Ongoing inspiration - author-illustrator Roger Duvoisin

Look what I received in the post today!

Front and back cover of Roger Duvoisin's Lonely Veronica pub 1963 -this is the 4th reprint 1974

The text of Lonely Veronica is much longer picture books are supposed to be these days and the story  unusual too.  

How ever did Veronica get lost at the top of a half-finished skyscraper?  

And winched out of a ship - as  the cover shows?  I love how the ship's funnel is just a hint in the bottom corner and how the lines of rigging and net play across the front and back  - and the lettering too!

The first page - 'Veronica's river was do slow and lazy..." 
(Can you see  a happy Veronica  hidden benhind the trees?)

Next spread - "Then one day men came..."It's the end of the world!" cried the hippopotamuses.

But plucky Veronica wants to explore the 'good new days'.  Joe the foreman makes her the machine crew pet and she joins them on a ship to American to work on building and demolishing in New York. 

One day she decides to explore and finds herself in a lift up a half finished skyscraper.

"When dawn awoke Veronica, the city was sunk into deep fog.."

The last spread

Getting down is harder.  She falls and is fed, oddly, by a pigeon called Alexander and finally rescued by Joe again who takes her to live by the old oak tree in his family farm.

All the pictures, in black and white and colour are works of art go add to my long list of Roger Duvoisin's illustrations in my Pintarest list of personal inspiration I put together for the lovely people at Orange Beak Studio 

Lonely Veronica was published by Bodley Head in the UK in 1964, three years after Roger Duvoisin's first book about the strong-minded hippopotamus Veronica,  an old  copy of which has been face out on my shelf for a while.  

Veronica has been republished.   Hum I wonder if Lonely Veronica will be?