Yay! Collage!

Last night I read a great new book from Lois Ehlert, published in March 2014, The Scraps Book: Notes from a Colorful Life. I love the bright colors and crisp-edged shapes in Ehlert's artwork. When the collages are reproduced as a book, their 3-dimensionality is made less obvious, so seeing the artwork in early stages reveals texture and volume present in the originals.

Finding the new book at the Kenton County Public Library, I discovered it is not Ehlert's first memoir. Right next to it on the shelf was Under My Nose, published in 1996.

From the cover, Under My Nose looks like your typical meet-the-author children's biography so numerous in school and public libraries. In it Ehlert shares just a few sentences about her life and then describes how she develops ideas into books. Scraps is really an extended, more artwork-filled version of Under My Nose. Since it's being published as a trade book rather than for the institutional market, it will likely catch more attention this time around, so I'm glad to see the revamp.