Through the Looking Glass Children's Book Reviews
NorthSouth publishes primarily picture and board books for children ages 1-8. Our authors and illustrators are from all over the world—Europe, Asia, Australia, and the United States. Our mission is to bring the best international authors and illustrators for children here to the United States.
We have a parent company in Zurich, Switzerland. Nord-Sud Verlag has a talented staff of editors, a dynamic publisher (Urs Gysling) and established creative relationships. Once Nord-Sud sets their publishing program, the US imprint evaluates the titles to see what translates to the United States. At this point, we are not acquiring titles from submissions here in the US, the original program is set in Zurich by the Swiss editorial staff. We then look for books that would have an audience here in the United States — whether that is at retail or in the classroom or libraries. We then take that list of books, and then work with our US editor and translators and designers here to create the US publication.
We are probably best known for The Rainbow Fish by Swiss author-illustrator Marcus Pfister. This is by far our best selling title and series. It’s a simple story of a special fish who learns how to be a friend and share. It can be read on many levels. It featured holographic foil accents, and when it was published almost twenty years ago, that broke new ground in design. That said, the foil also works as an integral design element. Lastly, though the book also sells well at retail, it is BELOVED in the school and library market. The Rainbow Fish is usually one of the first books children will have read to them in kindergarten.
Lila Prap is a Slovakian author/illustrator that we’ve been publishing here in the US for some time. Her last book Dinosaurs?! was a Parents Magazine Top Ten Book of the year in 2010. We also have several amazing authors and illustrators from Japan—Kazuo Iwamura’s HOORAY series has been very popular, and this Spring we had fantastic response to Ken Kimura’s 999 Tadpoles, which the New York Times Book Review called “impish” and “uncommon” much to our delight!
We also launched a popular new preschool series called Tuff Books, which features full-color, preschool storybooks in a smaller 7.5x7.5 trim with sturdy, laminated pages. There are currently eight books in the series with plans for more to release this Fall.
NorthSouth Books is really proud and excited to be an independent publisher during these fairly crazy times in book publishing! We are getting ready to launch e-books this year, we’re continuing to publish high quality and entertaining books, and we’ll always take chances on interesting new artists and unique formats.
