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Classics for babies: Board books introduce Shakespeare and Tolstoy to young readers

Most people would not consider “Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn and cauldron bubble” to be a nursery rhyme. But Utah children’s author Jennifer Adams does.

Adams and illustrator Alison Oliver have used the witches’ opening couplet from “Macbeth” as the focus of the latest in their series of BabyLit books — board books that introduce classic literature to readers between zero and 3 years old.

spoke with Adams and Oliver, who have been creating such books since 2011, starting with a counting primer inspired by Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice.” Toddlers could learn their numbers through items from Austen’s world: one English village, three houses, five sisters and 10,000 pounds a year, plus ball gowns, horses and soldiers.

“Pride and Prejudice” was followed by more Austen, Adams said. “‘Pride and Prejudice’ was counting, ‘Sense and Sensibility’ was opposites obviously from the title, ‘Emma’ was emotions,” she said. “So, I knew I wanted ‘Persuasion’ to be colors, because I wanted those to be like a little set of all the Jane Austen ones and to have a different primer for each one.”

Since then, they have produced 36 BabyLit titles, published by Utah-based , that have sold more than 2.5 million copies.

On July 8, the two newest books in the series — the “Macbeth” book, and a book of opposites inspired by Leo Tolstoy’s Russian novel “War and Peace” — were released.

Creating a book takes about four months, Adams said. Sometimes, the author said, themes come easy, but the rest of the work is more demanding. Both Adams and Oliver read or reread the books — an important step, they said, for understanding the story and finding the perfect theme.

For the “War and Peace” book, Adams said she tried to incorporate meaningful quotes that connect the story, its characters and the opposites she decided to use. She chose 10 short quotes, out of a novel that runs about 1,400 pages.

When Adams adapted “Anna Karenina,” she said Tolstoy’s descriptions of clothes helped her choose the direction of that book, which became a fashion primer.

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Chris Samuels // The Salt Lake Tribune

Choosing the right classic

The process of choosing a literary work to adapt comes with a lot of research and preparation, Adams said.

For starters, the book has to be in the public domain. For example, she and Oliver released “The Great Gatsby: A Party Primer” in March, marking the 100th anniversary of the publication of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel — four years after it entered the public domain.

She said she uses a library of free e-books, because searches are faster in an electronic format. She consults lists of classic books and checks what books have been adapted into movies.

“We started early on picking things that have passed into pop culture,” Adams said. “There’s a Jane Austen action figure, there’s a Charles Dickens action figure. ... We try to pick the ones that the general public would know and love.”

Adams created an animal primer based on Rudyard Kipling’s “The Jungle Book,” first published in 1894 — and more familiar to audiences for the 1967 Walt Disney animated movie.

In Adams’ writing studio, a beady-eyed brown papier-mache bear — a gift from a friend — sits in a corner, an uncanny resemblance to Oliver’s illustration of Baloo. It sits in the opposite corner from a gift from her mother: Don Quixote, in full armor.

The witches’ potion, explained

In “Macbeth: A Potions Primer,” the verses from the witches’ poem are framed in parallel lines, with the text on the left-hand page and Oliver’s illustrations of bubbling cauldrons, witches, snakes, frogs and owls on the right.

Adams said she learned a few years ago that the famous ingredients in the cauldron — eye of newt, toe of frog, tongue of dog — are actually herbs and plants.

“I thought that that’s so fun and playful,” Adams said. “Everyone knows the witches’ ‘Double, double toil and trouble’ — it’s in ‘Harry Potter.’ It’s a very familiar part of the play. I was, like, ‘That would make a really fun … Halloween book for kids.”

The potion primer’s last two pages include the names of the herbs, plants and flowers used in the potion recipe, with accompanying illustrations by Oliver. “Eye of newt” is actually mustard seed, “lizard’s leg” is ivy leaves, and “wool of bat,” is a type of moss that grows in dark wooded areas where bats live.

Unique circumstances, unexpected success

Though “Macbeth” required much research, Adams said “War and Peace” is the longest and most challenging book she and Oliver have done.

Adams compressed Tolstoy’s famously long novel into 10 pairs of opposites — including hot and cold, far and near, dirty and clean — and coupled them with a relevant quote on the page ahead of each. Then Oliver completed the drawings in less than three months.

“War and Peace,” Oliver said, was a last-minute replacement for another book they were working on, and the publisher “decided they wanted to put it with ‘Macbeth’ and have them come out together. ... Not only we did twice as many pages, but I had less time than I usually have.”

Adams said she and Oliver work more closely than most writer-illustrator pairs.

Illustrating a children’s book, Oliver said, is more than just drawing. She said she spends a lot of time researching the clothing, the architecture, even the china for the period to capture the atmosphere of each literary work they adapt.

“Then I start putting together reference materials and color palettes and ideas about typography,” Oliver said. “It’s important that the series feels like a series, that they are recognizable as being related to each other, but each one needs to be unique as well, because the stories are so different.”

Oliver said Adams always makes smart choices and understands literature and writing. This, Oliver added, makes their work smoother.

“We have a very good partnership on this series, which is great,” Oliver said. “I can kind of get her thoughts about how she feels about the book — why she picked that type of primer, how she wants the audience to relate to the book — which is really helpful to me.”

Adams grew up in Salt Lake City, in a family where classics were a daily norm. Her mother was an editing teacher at Brigham Young University, and her father taught history and psychology at Skyline High School.

Adams said that her love of the classics was inspired by watching old movies with her father, attending the Utah Shakespeare Festival with her mother and being exposed to books. All that made her look at classic books as “super familiar and positive,” she said, something that she wants to pass forward to her young audience.

“If you can introduce these characters, these titles, to a baby — where they feel like they have good associations with them, that they belong to them — when they come across the real novels as a teenager or an adult, they have a positive association,” Adams said. “ ... So hopefully, it just brings that literacy by making it theirs and making it fun when they are babies.”

Adams said she hopes younger generations will read more classics, and her books will pass the test of time — that teens who were babies in 2011, when her first BabyLit book was published, will grow up in a few years and give the book to their kids.

When the series started in 2011, Adams thought it would last through four titles. The popularity of the series, 36 books later, is a “lovely surprise,” she said.

Oliver added, “the relationship that the kids and their parents have to this series is very important to us.”

And even though “Macbeth” and “War and Peace” have been on store shelves for nearly a month, Adams said she’s already working on a BabyLit version of Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden,” to be published next spring.

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