A Apple Pie: An Active Alphabet

The idea for my new book A Apple Pie: An Active Alphabet started out with a search for public domain pictures of pie. I was making the illustrations for Baby Ballads: A Family Treasury and needed pies for two of them, so I was happy to find a whole book about pie to choose a picture from. I eventually picked the illustration for the letter P to alter for my project--and in the process I fell in love with Kate Greenaway's sweet little alphabet book. It really bothered me that it was missing a page for the letter I, however, and that it ended with a single page for the last six letters. (See Kate Greenaway's original book on the Library of Congress web site here or on the Project Gutenberg web site here.) I showed it to my son, and those things bothered him, too--every letter certainly deserves to have its own page in an alphabet book. Then I realized that the book's legal status of being in the public domain meant I could make my own version and fix it up however I wanted!

In the end I used Photoshop to create eight new illustrations, seven for the letters that didn't already have their own plus a facing page to go with the original ending. I wanted the new pictures to blend in with the old ones, so I took all the people for them from other books illustrated by Kate Greenaway. Then I decided it really needed a little poetry to go with it, so I wrote twenty-seven rhyming couplets to put under the illustrations. Every letter is used as many times as reasonably possible on its own page and highlighted in red. Of course I needed to read up on Kate Greenaway so I could put together an about-the-author page, and then I went very far down the rabbit hole researching the nursery rhyme itself. It turns out that it's at least as old as 1671 and has a wide range of variations, so I thought it would be fun to select some interesting examples and add a historical tour of the apple pie alphabet. It all took me quite a bit longer than I expected, but I really like the results. Find it on Amazon here.

I love the public domain! It's great that it's perfectly legal to reuse an old page like this one to make new things like the two below, without having to ask anyone for permission. The baby jumping out of the pie on the page from Baby Ballads was originally found in a different picture by Kate Greenaway, and the poetry on both pages is my own.