A new kind of classic

The best discoveries in reading are not those we simply enjoy ourselves but those we can share with others whose pleasure we know will equal our own – and the best of these discoveries are those we can share with children whose passion for reading is just developing. The iPad app The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr Morris Lessmore by William Joyce is just such a discovery and, if it can be considered a book, it is the best book about books since Alberto Manguel’s The Library at Night.

Joyce is both a brilliant children’s author and a computer animator skilled enough to have worked on Pixar films, and here his two talents merge as exquisitely as Beatrix Potter’s gifts for illustration and storytelling in Peter Rabbit. When our hero is caught in a hurricane – which the reader causes by swiping a finger across the screen – he loses his beloved library, and is inconsolable until he sights ‘a festive squadron of flying books’ that guides him to a secret paradise: a house stocked floorboards to rafters with fine volumes on every subject.