We are delighted to welcome Mini Grey to the blog to discuss her hugely exciting and ambitious new picture book The Greatest Show On Earth.  Mini is a multi award winning author and illustrator.  Biscuit Boy won the Smarties Book Prize, Traction Man is Here won the Boston Globe Horn Book Award, and The Adventures of the Dish and the Spoon won the Kate Greenaway Medal.  You can find out more about Mini by visiting her website.

Please can you introduce us to ‘The Greatest Show on Earth’?  

It’s the entire 4.6 billion year story of life on Earth, brought to you in the form of a performance by Rod the Roach and his insect Troupe in a Shoebox Theatre.

[See photo one in picture gallery]

What was the reaction from your agent and/or publisher to such an unusual and big book idea?

 The idea for the Greatest Show actually began around 10 years ago, and to begin with the book was small and very long! It was a little zigzag book that pulled out into a 4.6 billion year tape measure (which was on the back.) The lovely people at Penguin tried to find a way to publish it, but the zigzag format was difficult, and the little pages didn’t do justice to the story that Rod was trying to tell. For some years it drifted around, in search of the right format. And then I realised it could be a big book, rather than a little one, with space to delve into Earth’s story, and my editors Joe Marriott and Emily Lunn at Puffin decided we could make this happen!

You say the idea for ‘The Greatest Show on Earth’ started with a trip to the Oxford Natural History Museum, can you explain how the idea grew?

When my son Herbie was about 5 years old, we spent a lot of time hanging out in the Oxford Museum of Natural History. Gazing at the dinosaur skeletons, I realised there were enormous gaps in my knowledge of prehistoric life, and I didn’t even know how old the Earth actually is. Well, it’s 4.6 billions years old – and I just wanted to see what all that time looked like, and hold it in my hands. Later, when Herbie was at primary school, they would do projects on the Ancient Greeks, the Egyptians; how did those timelines fit with the dinosaurs? Could it be possible to tell the whole history of Earth as a story? We humans are uniquely good at absorbing information through stories. Before writing, story was how information was passed down generations. Stories are memorable. Story makes us want to know what happens, makes us pay attention. It seizes our imaginations and curiosity.

[See Photo Two in Picture Gallery]

Could this be a first story-scaffold to hang subsequent knowledge about life on Earth upon? I think once you have a mental framework you start to collect new knowledge, and you see things that could be added to your scaffold everywhere – you see more, just in your ordinary everyday world.

[See Photo Three in Picture Gallery]

There’s a wonderful sense of drama and theatricality in the presentation of the book; how did the idea for this develop as the central conceit for the book?

I have a mild obsession with toy theatres, and at one point long ago I worked as a theatre designer. Making a picture book is a bit like making a theatre performance: – both in how you make them, but also how you perform them (every reading is a new performance). But also the theatre was the answer to how to present my story – especially the Victorian-style Pollocks toy cardboard theatre. Modelling my book page on a Victorian theatre meant that I could organise the information into areas. The main stage is where you look first, to see at a glance THE MAIN STORY. But then to be able to delve deeper in, if you want to, you can peruse the wings and also see what's going on down at the Tape Measure of Time.

[See Photo Four and Five in Picture Gallery]

How much research was involved with the book and did you have any support with that?

When I’m making picture books, sometimes I am creating artwork, and have worked out most of the story-telling and the layouts. At these times the listening-and-words part of my brain is at liberty to listen to things – in fact sometimes I really NEED to listen to things to keep on persisting at making pictures. I developed a massive thirst for all online lectures, podcasts, radio broadcasts– about things prehistoric. (In Our time on Radio 4 has brilliant prehistoric broadcasts in its archive!) So I had an overview of what my ‘scenes’ could be. I took a copy of Richard Fortey’s LIFE – An Unauthorised Biography on holiday & scribbled on it. Making the final storyboard – I had to be sure I was telling the right story. But places to find information are infinite, it wouldn’t be possible to read up everything there is to know. I ended up with a shortlist of my go-to books: about 5 books for adults, and also about three go-to children’s illustrated information books. And lots and lots of Wikipedia. At the next stage, when I thought I’d worked out what to say: a few friendly expert fact checker professors helped, and another level of Puffin in-house fact checkers. But you can never get everything right and the science changes, as we see deeper in, as it should.

Were there any facts which particularly surprised and stuck with you?

