One of my favourite books when I was a kid, which I know by heart, is Tales from the igloo, by Maurice Metayer, with illustrations by Carmen Andrada (Spanish edition). It’s well kept and safe at my parents’, and every now and then I pick it from the bookshelf and read the text or watch the drawings, because I don’t know which I like more. The tales are eskimo legends, or fables, transmitted orally for generations, during long winter nights with all the people gathered in the igloos. So different and exotic, some of them with strange structures, and sudden endings from which I sometimes had a hard time drawing a conclusion of, full of funny names like Kajortok the red fox. And such beautiful illustrations, I copied them more than once and I think I could draw several of them right now, by heart.
Now that I’ve looked for some image of this book with no success, I value it even more.
Illustration by Agnes Nanogak, image by CCAA
Having all this in mind, I investigated a bit and I was a little puzzled to discover that those illustrations I love so much are not the same as the ones in the English edition. They keep the style though. The original ones are by Agnes Nanogak, a Canadian artist who belonged to the Inuit culture from where the tales come from. I also found out that a second volume was published, More Tales from the Igloo, this time written and illustrated all by herself, and unpublished in Spain – or at least I haven’t found it but at Amazon (here), second hand, very cheap, but…. ooooh! I cannot buy it unless I have it sent to the US. Any ideas?
