Boven in een Groene Linde zat een Moddervette Haan is this year’s only children’s book to make it through to selection. The panel were unanimous and unreserved in their welcome for the book’s well thought-out design.
Instantly conspicuous features are its large and elongated format and the cover, which proves that it is perfectly
possible to combine an otherwise typographic cover with an illustration.
The book’s tall, narrow format echoes the narrow text columns in which the rhymed fables have been set. Some of the verses have a column width of between two and four words at most. This form of poetry is called ‘skinny’, so perhaps that is the origin of the spindly shape that the book has been given.
The drawings are bled off and with this large format have plenty of space. The titles of the fables, large and in colour, have been gaily sprinkled over the pages, some of them happily encroaching on the picture or even interrupting the text columns. In this way the typography becomes almost an integral part of Sieb Posthuma’s expressive draughtsmanship.