It is so often the case that the best children’s books are the ones adults think children won’t like – too difficult, too weird, too wordy. Graeme Base seems to specialise in these. Like his alphabet book Animalia, which has sold five million copies around the world, packed with Base’s opulent, detailed, downright bizarro illustrations and a flashy alliterative vocabulary. How many kids’ books contain sentences like: “Victor V. Vulture, the vaudeville ventriloquist, versatile virtuoso of vociferous verbosity, vexatiously vocalising at the Valhalla Variety Venue”? And how many of you reading this still remember that word-for-word?
Or The Eleventh Hour, his picture book mystery about an elephant’s 11th birthday party where, at 11 o’clock, all the food is stolen; the reader must identify the thief through fiendishly difficult puzzles including ciphers, morse code and symbols hidden everywhere in the illustrations, even the page margins.
Both Animalia and The Eleventh Hour have been selected by Guardian readers as among the 50 best Australian picture books ever published – but if you pitched either book now, Base says, “you’d fail – miserably, I suspect”.
It was perhaps a strength that the 67-year-old, by his own admission, had no idea what he was doing when he started. Take his beautiful typography in the illustrations of Animalia: “You’re not supposed to do that!” he laughs. “You’re supposed to have all the text separate so you can translate it into Danish and things like that! I didn’t know!”
He didn’t even want to be a children’s book author. “I could have very happily been a record cover designer,” he says. “I didn’t want to be a writer. I just wanted to draw … and it figured that there’d be stories which needed illustrating.”
When Base’s family moved from the UK to Australia, eight-year-old Graeme went from being “one of the lads” to “the kid in the tough Aussie state school with a very strong English accent”. But he had a major selling point in the playground: he could draw, so well that he was even selling illustrations to his English teacher.
Base studied graphic design, which he loved – “although all the time I was drawing dragons and fantasy worlds and knights on crayfish, stupid stuff” – then went into advertising, which he didn’t love. When he got fired from his third job in 18 months, he gathered all the art he’d been making after hours “for my own sanity” and started knocking on publishers’ doors.
At first, Base illustrated other writers’ books, but “it really didn’t scratch the itch – I wanted to draw what was in my mind, not what was in somebody else’s”. His first picture book, 1983’s My Grandma Lived in Gooligulch, was published after Base took his illustrations to Penguin’s Bob Sessions, who would become one of the most influential figures in Australian publishing.
Sessions rang him back a few days later with a resounding yes. “Great! OK! So I’m one of the few authors in captivity who doesn’t know what a rejection slip looks like.”
When Base got to work on Animalia, his second book, he showed Sessions two illustrations – the H page, or “horrible hairy hogs hurrying homeward on heavily harnessed horses” (Base’s personal favourite), and the C page, “crafty crimson cats carefully catching crusty crayfish”.
“I was thinking, what an idiot – as if the world needs another English-language alphabet book,” Base remembers – but Sessions liked it. “There was no question of, who’s the age group? Aren’t these words a little difficult?” Though Sessions did eventually challenge him about Victor V. Vulture, the vaudeville ventriloquist. “He said, ‘Graeme, is that maybe a little too hard for some kids?’ And I went, ‘Yeah, probably … [But] you shoot above a child’s head, and encourage them to rise to the occasion.’ And bless him, Bob said, ‘Absolutely, I agree with you.’”
Sessions took Animalia to Bologna Children’s Book Fair, an influential event where international children’s book hits are frequently made, and showed it to Paul Gottlieb, the then editor-in-chief of New York art book publisher Abrams. Abrams didn’t even publish children’s books then, but Gottlieb loved Animalia enough to take it on. Suddenly, Base had money, so he and his wife bought round-the-world plane tickets and “spent the whole of 1987 just goofing off in Africa and Europe and India”.
When they landed in New York, Base was informed he was booked for Good Morning America the following day. “I’d never done a TV interview in my life!” But Crocodile Dundee had come out the year before, and Australia’s cultural cachet was through the roof in the US. When Base said “G’day” to the GMA anchor Charlie Gibson, he just about swooned. They barely spoke about the book.
“I was so, so stupid and inexperienced … but with about 35 seconds to go, Charlie picked up the book and did a hard sell that I couldn’t have done to save my life – ‘If there’s one book that you buy for your kid this Christmas, it’s this one!’ Bingo.” Abrams rushed to reprint. Animalia hit No 5 on the New York Times bestseller list and got a billboard on Sunset Boulevard.
“It just changed my life,” Base says, smiling. “It’s all been steadily downhill from there, you understand, but it was a wonderful thing to have happen.”
Animalia was esoteric, mysterious and fantastical, quite unlike any alphabet book published before or since. It’s not a book to be read through and closed; it’s a book to be explored.
“Which was the sort of book that I liked,” says Base. “It was a book for an 11-year-old adult me … There’s no story. It’s not about learning the alphabet. It’s about the joy of discovery and creation.”
During their 1987 trip, Penguin sent constant telegrams informing him Animalia was getting yet another reprint. “The thing was just flying off the shelves. And I had a moment where I thought, ‘God, I hope I’m not a one-hit wonder.’”
It was on that trip that Base started researching for what would become his next huge hit. Base had read some Agatha Christie books on holiday and the idea for The Eleventh Hour “dropped out of the sky”.
The original mystery wasn’t a lost birthday feast, but a death: the animal guests would find one of their fellow invitees, a dog, with a glass of poison next to him. Very Christie, but not very kid-friendly; Sessions wisely intervened. “‘Graeme, we can’t have dead dogs in picture books – have another think about this,’” Base recalls him saying, laughing. “I thought, ‘Well, what do I like most about parties?’ And the answer, of course, is food.”
Much like Animalia, The Eleventh Hour “would probably be deemed way too hard now”, Base says. Penguin clearly had no idea what a hit it would be, because early editions included a card that readers could send back in exchange for a pamphlet with all the puzzles’ solutions, as well as a guide to all the artistic and architectural references Base had included.
“Oh my god … what a bad idea it was,” Base says, laughing at the memory. “They got so many of these cards, it was like a nightmare. They had to employ several people just to deal with this massive problem that we’d set.” Later editions were published with the solutions sealed at the back.
One of the hardest puzzles is the name of the swan, which Base provided no solution for and has never revealed publicly. “But I have decided over the years to give a clue: the answer to the puzzle lies in the cards,” he says, with barely disguised pleasure.
He is chuffed that Animalia and The Eleventh Hour have been chosen by Guardian readers. “Good old books, they’re just hanging in there,” he jokes.
Is he surprised by their longevity? “Yeah,” he says. “So few books manage to stick for another generation. Now it’s done another generation again; there’s grandparents buying these books who got it when they were kids. Which is really, really weird!”
