Interview with Alan Ahlberg

I am a huge fan of Alan Ahlberg's writing, he came up with the idea for The Jolly Postman when he saw how much his two-year-old daughter loved playing with the morning post. "She would sit in her highchair and pull letters out and put them back in. I'm not sure she knew what a letter was, but she liked them."

This book took about 5 years to make because Allan and his wife Janet, whom illustrated the book were determined it should have envelopes and miniature letters that kids could handle. "We drove our publishers nuts - wanting the right paper, the right printing. I risk being pretentious," he adds, "but just because a book is tiny and its readers are little doesn't mean it can't be perfect. On its own scale, it can be as good as Tolstoy or Jane Austen."