There’s a lovely interview with illustrator Robert Ingpen in The Guardian, about his love of reading and illustrating the classics of children’s literature. He’s working his way through them slowly, one by one, (he’ll meet Helen Oxenbury somewhere in the middle, no doubt – perhaps at The Secret Garden) providing gorgeous interpretations for a new generation of readers. And old readers for that matter – I have a precious signed copy of his Treasure Island:

When blind Pew knocks on Admiral Benbow’s door in Treasure Island it’s ‘the most scary sound in literature,’ he says. ‘It comes as a sound to you by the skill of the writing and the vision of the man. You hear the sound and, if you hear that sound when you’re nine years old and you’ve read it yourself, you’ll read forever’.