Monte Packham: Rhyme Time

An unconventional illustrated book for children and all those with a healthy relationship to their inner child

Imaginatively combining retro images with new rhymes, Rhyme Time brings visual nostalgia and the traditions of children’s verse up to date. The illustrations are 1960s line drawings that Monte Packham (born 1981)―author of ABC Photography and Photo Adventures―carefully colored in as a child in 1988; now, more than 30 years later, he has rearranged these vibrant images into playful stories and captured them in rhyme.

The unexpected results are both original tales, like that of Humphrey who chased a pesky elf from his garden with a cricket bat, and tongue-in-cheek reinterpretations of beloved fairy tales and nursery rhymes―if Snow White isn’t actually the fairest in the land, then who is? And why did Jack and Jill really climb that steep and nasty hill?