Mam oko na litery
English title: I Have an Eye on Letters
Publisher: Wydawnictwo Dwie Siostry
Warsaw 2012
Dimensions: 23 × 15 cm
Board Book: 22 p.
ISBN: 978-83-653-4110-5
Part of the World of Mamoko series.
If you want to learn about the process of making books in this series go to Welcome to Mamoko (first book in the MBU – Mamoko Book Universe 😉).
What a crowd! Pages are crawling with characters and objects! Can you name them? Which of them has a name that begins with the letter pictured in the upper corner of the page? Will you manage to find them all? The number indicated under the letter may help you. You can also try searching for their names in foreign languages!
After finishing “Mamoko 3000” we decided that it would be the last part of the story based Mamoko books, but we had an idea for books with a different mechanic. The style and already established characters of Mamoko were a perfect match for both “Mam oko na liczby” and “Mam oko na litery”.
The idea for this book started with just a very simple sketch (see below). I think this was the only image we presented to our publisher Dwie Siostry.
After they green lighted the project we needed a lists of words. Fortunately thanks to work we put into Ba Ba Dum we had a database full of words that could be easily illustrated and were already translated into 25 languages.
Why would we need words in other languages? To make this book fun it had to be filled with different objects that didn’t start with a given letter. But foreign names of those background object could start on a specific letter. This simple trick would enable possible future translations.
For example: when you look at the spread above (with “R” and “S”), you will see a “saw” on the bottom left side of the image. The image above shows a photo from Polish edition, so “saw” doesn’t count to a total of 40 words that begin on a letter “S” because in Polish language this object is called “piła”. But if a publisher from an English speaking country would like to publish this book, we would have to change just the numbers below the letters.
While drawing each spread, we also marked what words from which languages were used and at the end we had lists for 6 languages. The numbers on each page were printed just in a process black colour so we could even print this project as a co-edition (this makes a production much cheaper because the CMY – or CMYK if you print numbers as a fifth colour – is common for all languages).
Foreign editions
Chinese Simplified, 从A读到Z-Mamoko妈妈看!-低幼认知版, Ronshin Group, 2018, ISBN: 978-7-5417-6509-4
Swedish, Leta och Räkna Bokstäver, Alfabeta, 2016, ISBN: 978-91-501-1779-0
German, Alles im Blick Buchstaben, Moritz Verlag, 2015, ISBN: 978-3-89565-397-4
You can find a Google Sheet with a list of all our foreign editions here.
