Acknowledgements

This volume is a synthesis of my love for drawing, printmaking, paper and book arts, and my interest in children’s literature, food, and materiality studies. I am grateful to the editors of the Children’s Literature, Culture and Cognition (CLCC) series for seeing the potential in my proposal and encouraging the writing of this volume. I would like to acknowledge series editors Nina Christensen and Elina Druker and all the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and valuable suggestions that helped me give this volume its final shape. I would also like to thank John Benjamins Publishing Company and the entire editorial team, the designers, and Esther Roth that have made this work possible.

There are so many people that inspired me along the way and without whom this book would not be what it is. I would like to thank my chief editor Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer for her generous, keen, and meticulous support. I am forever grateful for her scholarship, energy, and enthusiasm. A chapter I authored, “Materiality in Picturebooks”, in The Routledge Companion to Picturebooks under her editorship sowed the seeds for this book. I am also particularly grateful to Koç University for the opportunity to organize the international workshop “Material, Spatial and Sensory Encounters with the Picturebook Object” in 2017, as this workshop furthered my work. After this workshop, I edited a special issue on materiality of picturebooks published in Libri et Liberi: Journal of Research on Children’s Literature and Culture in 2019 (8/2) where early versions of Chapter 1 and 9 appeared. I wholeheartedly thank Jörg Meibauer for the encouragement he provided for this project during this workshop and for being the muse for this book’s initial title, Food for Thought. I am also indebted to the invigorating exchanges with the Mechanical Characterization Laboratory at Koç University that allowed me to deliberate on those pathways where art, literature, and science could merge.

I realize that this work is a palimpsest of art and science, old and new. I have benefited from such a wealth of knowledge, history, and hands-on experience that I can only offer a glimpse into it all with this volume. It has been a years-long process to arrive at this finished work, and I have many educational institutes and their experts to thank for the experiences that I built into parts of this volume. For instance, my time at the University of Richmond contributed to the development of early ideas, and I am thankful to Tanja Softic and Uliana Gabara for extending a warm invitation to me. There I taught Materials and Techniques, which discussed the importance of diversity in techniques for a variety of creative outputs that later bridged to children’s literature as I explore in the book. I wish to acknowledge my academic home of Koç University, Suna Kıraç Library and the Seed Fund I was awarded in 2016 that supported my exploration of various traditional ceramic arts and how they could tie into children’s narratives in Turkey and beyond. I appreciate the opportunity the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) offered to collaborate on a project that explored the digitization and interpretation of cultural heritage. It was due to the work on this project that I experimented with techniques such as 3D printing and augmented reality. I also want to acknowledge the International Youth Library in Munich and the fellowship I received that enabled me to study children’s literature from a wide range of international sources in 2017. Thanks goes to Jochen Weber, Jutta Reusch, Sibylle Weingart, Nadine Zimmermann, Lucia Obi, and the rest of the team for meeting me individually to discuss my project.

Thanks again to Koç University and its generous support of the International Summer Research Program that funded my research as a Visiting Scholar at the Parsons School of Design: The New School in 2019. I would like to thank Lydia Matthews and her colleagues for welcoming me to Parsons and the uninterrupted time for research they so kindly granted to me. During my stay, I had a chance to carry on my research at various institutions including Material ConneXion, the Elmer Holmes Bobst Library of New York University, and the Thomas J. Watson Library of the Metropolitan Museum of Fine Arts. I wish to express special thanks to Jennifer Cohlman Bracchi and Elizabeth Broman at the Research Library of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, and Rebecca Federman of the New York Public Library for guiding me through their collections.

As the pandemic broke and we had to become accustomed to lockdowns as a daily part of our reality, my perception of our material interactions with the world, reading, online learning, and work had to shift, too. Being deprived of many real-life engagements, the physical world was replaced with a virtual one that kept us safe but left an ersatz life stripped of vibrancy. This experience reinforced what I had already suspected: that a vivid environment, lively exchanges with people, and experimental material interactions are vital not only to enterprises like reading but for living in the moment and breathing in the joy of it all. I would like to thank my son for reminding me of this and for his first pandemic creation, which was curiously a smiling loaf of bread (see Figure 1). In a way his bread is a symbol of the sustainability of life and power of narratives, which unbeknownst to my son is tied in with this work. As such, I would like to acknowledge my son and husband for their patience and the sound basis that they provided.

In addition, salt in the soup came from family, friends, and colleagues with whom I connected in expansive and enriching ways that I cannot entirely encapsulate. I would like to thank Claudia Urlic, Nazlı Hilal Bulur, and Efe İmrahor for their immensely appreciated presence in my life and the genuine support they provided for me during the writing of this book. A special thanks goes out to Tülin Kozikoğlu, Lucienne Thys-Şenocak, Inge Uytterhoeven, Mary Priscilla Işın, Ilgar Veryeri and Birce Özkan who offered resources at just the right times. I express thanks for Christopher Culver’s remarks and vigilant final reading of the manuscript.

Last but definitely not least, I am grateful to all the copyright holders including artists, designers, and authors for giving me permission to include their works in this volume. Their work has inspired me. In sum, I dedicate this work to all those who show fellowship towards art and literature for children despite distances and differing disciplines and cultures. I hope that the introduction of some of the more unusual approaches to art and literacy discussed in this volume may resonate similarly with you the reader and extend the conversation so that these topics may grow beyond this book.