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Could you have thought that it was Charles Lindbergh who was the first to fly across the Atlantic, when he flew the Spirit of St. Louis from New York to Paris in thirty-three hours in 1927? Of course, no. There was a little mouse in Hamburg! He found that all the mice were disappearing in his city because humans had placed rat traps everywhere. The mice began to flee to America, but when our little mouse went down into port, deadly cats were patrolling outside of American ships.
What to do? The mouse saw bats, that is, mice with wings. Then he had an idea: it should be possible to use engineering to build mechanical wings. He went home and began to sketch an invention. But when he started testing his planes, of course, a lot of problems arose, and not just mechanical. The great owls began to look lustfully at the little mouse in the air, a delicious morsel.
It’s hard to do Today’s adventure books that give the same feel as old children’s books – where skill, courage, perseverance and ingenuity become a way to cope with great dangers.
But Torben Kuhlman’s beautiful picture books, extraordinarily well thought out, are like old adventure books, with the same optimistic joy of discovering the whole world.
“Lindbergh” by Torben Kuhlmann.
Photo: Lilla Piratförlaget
“Lindbergh” is his first book, originally a thesis at the HAW University of Hamburg in 2012, where he managed to combine his love for the history of science with great picture book art. One would have thought that it would be more of an unfinished first work than “Armstrong” (2017) and “Edison” (2019), but nothing could be further from the truth.
It’s a tale about the mouse making Lindbergh’s flight the other way, from Hamburg to New York, but based on historical knowledge that also gets an extra space at the end of the book. “Lindbergh” is a brilliant story, exciting to the end. The action item is not primarily the flight of the Atlantic, but all the mouse tribulations before it came up with a functional construct.
These are not books for the normal age of a picture book, but for a slightly older child. The text is relatively concise, while the images are excessively rich, sepia-toned, imaginative, and yet strangely realistic. Torben Kuhlmann alternates with apparent ease between large, full-length watercolors, precisely reproduced gear-drawn sketches, and small series of images throughout events that increase the pace of the story.
Make the most of the possibilities of the picture book medium by constantly changing the perspective and changing the lighting of the pictures. And of course, the book itself is a work of art too, carefully crafted to look like an old worn leather-bound volume. A full-fledged experience that combines art, imagination and historical facts.
Read more about children’s books and more from Lotta Olsson
