Table of Contents
Graham Oakley
…is an English children's book author and illustrator best known for his Church Mice stories, which are treasured for their droll, understated stories and incredibly detailed pictures (which generally put a different spin on what the text says is going on). He's also done a cute series about the Foxbury Force (Fox policemen), Hetty and Harriet - a poultry odyssey, a fascinating wordless flip-the-pages book called Graham Oakley's Magical Changes (republished as 512 in France and Canada), and illustrated lots of books for other people - including Is Your Cat Too Fat?, a book on cat nutrition. (His cat pictures are particularly wonderful - they have real “catty” expressions.)
News!
The Church Mouse, first book of the Church Mice series, was re-released as a quality hardcover in the Modern Classics series by Templar in 2008; a paperback version is also available.
The hardcover features beautiful heavy cream paper, a dust jacket over plain red cloth, and patterned yellow endpapers - the pattern is subtly repeated in the jacket. The printing quality is nice and crisp - much better than the early reprints (the plates were redone for the 90s prints). The only thing that it lacks to make it quite perfect is the cute 'The End' cartoons which the originals had.
It looks like others in the series are also going to come out again in 2010.
In other news, I've confirmed that the Graham Oakley who has recently been publishing children's board books through Tide Mill Press is not the same person as the Church Mice author.
Bibliography
Chronological listings of books he's written and/or illustrated.
Buying or Collecting Graham Oakley
Some things you could pick up via Amazon.co.uk:
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