Wordless books by Barbara Lehman

Kirkus: In the top floor of what seems an orphanage, amid rows of empty beds, a bespectacled boy hides a saltwater-taffy box under a floorboard.  The box, readers know, holds photos, a postcard, tokens, ticket stubs and a map fragment, with a route sketched in red-penciled arrows. ... Two groups of children, separated by generations, discover the box of treasures ... 

Here are some teaching ideas to use with The Secret Box.

IBBY Australia are thrilled to be hosting the 2019 IBBY Silent Books collection. Right now they are on display in Brisbane at the State Library and next month they move to Lost in Books at Fairfield.

Dr Robin Morrow and I are preparing a talk about Silent Books looking at their evolution and highlighting some newer titles. We both find these two book covers quite intriguing so today I will focus on the award winning US author/illustrator Barbara Lehman. We like the way their covers are wordless just as the books themselves are wordless.

Publisher Blurb: A red book is lying in the snow in the city. When you open it, you find a new kind of adventure. You will be taken across oceans and continents when you just flip the page. But this book-in-a-book holds even more secrets to discover.  Lehman’s simple story line and surprising illustrations create an unexpectedly enchanting story about friendship, connectedness, and how stories can bring us together . . . and even bring us inside their pages.

Kirkus - A charming wordless tale about a magical red book and two unnamed children.

Take a look inside here  and read an interview with Barbara Lehman.

Publisher Blurb: When a young boy discovers an abandoned book on the side of the road, it opens a window to another world just as real as his own. But what happens when the two worlds collide? This imaginative companion to the Caldecott Honor–winning The Red Book works in a continuous loop, showing us that stories never really end. While fans of the previous book will relish seeing the story play out, prior knowledge isn’t necessary in order to understand or savor this one.

Kirkus: A peaceful, wordless adventure that, as the final frames hint, will continue after it’s closed.

Here are some other books by Barbara Lehman:

Read more about Rainstorm here.  I was excited to read Barbara likes Peter Collington; Istvan Banyai; Shaun Tan; and Lisbeth Zwerger among others.

Her newest book will be published at the end of 2021:

Barbara says (of The Red Book):

As this was my first wordless book, I initially felt confused that not everyone “made” the exact same story from the visuals! And then I took a step back and realized that it was really a collaborative experience, as all books are—wordless books being just the “opposite” of how we usually experience stories in book form. As adults, we normally read just text and create our own images in our minds—the settings, the faces and so on—within the parameters of the written description. Wordless books are just the opposite: the specific storyline is what gets created in one’s mind, using the structure of the visuals, and so this is the part that will have the individual slant. I quickly came to really enjoy the variations among different children, and the additional possibility that the same child is also free to vary the story over time however it may strike them on different days or as they age.

Here are some further silent books to explore and ideas to use with a class.