Publishing house "Melik-Pashaev": books, sources, description and reviews

Publishing house "Melik-Pashayev" exists relatively recently. Despite the "retro-design", it was created in the near 2008 crisis year. Since then, books have been created here for children from birth to 10 years with wonderful illustrations. What are the books that can instill in the children the artistic taste and sense of beauty? Writers and artists working on the books of the publishing house Melik-Pashayev know exactly the answer to this question.

History of creation and logo

Publishing house "Melik-Pashayev" was created by two co-founder artists. This explains their close attention primarily to illustrations.

Maria Melik-Pashayeva is a painter, illustrator, participant of a large number of exhibitions, a collector of a children's book, an expert on handwritten fonts.

Tatyana Rudenko is a designer of books, the founder of a creative workshop at the Tretyakov Gallery. For many years she worked at the publishing house "Book" as an art editor.

Why choose such a seemingly "childish" name and logo? The fact is that initially the publishing house was chambered and was intended for a narrow circle of the intelligentsia. The Melik-Pashaev family financed the project. The surname is sonorous. Alexander Melik-Pashayev - the conductor, whose name is widely known, Albert Melik-Pashayev - the head of the children's studio "Teatron." All this inclined the creators in favor of choosing exactly this "retro-naming".

Re-publishing your favorite books

An invariably ardent reception from readers is met by reprints of old favorite books. Most of the reviews about the children of the book house - a request to republish the works, loved in childhood, with the same illustrations, but in modern quality. Gradually, "Melik-Pashayev" began to be perceived as a publishing house, giving a timeless classics a new life. And this has grounds: a lot of reissues have been published. Tatyana Rudenko considers this one of the aspects of her work: she sees her work in producing well-illustrated books for preschoolers. And it does not matter, will this reissue or some previously unreleased literature. The main thing that the book liked the child. And to understand what kind of book a kid's favorite is very difficult, because the authors are adults, and parents buy books. But publishers see this as their goal. "Retro for the sake of retro, for the sake of commerce we do not publish" - declares Maria Melik-Pashayeva.

Melik-Pashayev is a publishing house that has reissued books by such great masters as Vladimir Lebedev and Yury Vasnetsov, Lev Tokmakov and Nikolai Radlov, Vladimir Konashevich and many others. In the collection of the publishing house Melik-Pashayev, books by Korney Chukovsky and Nikolai Nosov are exactly the version in which they were remembered and grown fond of by a modern adult.

Funny pictures

Separately I want to mention a series of books on the magazine "Funny Pictures". Collected together the best Soviet illustrations to the magazine will certainly interest the child 3-5 years old and will cause nostalgic moods for most mothers, dads, grandparents. Ironic and funny, instructive and instructive "Funny pictures" were created for years by the best illustrators of the Soviet Union, now they have been restored, they have selected plots understandable to the modern child.

The children's book has two equivalent authors - a writer and an artist

Harmoniously combine the work of the writer and artist - the task is not easy. If, during the republishing of the book, this task has already been carefully conducted and verified by time, then when selecting an artist for a new book, the publisher collects a whole consultation. After all, the "correct" drawing for a children's book is paramount. For example, it should be detailed enough so that the child could understand the essence of the subject. At the same time, there should not be too much detail, which many modern books, aimed at parents, are guilty of.

The book, according to the leaders of the publishing house, should be exactly what the author and artist conceived it. You can not change its format, increase or decrease the number of pages. Although it sometimes flies in a pretty penny.

Another concept of the publishing house is not to create artificially created series. All the books of the "family" should be conceived by the artists initially, rather than simply being inserted in a common frame and the same format.

Translation of bestsellers

"Melik-Pashayev" is a publishing house in which very high demands are placed on translators. For example, when translating one of the books, the name of the character Percy was transformed into Uncle Willie because Percy in Russian is very similar to "Percy", which can cause confusion in the head of the baby. In general, close attention to detail is what sets out the books of the Melik-Pashayev publishing house against the backdrop of many other Russian publications.

During its existence, the publishing house Melik-Pashayev has produced the following series of foreign books:

• Beaver Castor.
• Carlchen.
• Cat Miauli.
• Watchman Willy.
• History in pictures.
• Sea adventures of Tim.
• My cat.
• Mishka Bruno.
• Mulle Meck.
• Zebrenok Zu.
• Ernest and Celestine.

Books for kids - pictures with captions

The Russian adult reader does not always want to buy the books popular in the West: they have so little text, some pictures. But this is exactly what the child needs, when under each illustration there are two or three lines of text. He will treat the book without parents many, many times.

One of the first works of the publishing house "Melik-Pashayev" was the history of Wilhelm Bush about Max and Moritz, who is at the source of the children's book. "Melik-Pashayev" retold this old German fairy tale, focusing only on pictures. In the post-Soviet space, Kharms's translation is known: "Plih and Plyukh." In the publishing house, they decided to give the opportunity to the contemporary author Andrei Usachev to compete with the great poet.

Many readers complain about the high cost of books of this publishing house. But given the enormous amount of work being done to create each book, how much attention is paid to each "little bit", it becomes clear why this is happening and why their books so often become the most beloved in many families.