Quentin Blake: Words and Pictures

Jonathan Cape $69.95

Review Margie Thomson*

There can be few illustrators whose work is as recognisable and as evocative as Quentin Blake's, and when you turn the pages of this lovely book, you quickly realise why.

Since 1949 when, aged 16, he had his first drawings accepted by Punch, through his years designing covers for the Spectator and early Penguin books such as Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim, up until the present day when he is probably best known as an illustrator (and author) of books for children, his drawings - "scratchy and instinctive and badly behaved," as he puts it - have done as much to establish the personality of a huge variety of publications as words ever could.

In 1999 and, as the Guardian newspaper put it, "already a national institution," he was made Britain's first Children's Laureate.

Blake is particularly closely associated with Roald Dahl and has illustrated many of his books, but has himself penned both words and pictures for children's books such as Cockatoos, Mr Magnolia, All Join In and Clown.

This is exactly the kind of autobiography someone like Blake should have produced. Albeit strangely impersonal, it is nevertheless, in a technical sense, hugely revealing. Full of works that span his 50-year career, including roughs, layouts and personal drawings and paintings not published before, it also provides an easy text full of anecdotes but also technical detail and insight into his development and modus operandi as an illustrator.

Some of his reminiscences are quite cute. Some 30 years ago, for instance, known for his black and white drawings but busting to try colour, he found no one who would give him a chance. "So what I had to produce - I realised at last, with an extraordinary slowness of apprehension - was a story that had to be in colour," he writes. "Hence this story [Patrick] of a young man who buys a second-hand violin which, when you play it, has the magical effect of (thank goodness) making things change colour ... " Talent, absolutely. But plenty of savvy as well.

* Margie Thomson is the Herald deputy books editor.