THE CRADLE FABLES STORY

33 Harold Street was a house full of books, and a place where imaginations ran rampant. It was here that Kirsty spent hours as a child reading, turning her favourite stories into backyard games and even staging grand literary performances with her siblings, for their audience of dolls.

Even after growing up, Kirsty always found a way to bring her love of reading into her adult life. She commenced studies in Writing for Children and had settled on attempting to write ‘a whimsical novel for 11 – 13 year old girls’, while working from home as a freelance writer, specialising in business, technical and resume writing. The novel still sits quietly on her hard drive, in waiting.

With the birth of her first nephew, Kirsty and her sisters rushed into their local bookstore and armed themselves with the biggest and brightest picture books they could find. As they sat reading to the baby boy, they quickly realised these books were fine for now, because while the words made no sense to him, he would gurgle with delight at the sound of their voices. Still, they began to have their doubts of his interest in these books as he got a little bit older. Sure enough, by the time he was walking, while he loved looking at the pictures, the stories were too long, too mature. They would have to wait until pre-school.

Back to the bookstore, this time looking for picture books to read to a toddler, all the sisters could find was a small (but truly fabulous) handful of books by Mem Fox, Michael Rosen, Maurice Sendak and Lynley Dodd which took up about 5% of the toddlers’ bookshelf. The rest seemed to be filled with educational books.

These educational books, with pictures of random objects and one simple word “Car”, “Dog”, “Apple”, were fun whilst their nephew was learning to talk, but hardly made for great bedtime reading. While none of them ever got sick of reading their perennial favourites “Where is the Green Sheep” and “We’re Going on a Bear Hunt”, Kirsty and her sisters couldn’t believe there weren’t more like this.

Through her studies, Kirsty had already discovered how difficult it was to get picture books published, and indeed most of the big publishing houses weren’t even accepting picture book manuscripts. Money made from adult novels seemed to speak louder than the joy of reading to children.

With nephew number two having since arrived, and nephew number three on the way, Kirsty was more discouraged than ever. Realising the big publishing houses were unlikely to ever change, Kirsty decided it was time to take matters into her own hands and start the search for, as yet, unpublished manuscripts that she knew would be filling kitchen drawers and hidden under piles of dirty laundry of mums and dads, aunties and uncles, grandparents, baby sitters and frustrated librarians everywhere. All of whom were looking for what she was, “picture books to capture the hearts and imaginations of toddlers … and the grown ups who read to them”.

And this is the very beginning, of the Cradle Fables story.