Haunted House

"I am such a fan of Jan’s art and his illustration, but Haunted House stands out for me particularly in terms of production: it’s a really beautifully produced children’s book. I didn’t own this book as a child, but my friend did. We used to say “let’s go and look at the haunted house”, and we would seek out the special place where it was kept, take the book out and pore over it. I love the way that the voice is saying one thing and the images are totally different, so you have a sense that the words are not quite telling the whole story. That was really appealing to me as a child. And the paper engineering is amazing. I remember that feeling of getting totally immersed in this book. It’s really clever. Every cut in this book is used to the best effect, there’s no extraneous paper engineering in there. I’m pretty sure that it uses both sides of the wheel in lots of the illustrations. So you’ve got a dial, and you’ll have one thing printed on the outside of the circle, and then you’ll have an inner ring which has got something different printed on it. When you put holes on the page in different places it looks like magic, and I remember being blown away by that as a child. Now I’m on the illustration side of publishing, but when I was working as a designer I always used to ask the people I worked with about their first experience of books, because we were all obsessed. I think we all had very significant reading experiences as children. I feel that the books that I loved as a child really marked me as a human. This book has only got six spreads, but you can spend hours reading it because it’s got all these little doors that you can open. And when you open the flaps you’ve got little dials which you can turn and the cat’s eyes rove across the page and at the end a vampire bat comes out in a big pop-up. There are all sorts of different things happening at the same time. You open a door and it creaks because it has a serrated edge. It’s funny, and again it’s clever simple. It’s perfect. The words are sparse and yet what they say is brilliant. It’s more interesting because it isn’t just saying “once upon a time in a spooky old house”. I really love this book, it’s very special. It has flavours of In The Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak. I found something appealing in the strangeness as a child, and I still like books that have a touch of whimsy and oddness to them. Jan is a brilliant storyteller. I used to love his Meg and Mog books as well. Now they look very dated with lots of purple and orange, but I absolutely loved them as a child."