Birds and Bees or: A Vintage book that explains everything

Spring is coming. Even in Iceland you can feel it in the air that nature is quietly resuming its oldest project: renewing itself ;-)
Which is why this small book feels like a perfect seasonal rediscovery here at Bókin. I am talking about Þannig komst þú í heiminn, the Icelandic translation of the 1968 children’s sex-education classic How Babies Are Made by Andrew C. Andry and Steven Schepp, originally published by Little Brown and Company, featuring distinctive full colour-paper cutout illustrations by Blake Hampton.

The goal of the book was simple: explain reproduction honestly to children.
The method was…artistically and delightfully direct. The book does it rather clever: it starts with the reproductive habits of plants and animals, gradually building toward humans.

First pollen.
Then chickens.
Then dogs.
Then humans.

So while many children’s books talked about “the birds and the bees.” this book simply showes you the birds when a rooster hops onto a hen while the text calmly explains what is happening. And when a few pages later eggs sit neatly in a carton labeled “Egg,” it feels like a real deadpan joke.

Everything is explained with calm biological clarity. What makes it stand out, however, is the illustration style: layered paper-cut figures arranged almost like a miniature stage set.

The book never intends to be funny, but the combination of earnest text and carefully cut paper anatomy produces a kind of accidental comedy and makes it in a playful way bizarre to date.