Jumping off the page – Lara Marlowe at the Bologna Children's Book Fair

The walls of the exhibition hall are decked with thousands of pieces of paper, like notice boards in supermarkets or university buildings. The images were posted by book illustrators advertising their wares at the Bologna Children's Book Fair, the world's largest, held annually in April for the past 61 years. A few dozen of the fair's nearly 32,000 trade visitors stand in a forest of books, perusing texts suspended at varying heights from the ceiling. In a clearing amid the maze of illustrators' walls and exhibitions, Mac Barnett, a children's author from California, talks to a rapt audience. "Children's books…