A Apple Pie: An Active Alphabet--Pocket Size

 

I thought A Apple Pie: An Active Alphabet would make a cute mini book, so this summer I formatted a 4" by 6" pocket size version. It's a lot more portable than the original 8.5" by 11" book. The extra stuff in the back that I excluded from the ebook because of unreadably small print was also left out of the pocket size version, though, so you'll have to get the full-size book if you want a historical tour of the A Apple Pie nursery rhyme. The more streamlined mini book still has the same information in the back about Kate Greenaway, about me, and about the nursery rhyme, just without the example pages from other old books. Unfortunately the black-and-white picture of Kate Greenaway's dog also didn't fit, but that meant I could include the photo of Kate herself in its original sepia instead of having to make it grayscale to match. And I think she looks more natural and friendly in sepia. Anyway, I am quite pleased with how the mini book turned out. Find it on Amazon here. 

This size of small book makes a perfect prop for 18" American Girl and similar dolls, so I got out my Kirsten doll to take some size comparison photos. My son was pretty goofy about having to sit next to her, but I wanted to show how well the pocket size book fits Kirsten compared to how the original book fits a real child. It's a fun option to have available.

A Apple Pie: An Active Alphabet--Kindle EBook

 

Happy Pi Day! I decided it was the perfect day to format A Apple Pie: An Active Alphabet as a Kindle eBook, so here it is. An earlier blog post describing this book is here. I removed the selection of historical examples from the back of the eBook version--most of the text in those would have been too small to read--so the paperback is a better choice for those who are really interested in the historical background. But the eBook is a fun, less expensive option for those who want to check out the combination of Kate Greenaway's classic illustrations and my own quirky accompanying rhymes. 

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.