Tails Are Wagging for New Dog
This story originally appeared in Children's Bookshelf on December 7, 2006 Sign up now!
by Sally Lodge, Children's Bookshelf -- Publishers Weekly, 12/7/2006
Pop-ups to view, tabs to pull, textures to feel and flaps to lift are hardly new ideas for novelty book maestro Matthew Van Fleet, who has created some winners in the genre. Dial has sold more than one million copies of his Fuzzy Yellow Ducklings since its 1995 release, and Tails, published by Harcourt's Red Wagon imprint in 2003, has sold 882,000 copies. And Monday the Bullfrog, Simon & Schuster/Paula Wiseman Books, has 75,000 copies in print after returning to press three times since publication last spring.
Though his latest title also features animals, Van Fleet ventures onto new turf with Dog, his first novelty book that is illustrated with photographs. A collaboration with photographer Brian Stanton, this title introduces verbs, opposites and synonyms as pull tabs animate the dogs and furry textures enable readers to pet the pups. S&S has a 400,000-copy first printing on order for Dog, due from Wiseman's imprint on January 23.
Wiseman, who first met Van Fleet in the late 1980s when she was an editor at Putnam and he was a design assistant at Grosset & Dunlap, acquired Tails while she was an editor at Harcourt. "I had a yen to do a novelty book and, knowing Matt's work, I gave him a call," she says. "As it happened, he was in the middle of creating a dummy of Tails and I signed it up. Sometimes novelty books can be an enormous headache to create, but he makes creating them a joy and a pleasure. He is creative, exacting and genuinely interested in the workings of novelty books and is always inventing new ways to push the boundaries. With Dog, combining texture, photography and wordplay, he takes a wonderful new direction."
Van Fleet recalls that he had been musing for some time about doing a book that included photos and had also been thinking about devoting a book to dogs. The two concepts seemed a natural fit and he started kicking around the idea with Stanton, a commercial photographer, after the two met through a mutual friend. "We started it out almost as a whim," the author recalls. "We more or less knew something was there, but we didn't know at first if it would work. But we were having a blast doing it."
 Van Fleet at play with Molly, one of the three cover dogs. |
Stanton also ventured onto new terrain with Dog, his first book project. "I have spent a lot of time photographing ads and photographing CEOs for annual reports and this was a great change," he says. "It was hilarious. Matt and I both became hyper-aware of how serendipity plays such an important role in photographing dogs for a book. In his earlier books, Matt could illustrate whatever he wanted, but here the dogs would sometimes do fabulous things and totally surprise us. So Matt was ready and was able to change gears and adjust his thinking, depending on what came out of the shoots."
Stanton says he used high-end digital photography for this project, enabling him and Van Fleet to view the photos on a computer screen while the dogs were still with them. But Stanton's work continued long after the canines had come and gone. "There was a lot of Photoshop work at the back end, a lot of prepping of the images," he explains. "Silhouetting all the shots was quite a challenge—a white dog on a white background disappears, for example. And there was the whole aspect of creating images so that Matt could make the interactive mechanicals work. He is very particular and so am I—but in a different way. He's very organized and I'm not, but we are both maniacs about quality."
After the dogs had their day in the spotlight, Van Fleet, who had devised a list of possible layouts and rhymes for the book, whittled down the text. "For the most part, we were able to get expressions and poses from the dogs to fit my original comps," he notes. He then worked on the concept and layout with Skip Skwarek, who has collaborated with the author editorially on all of his book projects.
As with his earlier books, Van Fleet waited to sign a contract until the dummy of Dog was completed, saying, "I don't want to be halfway through a book and realize it isn't going to work." From her first glance at the book, Wiseman had no concerns about it working. "When Matt came into my office and pulled the dummy—a fairly final dummy—out of his bag, it was absolutely love at first sight for me," she recalls. "And I'm not a dog person—in fact I'm allergic. But, without exception, everyone else who has seen it subsequently has had the very same reaction."
S&S hopes to unleash consumer enthusiasm as well with a 12-copy floor display for Dog, which features a motorized shaking dog header. And booksellers interested in throwing a pooch-themed party (with or without four-legged guests) will find an event kit in January's Book Sense White Box mailing.