[See Photo Six in Picture Gallery]

So many! It’s amazing and terrifying that life on Earth has been REALLY close to being snuffed out (the worst: 251 MYA). How the Earth has often been a TERRIBLE place to live in the past – (possibly even trying to get rid of life, you could suspect…) There have been huge volcanic lava outpourings, there have been tremendous freezes, there have been times when the ocean became anoxic and hostile to life. There’s also just how extremely bizarre animals of even not so long ago are: for example, the chalicotherium was an unholy mammal mash-up of a horse and a gorilla – it just looks all wrong! There is the almost accidental way one animal group takes over from another after a mass extinction: mammal-relatives (therapsids) were poised to dominate Earth 270 million years ago, but it was ultimately dinosaurs who kept the mammals small and in the shadows until that fateful asteroid impact 66 million years ago. But also dizzying is the incredible recentness of humans, and the extremely nice climate we happen to find ourselves in (compared to a lot of the past), and that our happy Holocene times (the last 10,000 years), on my tape measure of time, is just the last one-tenth of the last millimetre.

[See Photo Seven in Picture Gallery]

It’s a huge and very exciting topic, do you think picture books are a useful means for explaining big and complex ideas and if so what helps with that?

The secret power of picture books – is to tell with pictures as well as words, and pictures can tell big and complex ideas. But actually they show, not tell! I hope with very visual pages, picture books can reach ‘reluctant readers’ and also children excited by prehistoric content, who have a thirst for science. I think giving children big numbers, long names, the actual facts – is something they can handle. Picture books can make things visible and tangible.

Can you tell us a bit about your technique for creating the book and the media you used?  

When I was making the pages, I was building each scene as if it was a theatre set, with actors, scenery and backdrops in layers. I’d work out the layouts with loads of layers of tracing paper cut-outs that I could move around. I’d make artwork for all my actors and scenery pieces separately, and then layer them up in Photoshop in my theatre page framework. The fun challenge was inventing what sort of puppetry Rod & Co might be using; there was quite a thrill in making insects manipulate giant puppet insects (in the Carboniferous era). I was also trying to hide jokes maybe for grown ups: eg in the Cambrian explosion page, Brunhilda (beetle) and Edna (earwig) are trying to work out which way up a creature goes: that creature is Hallucigenia. When it was discovered in the Burgess Shale, it was so odd-looking that palaeontologists couldn’t work out which appendages it walked on, and which were (maybe) for defence, and its name reflected its very mind-bending puzzlingness.

[See Photo Eight and Nine in Picture Gallery]

The tape measure is a clever way to create a time, what was involved in mapping events across such a huge span of time?

[See Photo Ten in Picture Gallery]

There were massive problems with mapping the entire 4.6 billion years. For the first 4 billion years, there’s no complex animal life. But on my scale of 1 million years to 1 centimetre, this bit would be 40 metres long – right down the street! But very luckily, after the dawning of complex animal life, about 600 million years ago, time becomes more mappable. The International Stratigraphy Chart was invaluable! I discovered a lot of geological time periods last about 50 million years. (There’s usually some sort of extinction event that differentiates the rock layers of different geological periods.) This was incredibly useful and lucky, because my open book was going to be about 50cm wide – so each spread I’d have 50 million years of timeline to play with. I had to be careful not to overload the tape measure – so that meant a lot of thought & research to work out what climate ‘story’ to tell on each spread. With the Tape Measure I was trying to show: the date/time, earth’s changing climate, earth’s changing continents, and snippets of the animals that were around at the time, and introduce the geological eras. The Time Team use cocktail stick animals and teeny road signs to mark out what’s going on.

[See Photo Eleven and Twelve in Picture Gallery]

Are there any other ideas for information topics which you’d love to approach?

How there are so many amazing animals that didn’t get to appear enough in The Greatest Show – for example: dimetrodon, therapsids, mad palaeocene mammals. What would happen if Rod and the Troupe had a time machine instead of a tape measure?

A huge thank you to Mini Grey for a fascinating interview and to Puffin Book for the opportunity.  If you have enjoyed reading about The Greatest Show on Earth, you may also be interested to attend the YLG annual conference this year, Reading the Planet follow the link for more information.

Picture Gallery:

One:           The Greatest Show on Earth
Two:           Oxford Natural History Museum
Three:        First Zig-Zag version of The Greatest Show on Earth showing the
                   Timeline.
Four:          A Pollocks Toy Theatre
Five:           This page explains how to read the book
Six:             251 million years ago – the End Permian mass extinction
Seven:       A chalicotherium – from the DK Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs
Eight:         Some of the pieces for making the Age of Fish page
Nine:          Hallucigenia
Ten:           International Chronostratagraphic Chart
Eleven:      Tape Measure research
Twelve:      Tape Measure