Animals Spell Love

by David Cundy, David Cundy (Illustrator)

Overview

Animals joyously spell out the word “love” in languages from around the world. From Czech to Korean to American Sign Language, here are sixteen ways to say “love” in this ingeniously, and gorgeously, designed and illustrated picture book.
Children and adults will delight in the way Cundy shapes the letters from and with animals. The Amharic word that makes a cheetah's face, the ladybugs made from the French word “l’amour,” the Japanese koy catching a valentine — open your world to all these ways to say “love” (pronunciations included).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781567925869
Publisher:	David R. Godine, Publisher
Publication date:	11/10/2016
Pages:	40
Product dimensions:	8.10(w) x 10.50(h) x 0.60(d)
Age Range:	7 - 12 Years

About the Author

David Cundy wrote his debut children’s book, Animals Spell Love, following a long career in the graphic arts. David has designed type at Linotype in New York and with the renowned type designer Matthew Carter in London. His graphic design firm, Design Trust, has created graphics for many organizations, including the Brooklyn Museum, Columbia University, and the Parsons School of Design. David has served on the board of directors of the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Graphic Arts and has taught in Yale’s graduate graphic design program.

Editorial Reviews

10/31/2016
Graphic designer Cundy shows readers how to say "I love you" in 14 languages while using the letters in the word love to create animals and scenes. In the opening spread, the letters in the Spanish word amor form two foxes: a capital M becomes a convincing pair of forelegs for the animal, and overlapping cursive As are shaped into its bushy orange tail. Brief text passages include phonetic pronunciations and seek-and-find suggestions for readers ("Do you see the heart in the leopard's face?"). Cundy doesn't entirely sustain the visual premise suggested by the title (the Hindi word for lovely appears as a giant tree for a dozen monkeys made from @ symbols), but it's still an impressive demonstration of text as art. Ages 8–12. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

2016-11-06
A series of fanciful animal portraits, constructed using only the letters or signs for "Love" or "I love you" in 16 languages (or 18, depending how you count).Style definitively trumps legibility here, whether the sentiment is expressed in English or Amharic, Thai, or American Sign Language. Even for the nine tongues that use non-Roman scripts, Cundy, a veteran typographer, chooses multiple typefaces and throws in so many swashes and dingbats that the animals are rarely recognizable and the words composing their bodies thoroughly disguised. Fortunately for readers, he identifies all of the creatures, scenarios, and languages in his accompanying narratives. Unfortunately, he also adds sometimes-daunting challenges, such as finding a tiny heart placed amid thousands of spiral ornaments on the Hebrew page or counting the hundreds of "Love letters" that make up the ornate flowers he assembles for English. Also unfortunately, his pronunciation guidelines are idiosyncratic—the umlaut in the Swedish "älskar" is rendered as a glottal stop following the pronoun "Jag," for instance, while the short "a" in the French "L'amour" is given as is, but the same sound in the Italian "Amore" is "Ah." Between a pretty if perfunctory world map that doubles as index and a complete tally of typefaces and ornaments, he concludes "Any way you say it, ‘I love you' means the same thing to everyone!" The sentiment is true even when obscured, as here, by ostentatious graphic design. (Picture book. 6-8)

Kirkus Reviews