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| Juan Farias | | The keeper of words |  Juan Farias arrived pushed by the hurricane of a war that happened once in the Mid-Afternoon. And the wind became words to him and he furnished himself with pencils and wrote them in his notebooks. While he was resting, the words filled the flowerpots waiting for the wind that had brought them with the writer to blow them again.That day on which he knew that there was a war, was the very same day when the bronze bell in the church of Mid-Afternoon, the village which went through difficult years for a while, was split in two. Juan Farias decided to recount what life brought to the hearts of the men and women of Mid-Afternoon. They were everyday worries, small anxieties which became as big as worlds, which obstructed the future and which dimmed the lights of the soul. But Juan illuminated these worries with a particularly bright light and wishes became bigger than reality and they vanquished and possessed it.
Download extract in PDF  |  | | The thousand letters of the alphabet |  Our A-Z has no prescriptive intention; in it Spanish and Latin American illustrators representative of the whole gamut of contemporary illustration for children appear. It could well have been these or others, or what is the same, all those to be found here are illustrators but not all illustrators will be found here. To put it clearly: the pretext for bringing together these artists has been a group of characters from what is classified as children’s literature, some characters more universal than others, some of them archetypes from popular tales others taken from ageless books and still others who come from the so-called children’s classics. In effect it is a hybrid line-up because, doubtlessly, any selection is partial, and also because while there is a plethora of substantial protagonists beginning with M, J or P, there is a frightening dearth of characters beginning with U or X; this is a random mystery which it will only be possible to unravel when some patient investigator (who might well be called Daniel Nesquens or Gloria Sánchez) finds out why the T absolutely has to come after the S, or the C before the D, following a rule which has never been explained explicitly which, it has to said, has imposed order in our world of readers.
This A to Z has been devised thanks to the generous and unselfish collaboration of the following contributors without whose help it would have been impossible. Thank you.
Carmen Segovia, Teresa Novoa, Miguel Calatayud, Elena Odriozola, Javier Sáez Castán, Javier Olivares, Javier Zabala, Mercè López, Irene Fra, Manuel Marín, Antonio Santos, Emilio Urberuaga, Ivar Da Coll, Ignasi Blanch, Óscar Villán, Pere Ginard, Paco Giménez, Noemí Villamuza, Xosé Cobas, Leticia Ruifernández, Alejandro Magallanes, Beatriz Vidal, Isidro Ferrer, Elisa Arguilé, Pablo Auladell, Rocío Martínez, Federico Delicado.
Download extract in PDF | | | Picture Book | | Alphabet books which can be read as poems, as pictures, as architectures, as games just like the world. Here are some proposals to surprise yourself with the joy of letters. |  If alphabet books were the first materials to transmit the rudiments of reading and writing to children, with the passing of the years they have moved a long way from this mission to become a post-modern genre which is introspective and develops like tentacles, crossing with other genres such as poetry, stories, design, art books and documentaries.
Download extract in PDF | | | Bloc #3: Illustrated Alphabets | | April 2009 |  Sooner or later it had to happen: Bloc dedicates an issue to alphabet books, those books which were born to teach the letters to those who didn’t know them; books which, with the passing of time, have become the scene of the most thought-provoking graphical experimentation in illustrated publications be they for children or not. It is in this spirit that Bloc offers you its alphabet book. For it we have convened a group of Spanish and Latin American Illustrators and brought together a handful of major characters from children’s stories. Altogether they offer us a framework, with no claim to be comprehensive, of the world of books aimed at children. Undoubtedly important figures from both geographical areas have been omitted but there was only room for twenty-seven. What we do not doubt is that none of those included is surplus to requirements. The quality of their work is therefor all to see. Their offerings show that even those characters which have been interpreted many times throughout history have something new to say and a new view to give us, exposing further secrets to the reader.
We round off the pages of this issue with the contributions which were given in the tribute to the writer Juan Farias in Pontevedra. There wasn’t any date in particular to celebrate this author; it was just a great opportunity for his friends to express their recognition of the teacher who taught many the special alphabet expressly for children with solid words such as apple, island, sea, father,redhead, zoo… which bring to life texts full of emotion and literary honesty.
Bloc #3: index of contents | |
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