All You Can Eat and Other Small Books

Hello, this is Anna Watanabe, co-founder of Do Re Mi Books. All You Can Eat, my debut children’s book, came out this month! All You Can Eat is a tiny, chunky board book packed with 50 pages.

I’ve always liked small board books, but have often been disappointed when they only contain six spreads or less. They’re usually pitched as ‘buggy books’ and have a massive clip attached to them. In my experience, babies are only interested the first couple of times they encounter them. They quickly become just something to gnaw on. 

Those bumper packs of little board books that fit in a small box are a different thing. They seem to have more longevity because they’re fun to take out and put back in the box.

There is a third way I discovered on a trip to Japan when our son was a baby. It was a random book I picked up at a convenience store, sitting alongside bottles of cold green tea and egg sandwiches – a little thing with a surprising number of pages for a board book. It was a food-themed alphabet book featuring a popular Japanese TV character. Each page featured a letter of the Japanese alphabet, a food item starting with that letter, and a cute, strange or funny character based on that food.

My son, who was under a year old, found this book completely absorbing. He’d look through it in the buggy, in the car, or sitting on the floor while I did laundry, sometimes for FIFTEEN or TWENTY minutes at a time – which will be notable to anyone who’s known a baby.

I obviously thought this book was pure magic, so when we started Do Re Mi, All You Can Eat became one of our first projects.

It took me over a year to illustrate this book. Starting up Do Re Mi at the same time had something to do with that. There were many times I lamented my decision to illustrate a 50-page book for my debut. I had to delay the publication twice and considered giving up.

In the above picture you can see how I started out. I painted sheets of paper with gouache, then cut and glued down shapes to form the illustrations. After doing several illustrations (very slowly) this way, I changed my method to scanning the painted sheets and doing the cutting and glueing part in Photoshop. But the main problem was that this book simply had to be as good as the other books we were publishing. It took a lot of doubt and iterating to get it there, but pushing through forced me to level up as an illustrator. I’m glad now I didn’t give up!

When choosing which foods to feature, rather than prioritising foods that babies and toddlers are necessarily fed, I chose to focus on the array of foods they may encounter in their daily lives. For example, a plastic pot of hummus from the supermarket, sushi (these days found on many high streets wherever you are), and the coffee-shop staple, croissants. Food is a part of our culture, and I wanted this book to be a playful way to introduce this to children. Not necessarily a tome on how to eat healthily (there are plenty of those already)!

We quickly decided to make this chunky board book idea into a series, which we named ‘Chock-a-Blocks’. The next Chock-a-Block is called A Plane, a Crane, a Train, and is authored and illustrated by the wonderful Maia Judith. Maia was instrumental in coming up with the concept at the heart of the series – which is that not only are the books catalogues based on a theme, but they also involve some kind of playful narrative element.

In A Plane, a Crane, a Train, every spread features a different vehicle. Depending on which end of the book you start reading from, you follow either Poppy or Oliver as they travel towards each other, riding many different vehicles on the way. They meet in the middle in a friendly embrace.

Maia’s idea was both genius and terrible; terrible because we now have to think of a clever narrative element for each Chock-a-Block we make forevermore! Which is more work for us, but ultimately, totally worth it.

We have two more Chock-a-Blocks coming out next year. We’re hoping that this series will serve as a kind of showcase for up-and-coming illustrators; a mini gallery of palm-sized artworks.

Hope you and the little ones in your life enjoy the Chock-a-Blocks!

All the best,

Anna x