Celebrating the art of children’s book illustration, with brief texts and pictures from illustrators all over the world, this appealing book honours the work of the International Board on Books for Young People by donating 15% of the proceeds from its sales to IBBY. Many of the 33 illustrators included have won the IBBY Hans Christian Andersen Award for picture book illustration and are familiar to Canadian readers. The chance to discover less familiar artists, however – such as Nasrin Khosravi of Iran, Isol of Argentina, or Pulak Biswas of India – makes this collection a particular treasure.

The illustrators, who have donated their work, each have a double page including both their illustration and a short piece of text (written either by them or another author), or a traditional verse or saying. Since each text is only a few lines long, nonsense and descriptive verses dominate. Original texts in a language other than English are included, followed by a translation by Canadian poet and editor Stan Dragland. The beauty of the calligraphy in Japanese, Hebrew, and other scripts adds to the visual and cultural appeal of the book, while hand-printed texts by such illustrators as Quentin Blake are an essential element of the illustration. Phillipe Dumas of France suggests the cultural openness of the European Union by not only printing and illustrating an English text by Lewis Carroll but also including a rattlesnake posing a question in Greek!

Because of the diversity of the subject matter, moods, and styles of the work included, Under the Spell of the Moon is perhaps better used as a resource to dip into rather than absorb all at once. Ranging from highly abstract to romantic to surrealist, the pictures vary in appeal. Canadians may rejoice, however, that the submission of Montrealer Marie-Louise Gay is outstanding in its humorous charm.