. I think this book is where I developed my love of illustration. I really want to have a look through it now, to see if it's still as special to me as it was to me then...