Amitava Kumar: Why Don’t Books for Adults Use Pictures? - The Atlantic
theatlantic.com · 1,160 words · saved by 1 readers
Picture books aren’t just for children.
The first books I read in my childhood contained images: five kids talking to a large policeman (Enid Blyton); a child looking in horror at a man who has escaped from prison, in the light of a fire (an abridged Charles Dickens); a tiger and a snake (Rudyard Kipling). Those dark pictures held so much drama; they lingered in my mind even after the pages had been turned. But I rarely find pictures in the stories that I read now as an adult. Why is this so? Drawings and photographs run the risk of making everything literal. In books for children, they mostly are mere illustrations, directly repres
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