Masha du Toit

It’s been a while since I’ve posted – (and no, I’m only halfway with colouring in the “Unexpected Tea Party drawing that I posted about last time!)

In any case, I wanted to share an illustrated children’s book I found in a second hand bookshop yesterday.  It is called “Switch on the Night”, is written by Ray Bradbury, and illustrated by Leo and Diane Dillon who I also wrote about in this post.

The story is about  a boy who is afraid of the dark.  He does his best to light up every room he is in:

Notice the Escher-like distortions of perspective.  Here is another image, showing his parents walking through the house, switching off the lights:

And the next image shows the boy switching all the lights back on again, to keep the night away:

Later in the story, he meets a friend who introduces him to all the beautiful things that can be found in the dark, like stars, crickets and frogs.  They boy learns to love the night just as much as the day.  There are many lovely images, but I’ve chosen my favourite one:

And the story ends with a lovely night time scene in a park:

The book itself is quite small, a real jewel. There are many other images that I have not shared here, all of them very detailed and unexpected.  The daytime images are printed on white pages, and the night time images are on black pages. Unfortunately the drawings have an odd speckled quality that make the scans look low quality, but they are very fine in the book itself.

For those of you in Cape Town, the bookshop where I found this book is called “Folio”, and is in Main Rd Rondebosch  near the intersection with Klipper road. It is small but full of great books, as well as a friendly bookshop cat 🙂