Summary of the impact

This case study reports impact on the publishing industry achieved through:

• International sales of authored and co-authored books, regarded as the key texts on the subject.
• Keynote contributions to the major industry-based children's publishing conferences (Bologna, Seoul, London, Paris, Valladolid).
• Invited membership of international awards juries for picturebook illustration (Bologna, Seoul), influencing/shaping trends in picturebook design.

Impact on the wider community/public awareness of picturebook-making is achieved through:

• Invited media appearances including three-part BBC TV series, Picture Book, 30-minute interview on NPL Radio USA (15m listeners), BBC Radio 4, and Newstalk Radio Ireland.
• Book sales.

Impact on subject within HE worldwide:

• Authorship of key-texts: Salisbury's texts have been in Amazon top twenty bestseller lists for Illustration for over ten years.

Underpinning research

Professor Martin Salisbury has been a lecturer at Anglia Ruskin since 1988, becoming Reader in 2007, and Professor in 2011. Salisbury's research focuses on the children's picturebook as a unique, constantly evolving, multimodal form of communication that employs complex interplays between word and image to deliver meaning. In particular, it examines the subject from the perspective of the practitioner/maker and the process of creating or composing (as a newly emerging area of research, language and terminology are also evolving). Interest in and research into children's literature and children's book illustration has expanded in recent years but academic research has come primarily from fields outside of Art & Design, e.g. Literature and Education and has tended to focus on the finished artefact and its use in the classroom. The complex process of creating and designing that underpins the picturebook has hitherto received little attention. Salisbury invited Professor Morag Styles of the University of Cambridge, Faculty of Education (a long-standing collaborator) to contribute as co-author to Children's Picturebooks: The Art of Visual Storytelling. The aim of this collaboration was to bring these two areas of research closer together: practice and theory.

Salisbury's work is informed by a background in professional practice as an illustrator as well as by a longstanding interest in the history and theory of the subject. He sees research, teaching, and applied commercial / industrial practice as closely linked and mutually interdependent. His ideas feed directly into and are informed by both teaching and writing about process for publication. The research sheds light on these processes by examining the practical, artistic and structural methods that are used by artists to develop and realise picturebook concepts. He interviews numerous picturebook makers from around the world, some internationally celebrated, some at early career stage. He proposes that increasingly, picturebooks are created by one `maker', due to often complex and ironic word- image counterpoint that requires total creative control.

In his chapter, `The Artist and the Postmodern Picturebook' in Postmodern Picturebooks: Play, Parody and Self-referentiality, Salisbury is, as is frequently the case, the sole practitioner among the many international academics invited to contribute. He writes about the extent to which the artist is consciously exploiting postmodern techniques in this context and discusses the paradox of a disparity between the emergence of theory and the importance of intuitive creative expression in making itself. In Children's Picturebooks: The Art of Visual Storytelling, Salisbury and Styles explore a range of aspects of the new hybrid phenomenon of the picturebook. These include chapters on its history and evolution, the relationship between the mass-market picturebook and the livre d'artiste, the picturebook and the child, word-image synergies, the influence of reprographic technologies on the form and a final chapter on the global picturebook industry. Linked to this is Salisbury's contribution to a chapter on British picturebooks in the volume Bologna: Fifty Years of Children's Books, Bononia University Press (2013) which, as a volume, charted the current territory of children's books worldwide. A similar text, though focussing on new trends, was published in the Bibliotèque Nationale de France (2013). In 2008, Salisbury was one of a number of illustrators, writers, academics and celebrities who appeared throughout the three-part BBC television series, Picture Book. As well as appearing to speak about the work of various leading artists, past and present, Salisbury worked with the production team on researching the series, meeting with them to plan the content of the programmes.

References to the research

Details of the impact

Salisbury's work has achieved impact at national and international level through his publications in numerous languages and his activities as a commentator, International Jury member and invited speaker/broadcaster at events and media outlets around the world. Cultural and industrial impact can be gauged or estimated, if not accurately measured, through book sales, `footfall' and audience figures, for example.

Salisbury's authored books, for example Play Pen: New Children's Book Illustration (referenced above), and Illustrating Children's Books (A&C Black, 2004), have been translated into at least nine languages and reprinted frequently, the latter most recently in 2012, having sold tens of thousands of copies worldwide and become a standard text in Illustration programmes. It has remained consistently in the top 20 Amazon bestseller lists for Illustration. This trend has continued with Children's Picturebooks, explored further below. The international success of these publications has led to Salisbury being in great demand to write and speak about this highly specialised and increasingly recognised art form. His work has impacted on the children's publishing industry, the Higher Education sector and the public at large, as outlined below.

