Bookbird, Journal of International Childerns’s Literature, 2025/3, 80-81.

Csimota Publishing House—earning its name after a somewhat old fashioned, dialectical term for a kid_—was founded in 2003 as a Budapest-based private publishing house. It specialized in children’s books with daring innovations in terms of themes, style, genre, and medium of the published material. Csimota is also responsible for, among others, the introduction of kamishibai (Japanese paper theatre) in Hungary, the launch of the Tolerance Series devoted to the development of social sensitivity and the promotion of inclusivity, and the introduction of the pioneering silent book series initially named Design Books, for lack of a better term and because of the emphasis on visual artistic qualities.

The founder’s—Dóra Csányi— initial idea was to select a classic fairy tale and invite five contemporary graphic designers to each transform the story into images, creating illustrations devoid of verbal commentaries and compressing the tale’s plot and moral message into them. Each illustrator was given twenty pages to reimagine a familiar story in their unique, individual way. The result was a series of five small (12 cm x 12 cm) hardcover volumes: Red Riding Hood (2006), Three Little Pigs (2007), Snow White (2009), Puss in Boots (2012), and Sleeping Beauty (2015-2016). The so-called FiveBooks (Ötkönyv) wordless fairy-tale picturebook pentalogy series saw the publication of twenty-three volumes between 2006 and 2016. Collectible items with iconic image sequences, each volume illuminated the same narrative from a different light, highlighting the retellability, the variability, the intertextual- and intermedial connectivity, and timeless contemporaneity of the fairy tale form.

Each volume bears the title of the same tale in a different language. For example, Little Red Riding Hood was published with Hungarian, German, English, French and Spanish titles; while Puss in Boots in Italian, Portuguese, Danish, Greek and Polish. This multilingualism, a minimal verbal intrusion into the visual text on the cover image, clearly expressed the series’ mission: to celebrate the universal power of images joining nations across the ages and to grant free play to culturally and individually differing interpretations.

The retelling of the same story from multiple points of view, generic or medial hybridization, stylistic heterogeneity, and ironic self-reflectivity are major features of postmodern children’s books. However, the retellings also attest a kinship with the fundamentally changing/ changeable nature of folk and fairy tales, which have traditionally spread through oral tradition in innumerable variations and adaptations. This freedom of (re)interpretation is reflected in the stylistic diversity of the series: illustrations range from expressive painterly representations to abstract, emblematic imagery.

In revisiting Little Red Riding Hood, for example, Bori Ruttkai uses the stylistic devices of expressionist painting. András (b) Baranyai evokes abstract art in translating the story into visual language of flow diagrams. Tibor Kárpáti, meanwhile, experiments with pixel art reminiscent of early computer games’ visual. The least realistic take by Mari Takács uses geometric shapes to indicate the main nodes or kernel points of the plot. She echoes Warja Lavater’s 1965 artbook which translated the same storyinto a nearly five-metre-long lithographed sequence of colorful, geometric forms, basic minimal constituents of the tale’s visual grammar. These volumes focus on diegetic turning points, characters’ spatial positions (meetings and separations), they leave it to the imagination of the reader-viewer to conceptualize the details of the environment, the unheard dialogues, and the affective charge of interactions.

The illustrations in the series feature diverse artistic techniques. In Three Little Pigs, Kata Pap uses a multimedia combination of photos and graphics to stage the story on a dinner plate where jelly beans and cookies impersonate the protagonists. As textures have a vital significance in the storyline, Mari Takács fills the rudimentary geometric shapes of her figures with fabric collages. Tibor Kárpáti centers on the dramaturgy of time and space: the parallel presentation of three scenes directs the viewer’s attention to the existence of actors who are not necessarily major players in the events.

Stylistically, Snow White represents a genuine celebration of diversity. Using vector graphics bearing the Arabic title, Juli Kasza retells the story through the rhythmic repetition of numbers and diagrams. Tibor Kárpáti’s pictures celebrate the typically feminine activity of tapestry embroidery, while Siele Ernanitos photographs puppets on the beach. Gabriella Makhult used a traditional graphic technique, linoleum engraving, when she composed her black and brown, strongly emotional pictures. A lyrical, painterly symbolism characterizes the three volumes of Sleeping Beauty decorated by the pictures of Krisztina Maros, Alexandra Grela and Barbara Szepesi Szűcs.

In one of the most abstract volumes of the series, Ági Csernus’s interpretation of the story of Puss in Boots ignores the action and instead provides photographic documents of objects which provide symbolical clues to each scene (a mill-shaped honey cake, a Lego castle, a rubber band, etc.). Transforming a series of static photos depicted against a neutral background into a dramatic story requires multiple abstractions. It presupposes the interactive agency of the viewer who, relying on their familiarity with the tale, will create connections between the eclectic set of things, will decode symbolical significations (the white shirt refers new clothes after bathing and a subsequent change of identity), and will fill the gaps between abstract visual references with events, dialogues and emotions. In doing so, this object oriented fairy-tale retelling realizes one of the main agendas of the silent book medium as a pictorial narrative: the creative engagement of the viewer becoming co-creator.