On the wordless book

People sometimes pick up Buffalo Baby, turn it over, and ask where the words went. The honest answer: we left them out on purpose.

A wordless book doesn't tell a child what to think. It hands over the whole job of noticing: the calf's ear flicking, the grandmother in the doorway, the small determined girl who will not give up. The child becomes the narrator. On the first reading they point. By the fifth, they are telling you a story more elaborate than anything we could have printed.

It is slower than a noisy book, and that is the point. There is nothing to race to the end of. You sit, you look, you wonder aloud together. We have watched a room of twenty-two children go quiet over it, not because they were told to, but because the pictures asked them to look closer.

The Parag Honour List named it in 2024. We were glad. But the prize we actually wanted is the one we keep hearing about: a child who asks for the same book again, and finds something new in it every time.