My First Books…
MY FIRST BOOK… Spring 1980. The September 12 coup was still a few months away. Politics and conflict were part of our daily lives, and we all wanted to change the world.
In the picture, a boy named Pan finds a flower in the countryside that has been pulled out of the ground. He plants it again and waters it. That’s all… Pan could be seen as a forerunner of the character in my later book series, I Can Read by Myself, which began with I Was a Little Child…
The award came as a surprise. My publisher, Redhouse, had entered the book in the competition without telling me.
When Pan’s first adventure won an award, Redhouse asked me to make a second one. This time, I added a new character, Sun, as a friend for Pan.
I remember showing it to Aziz Nesin when he came to visit us one day. “It’s nice,” he said, “but why Pan? Why not Ali or Osman?”
Why was it called a Television Game? Instead of pages, the book consisted of eight cards, with the text on the back of each one. You lifted the front covers, showed the pictures to the child through the “screen” and read the text on the back.
It was an adaptation of a Japanese storytelling technique called kamishibai. Television was just beginning to reach more homes in Turkey at the time, and it was the centre of attention.
Görsel Publishing was the first name of the publishing house I founded—what would later become Mavibulut. After publishing just two of my books under that name, I changed it to Mavibulut.
The idea of making it both a storybook and a colouring book came from the fact that I didn’t have enough money to print it in colour. It was something like: “I couldn’t colour it, children, so you do it!” 🙂
This was my second book published under the name Görsel Publishing. I brought several illustrated stories together and called the collection Funny Animal Tales.
At the time, it was printed on what we called third-grade paper: thinner and more yellow than the book paper used today. Private companies had not yet entered the paper industry, and higher-grade paper had to be ordered from the SEKA mills in Dalaman or İzmit. Delivery could take months.
This was the second book in the series, but unlike the first, it contained just one story. I later illustrated it again several times and published it as The Tale of the Violinist Bear.
It is the story of a bear who dreams of playing the violin, and of the patience and determination he shows along the way.
A few friends and I once went to Şile. I saw a young goat on a steep hillside, crying out as though it couldn’t get down. Thinking it needed help, I set out to rescue it.
I think I did get it down, but while jumping around, I sprained my ankle, which immediately swelled up. My story The Goat and Me grew out of that experience.
It is also proof that I once thought I was more agile than a goat!
Unfortunately, we haven’t yet managed to republish this series, called Aslı’s Questions. The books are also special because they were among the first published works illustrated by Huban Korman, one of Turkey’s finest illustrators.
I started the series after reading Piaget’s book about children’s questions, but it ended after just two titles.
In one of his writings, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson—better known as Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice—suggested that if we could run fast enough, we could follow the sun around the Earth, overtake it and even travel back to “yesterday”.
Aslı asks a similar question and sets out on her bicycle to catch the sun…