The picture book is a survey of the alphabet from A(ne) to Aa(ge) - Aa being the last word of the Danish alphabet. It is one of the books that Danish schoolchildren use when they are learning to read. The words create pictures and the pictures words in a strange, dramatic, odd, poetic, funny and frightening universe.
"Halfdanish" word play
Halfdan Rasmussen's nonsense verses are one big play on words, but he makes quite sure that the verses always rhyme. Here you find a welter of alliterations and end rhymes woven together in rhythmic sentences, making the verses easy to remember and fun to sing. The reader encounters puns and alliterations about pigs and pimples, and other fun plays on words such as "Ane's anemones". To read the book out aloud is a bit like tasting the words, try it for yourself! You'll notice that different words lie differently in the mouth and that language is really sound and not just visual symbols on a piece of paper.
Artist Ib Spang Olsen is brilliant at translating the quintessence of Halfdan's texts into pictures. He manages to maintain a realistic yet at the same time highly imaginative tone in his illustrations, which capture the wit and weirdness of the verse. Ib Spang Olsen's heavily shaded and highly atmospheric brush creates figures which are lively and at the same time never unambiguous. Else-pelse-poelsesnak (poelse = sausage) simply has to be illustrated showing a monstrous lady looking like an overswollen sausage, whose hands and feet resemble little apertures which can barely hold in all the meat!
Picture book history
The book demonstrates the close link between music, pictorial art and language, creating at eye height with the child a humorous contrast to the systematic writing of the time.
Halfdan's ABC has become a classic, which every subsequent ABC has been compared with. But the book itself can in fact be seen historically within its genre as a continuation of Claus Eskildsen's Ole Bole ABC (1927) with illustrations by Storm P. Halfdan's ABC came out at the same time as Flemming Quist Moeller's Bicycle Gnat Egon (Cykelmyggen Egon), and 1967 is thus considered an important year in the history of Danish picture books.
Marianne Eskebaek Larsen is a research assistant at the Centre for Children's Literature (Center for Boernelitteratur).
Ib Spang Olsen's illustrations to Halfdan Rasmussen's poem about the letter A. © Ib Spang Olsen/ COPY-DAN Billedkunst 20060164. Forlaget Carlsen, 1967.