posted on 13 Apr 2017

The Brave Little Tailor by The Brothers Grimm illustrated by Sergei Goloshapov

North-South is a unique little publishing house with its origins in Middle-Europe during the 1960s. Operating from Switzerland and called NordSud, their mission was to publish multicultural books by authors and illustrators from as many countries as possible. The company was transformed in the late Seventies and early Eighties when the founders son, Davy Sidjanski, purchased the company and took it off to the USA. A distribution deal with Henry Holt & Co. and a change of name to North-South saw the books becoming an influential player in the children’s book market.

The company has clung on despite some rocky financial moments – solved by a purchase of the firm by a group of Swiss-German investors – and they continue to publish under the North-South name. However, for me at least, the extraordinary and daring books they produced in the Eighties and Nineties represent the high-water mark of their output to date.

This book and its illustrations are a perfect example of what they were capable of getting to the market. The Grimm story of the tailor with a rather inflated sense of his own capabilities and his rise to unlikely power is possibly the least interesting element of the book. Much more noteworthy is the is genuinely arresting design - an upright half folio  - that takes you by surprise and which makes the book stand out on the shelf. It’s a remarkably tactile format and really enjoyable to hold and read. But even more impressive is the choice of Sergei Goloshapov to do the illustrations.

Born in Moscow, Goloshapov began to make a name for himself as a precocious artist even before he graduated from the Moscow Polygraph Institute. In addition to his illustrations he works in oils, etching and paper engineering and he has been extraordinarily prolific. He moved to the USA in 1991 to work for North-South and in 1996 he won a series of awards for this book and a companion volume, Six Servants, another Grimm tale.

It’s easy to see why. The colours are saturated and truly breath-taking and his characters are as fantastically eccentric as the original story. Here we have grotesques of all kinds – square and solid men and monsters with lantern-jaws and disproportionate heads. The animals that decorate the picture edges are also menacing and only half recognisable – disturbing your equilibrium as you catch them out of the corners of your eye. There are full page and half page drawings  throughout and you’ll be buying a work of art rather than a book if you buy a copy of this.

I think these fabulous books are massively undervalued at the moment and if you want to buy something that’s not only fabulous to read and handle but something you’ll want to pass on to the next generation, this is what you should be trying to find.

Copies can be found on the second-hand market and a 1997 first UK edition will cost you about a tenner – not bad for an heirloom.

Terry Potter

April 2017