Bob Staake's Look! A Book! - review

Here is a fun exercise in creativity:

Think up a three-item list of rhyming nouns. A screw, bamboo, Anne Hathaway saying "WOO!"
Draw a giant complicated colorful scene incorporating these items. NOTE: your scene can include anything you like, but your three rhyming nouns must be on the right-hand side of the page
Fold your picture in half like a greeting card
This is the tricky part: make holes in the left-hand side of the picture opposite your three rhyming nouns, so that, when closed, your nouns peek out.

Yay! You have made a simple version of the super-cool spreads that populate this masterful visual feast from Bob Staake.

But hold on a second. Not so fast. Don't take this personally, but I think there are a few things that you forgot to put into your complicated colorful scene. Do you have a dog mowing the lawn? A horse in a hot tub? A Fighting Irish football helmet? The 'A' train? Paul Bunyan? Donuts? Oh I'm sorry - of course you have donuts.

If you're Bob Staake, of course, your scene will include all these things, especially the donuts. Also lots of robots, gnomes, ogres, crustaceans, table lamps, children having fun, and pineapples. If you're Bob Staake, your rhyming nouns will be easy to read, jazzy, rhythmic, and somehow silly.

And if you're Bob Staake, your colors will be chosen from a wide but shallow palette, meaning that each color of the rainbow has sent just one or two hues to the party, insuring that all combinations will be vivid but also harmonious. This is an excellent skill - you try to draw a big scene on a tomato-red background without any of the colors vibrating retinally against it.

Now, it's easy for any child to find the highlighted nouns - they're spotlighted by the die-cuts, after all - but it's a real giggle to open up these spreads and see how Bob has incorporated items like a moose and a hook into a larger scene. And for extra added challenge, there's a list at the end of the book of additional items to go back and find. NICE. I wondered why I was seeing so many table lamps. Parents and children familiar with Mr. Staake's previous books will notice some references - the donuts, the lamps, the robots. This not only adds to the fun, but makes Bob Staake an excellent candidate for an elementary school author study.

Speaking of the classroom, not for nothing have I been prompting us to try to mimic what Bob has done in Look! A Book! It has been said, by me and by others, "Bob Staake makes it look easy," and there's no better way to appreciate the thought, compositional mastery (look at the birds flying in front of that dinosaur above), and imagination apparent in this book than to try it yourself with a bunch of kids. (Also, the kids might not include a dog mowing the lawn in their drawing, but there will be something equally surprising.)

Little, Brown has done beautifully by this book, printing it on heavy paper with precise die-cuts and a big fold-up at the end. The large trim size signals to children that it slides right onto the shelf beside other seek-and-find picture books like I Spy and Where's Waldo?.

I know Bob's a little bit of a Luddite, using, as he claims, the oldest working version of Adobe Photoshop and a mouse to create his books (I shudder for his wrists), but I would love to see him team up with an iPad book app developer. His tiny, peppy illustrations already practically boing around as if they're on springs (and he's done plenty of animation) - I think there's a lot of potential for interactivity that would in no way detract from the original content.