The three-part BBC television series, Picture Book (2008), on which Salisbury appeared to discuss and illuminate the processes of making picturebooks, has impacted upon public and industry consciousness of the history and culture of the picturebook.

Salisbury has been closely involved with the Bologna Children's Book Fair (the international trade fair for the children's publishing industry) for a number of years. Having been a member of the international jury for the Ragazzi publishing award in 2007, he was invited as jury member for the 2010 Bologna Illustration Competition and Annual. In 2009, he was an invited member of the awards jury for the inaugural CJ Picturebook Festival in Seoul, South Korea. These awards impact significantly on sales figures and foreign language co-editioning of picturebooks. In 2011, Salisbury was the keynote speaker at the Tools of Change in Publishing (TOC) conference at the Fair, speaking to an audience of publishers on the conference theme of digital publishing / picturebook `apps', thereby directly impacting thinking within the industry.

Salisbury was invited as a special guest of the Fiftieth Bologna Children's Book Fair in 2013 and, along with leading international commentators and academics in the field of children's literature, invited to contribute a chapter to the Anniversary Book, published in association with the University of Bologna. This book, comprehensively reviewing trends in children's publishing over the last fifty years, is distributed to all 1200 publishers at the fair as well as being on general sale.

Salisbury was also invited as a special guest of the Montreuil, Paris Children's Book Fair in 2012 to join an international panel to design a new competition titled `A Picturebook for Tomorrow'. The competition aims to encourage new talent and new ideas in a rapidly evolving children's publishing arena, thereby impacting once again on trends in the field. In 2009, he was invited keynote speaker and workshop leader at the Itabashi Art Museum in Tokyo, accompanying the touring Bologna Illustration Exhibition. In 2011 he was the invited speaker at the annual conference of the UK's largest independent children's book publisher, Walker Books.

Children's Picturebooks: The Art of Visual Storytelling, by Salisbury and Styles, in the first year of publication had achieved international sales of 11,000 copies in the UK, USA, Spanish speaking countries and South Korea. A September 2013 update on figures adds a further 4,372 sales across USA, UK and now Portugal. The book will be published in mainland China later in 2013. The book has been favourably reviewed in numerous international publications including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and The San Diego Union Tribune. Salisbury was interviewed about the book on US National Public Radio. The international sales of, and attention on, this book can be clearly seen to impact on public and industry understanding of the art of the picturebook and to bring a new cross-border, cross-discipline understanding of the subject. The book received the biannual Academic Book Award for 2013 from the UKLA (UK Literacy Association). Selected from a final shortlist of nine, the book was described as "unique, distinctive, stunning, inspirational" by the judging panel.

Sources to corroborate the impact

* `The genius behind simplicity' (Children's Picturebooks: The Art of Visual Storytelling)
Review of Children's Picturebooks by Jerry Griswold (Professor of Literature, San Diego State University, Professor Emeritus, University of Connecticut) — San Diego Union Tribune, April 2012 http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2012/apr/28/the-genius-behind-simplicity/

* `The Artistry of Children's Picturebooks Revealed' (Children's Picturebooks: The Art of Visual Storytelling)
National Public Radio, USA
A summary of the radio interview with Martin Salisbury, April 2012
http://www.npr.org/2012/04/23/151053393/the-artistry-of-childrens-picturebooks-revealed

* `11 Gorgeous Children's Book Illustrations' (Children's Picturebooks: The Art of Visual Storytelling)
Review in Huffington Post, September 3, 2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/martin-salisbury/childrens-book-illustrations_b_1316345.html

* `Pattern Recognition' (Children's Picturebooks: The Art of Visual Storytelling)
Review by Steven Heller, New York Times, February 24, 2012
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/books/review/new-books-about-textile-design.html?pagewanted=2

* `Roaming With the Wild Things' (Children's Picturebooks: The Art of Visual Storytelling) Review in Wall Street Journal, January 21, 2012
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204555904577166942797312120.html

* `Children's Picturebooks: The Art of Visual Storytelling' (Children's Picturebooks: The Art of Visual Storytelling)
Reviewed by Valerie Coghlan (Editor's Choice) in INIS: The Children's Books Ireland Magazine http://www.inismagazine.ie/reviews/book/childrens-picturebooks-the-art-of-visual-storytelling

* `Postmodern Picturebooks: Play, Parody and Self-Referentiality' (Postmodern Picturebooks: Play, Parody and Self-Referentiality)
Reviewed in Children's Literature Association Quarterly, Volume 34, Number 1, Spring 2009 http://muse.jhu.edu/ligin?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/childrens_literature association_quaterly/v034/34.1.lewis.pdf

* UKLA Academic Book Award (awarded to Children's Picturebooks: The Art of Visual Storytelling)
http://www.ukla.org/awards/ukla_academic_book_award_-1/