As the old Japanese saying goes, "February runs away," and the eventful March is coming in two days. Back in my home country, it is time for peach blossoms also admired on the occasion of the girl's festival, the third of March. I wish we had those delicate pink blossoms in our garden. But instead, we have pretty yellow flowers of mimosa started to open in time for the International Women's Day. Spring is just around the corner. I said "eventful March" not only for my personal matters but also for my city, Bologna. In one week, the 60th edition of Bologna Children's Book Fair will be hosted here. This annual event, as a book fair exclusively dedicated to the market of children's literature, is the word's largest. Although the fair itself is a business-to-business event, there will also be various art, book, and educational side-events in town on this occasion.    It was back in 2019 that I attended the fair for the first time as part of my resear...

Hi there. I am writing this post from Bologna, Italy where we moved back from Japan in the mid-summer.  It has been a great year for my son to get to know his Japanese grandparents, family, and friends he made there.  He is shortly turning two years old, and is more attracted than ever to words. So we have much more fun reading books together.  Every page of the books is filled with images that make him a curious boy. He can't help pointing at them and saying "Oh? Ah?" as if to ask "What's this?" In the beginning,  he was just doing this with illustrations, but now he also recognizes letters (both Japanese and English/Italian alphabets) and numbers, asking me how to pronounce them. And guess what, if I were perhaps half asleep and would answer him with the same words to different images, he would immediately raises his voice and says "Ah! Ah!" to warn me.  Do you remember this Miffy's picture book I previously talked about ? He still loves it a...

Joy of reading:  today I want to start by talking about it. What is it for you? Perhaps it is to gain knowledge, to be opened up to a new world, or to come up with some inspiration. Perhaps, if reading a picture book, it is to please your eyes with beautiful illustrations. These are commonly experienced by reading print and digital books, however, there are many other joys reserved for print books only. For this, I would always favour print books, no matter how much our everyday life is to be digitalised.  For example, I can easily go back and forth between the pages at my own pace; sometimes slowly, some other times quickly jumping from one to the other. Other joys can be materialistic. I like the texture of books bound in fine paper, warm colours printed on them, and smells of ink and paper that become peculiar with age.  And this precious book by Dahlov Ipcar, an American painter and author, gives me such joys of good quality. I found this book at a tiny book...