Thirteen [Hardcover]

A book of creative metamorphosis and stunning visuals that will bend children's imaginations and appeal to all ages. One of my own personal childhood favorites... --Brian Selznick

Thirteen is no ordinary picture book. It is book of visual and conceptual revolutions, metamorphoses, and narratives that swallow their own tails. In thirteen illustrated stories, plus a preview of coming attractions, nothing less than the birth of the world, its duration, death, and rebirth occurs, in thirteen arresting and evolving tableaus, involving a sinking ship, a play, a leaf and caterpillar, a card trick, swans, a worm, Cinderella, the alphabet, paper magic, pyramids, a getting-thin-and-getting-fat-again dance, the fall and rise of civilization, and a countdown. This is not a book you read from beginning to end, so much as one you enter into, are absorbed by and transformed, like the thirteen tableaus themselves. Fortunately, Remy Charlip and Jerry Joyner's classic book Thirteen is finally back in print! Thirteen stories, thirteen spreads, endless surprises. One of my own personal childhood favorites, Thirteen is a love letter to book-making, a valentine to the art of the page-turn, an experimental vision of what picture books can do. It's a treasure chest of ideas, wit, suspense, surprise and joy. Even if you've been everywhere, and seen everything, you've never experienced anything quite like this before! —Brian Selznick, author of The Invention of Hugo Cabret

Absolute visual magic...Charlip and Joyner have a winner here. --Milton Glaser,The New York Times

This is the sort of picture book that a person might leaf through quickly and dismissively and then, caught by a stray curiosity, begin to study, flipping a page back and forth to see how the images morph and evolve and then turning forward (and back again) with dawning fascination. Mesmerizing anlc