The Very Hungry Caterpillar again

As you may have already read, we just love The Very Hungry Caterpillar at our house, and it has recently become my sons favourites.  As it was a favourite of mine as a child also, I wrote some thoughts about this book the other day for my class...if you're in my class, you've probably already read this, but here's what I wrote, just in case anyone reading this is not in my class, or happened to miss my post:

"Two of my favourite books when I was very young were 1, 2, 3 to the Zoo and The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle.  I was recently talking about caterpillars with a friend who had some monarch caterpillars who were very hungrily eating her swan plants, and this brought me to look anew at The Very Hungry Caterpillar so that is the book I have chosen to talk about.  My copy is a 1973 reprint, and it has thankfully survived intact through my own and my children’s reading of it.  Carle’s style of collage illustration is unique, and I remember as a child being fascinated by the pages for Monday through to Friday with each one being bigger than the one before, and by the holes, by the way the caterpillar seems to come through the holes, and the same fruit is represented on both sides of each page.  I believe the book still holds the same fascination for children today.  I wonder if it was the first picture book with holes?  There are plenty of them around now, some good, some not so good.  As McCahon (1999) puts it “the picture book market has witnessed an astonishing growth in books with added extras” such as holes, flaps, pull tabs and so on, these are “sometimes worthwhile but too often mere gimmicks.”  I wonder what The Very Hungry Caterpillar would look like if it had been written and illustrated today?  One thing I noticed about my copy is that the pages are matte and the colours are rather dirty (the pages are a bit that way too, but that’s just old age ^_^).  Picture books these days seem to be glossier, and the colours brighter.  I imagine the butterfly would be a pop-up, maybe even with sparkly wings like the fish in Rainbow Fish, by Marcus Pfister.  That might be kind of fun, but certainly an unnecessary gimmick."


Well, turns out I was wrong, they haven't added pop-ups to this wonderful book, they've added sound!!  Oh, please!  Did it need that??  If it ain't broken, people, don't fix it!  Although I was interested to watch Eric Carle reading the book...and I did notice that the pages of his copy (surely a new one) are much glossier than mine, and the colours look a whole lot brighter!