Telling a story with pictures

In the twilight filtering through the window into the small basement coffee shop La Boheme, illustrators Tsao Ruei-chi (曹瑞芝) and Huang Yu-chin (黃郁欽) are busy hanging their drawings in preparation for their joint exhibition Love and Photo Studio, which opens today. The exhibits are manuscripts from their first two books -- Soliloquy of Love (愛情獨白) and The Blue Photo Studio in H Town (H鎮的藍色寫真館), which were released last month.

Huang and Tsao have each authored over a dozen hand-made picture books, for which they also wrote the texts, but it has taken almost a decade for their work to attract the attention of a publishing house. What makes their work unusual is that, although they are illustrated books, they are not designed for children. Although there's been no lack of illustrated children's books by Taiwanese authors, picture books designed for readers other than children have been dominated by foreign-language translations.

Huang and Tsao are leaders of Picture Book Club (圖畫書俱樂部), a group of 20 hand-made book enthusiasts who regularly show their work at Cafe La Boheme and hold group exhibitions every year. Since 1996, they have held regular meetings to view and comment on each other's books and brainstorm for new ideas.

The Picture Book Club is one of seven such clubs currently active in Taiwan.

We Are Fun (繪本FUN團), another of those groups, has seen its several members publish children's and other picture books in the past two years including Deng Mai-yun's (鄧美雲) Picture Book DIY (繪本創作DIY), which has become standard reading for people interested in hand-made illustrated books.

The exhibitions held by these groups can really be an eye-opening experience. In Picture Book Club's last group show last year, Huang showed books of fairy tales for the grown-ups, accompanied by paper-cuttings that served as illustrations. Other group members made story books with three-dimensional illustrations, devices inside pages for readers to play with, exquisite paper sculptures and even illustrations of noodles that actually felt soft and elastic.

Until recently, the high cost of color printing has kept these works available to only a niche audience who frequent such exhibitions. This was how Tsao and Huang were discovered, and they say that the interest shown by publisher Chen Yu-hang (陳雨航) is due to a trend towards publishing books without a high word count but with lots of pictures. "These are thought to be easier to digest by a busy public," they said.

Chen, founder of the famous literature-oriented publisher Rye Field Publishing (麥田出版社), and head of Yi Fang Publishing (一方出版社) decided to set up a new label, called Words and Pictures (圖話書), under which to publish Huang's, Tsao's and other illustrated works. In total, three works by local authors have been released to date, and translations of three imported works are currently underway.

"It is a worthwhile experiment," said Chen, who saw their books by accident when he was having a coffee in La Boheme.

"My publishing house is basically literature-oriented but nowadays I really need my publications to have illustrations. I found their [Huang's and Tsao's] works appealing both in their text and their pictures, so I thought I would try them out," Chen said. "Even literary books now have to include something visual. [Novels] whose pages are narrowly printed with line after line of text have lost their appeal. Simple decorations on the margins are not enough either. Full page illustrations are necessary. Young people, in particular, like to see pictures next to words. This is the era of the visual."