By Aleksandra Mizielinska, Daniel Mizielinski
An enormous hand-drawn atlas where every country is a spread crammed with tiny labeled pictures of its animals, foods, buildings, famous people and things nobody else would have thought to include.
Open it at any country and there is one huge hand-drawn map filling both pages, with a hundred small things scattered over it and every one of them labeled. Not photographs. Drawings, done by two people in Warsaw who spent years on it. Peru gets its potatoes and its condor and a man playing panpipes. Norway gets a troll, a stave church and somebody's cheese slicer. Mongolia gets a yurt you could climb into. There is no story and no order. A child lies on the floor with it open and reads the labels for forty minutes, and the fact that it weighs about as much as a paving slab is part of the appeal.
It is the pleasure object of a geography shelf and it earns its place by making a child want to look. The charm is the idiosyncrasy: two illustrators decided by hand what was worth drawing about each place, so the pages are full of oddities and small jokes that a committee would have cut, and children remember oddities. It is the same living-book argument the older titles here make, done in pictures and with no narrator at all. The bulk of it helps too, since a book this size reads as a treat rather than a task, and a child who will not touch a page of prose will spend an hour on Mongolia.