Otto Blotter arrived in our donation pile because we ordered it. One of us had seen Graham Carter’s screen-print work elsewhere and wanted to know what his picture book would look like. It turned out to look like a screen print.
Carter is a print-maker by training. The colours of Otto Blotter are flat and layered, the birds sit on top of the landscape rather than in it, and the book has the physical texture of something somebody printed through a mesh, one colour at a time, then put together afterwards. Most picture books we send out are soft and painterly. Otto Blotter is not. It looks like a thing somebody made with their hands.
Otto is a boy who wants to spot a rare bird. He spots every other bird. The rare one keeps eluding him. Eventually he finds something much bigger than a rare bird, and we will leave the book to deliver the punchline.
What we like is that Otto Blotter does not look like anything else on the donation pile. A child opening a box of picture books from us gets warm, soft, familiar, familiar, familiar, then Otto Blotter, and they pick it up.
If your Reception has a Lost Words sort of shelf for the books that are beautiful as objects, Otto Blotter belongs there.