„A Bit White Pitch Black Book” is a project by Dmytro Kuzmenko, the Ukrainian writer and illustrator.
The book format is 200 mm × 245 mm. It contains 64 pages and about 25 000 symbols with spaces. The original language is Ukrainian. The book is for the kids’ auditory 7+ years.
„A Bit White Pitch Black Book” is an educational book, the aim of which is to tell children about different displays of black and white in the surrounding world, about their physics origin, their spreading in culture and geography.
This book is provocative and eccentric in some way. That is not because it is not colored as the prevailing amount of kids’ editions are. It is not even black and white, but very black and it has a pitch black cover. Thus it’s naturally that the book appearance may frighten away some category of readers. However the book is going to be a real pleasure for those whom it is written for. These are kids who are interested not only in learning some facts about the world, but in getting to know it in all its diversity and in an unusual way. This way is very joyful in spite of the book outer darkness.
To make reading interesting the educational information is blended with the general fable. The style of narration and plot are close to a specific genre of kids’ folklore – scary tales, which children tell one another in the dark, when there are no parents beside, at the camp or the campfire.
Besides, to attract a reader more deeply into interaction there are several logical tasks and experiments to do at home in the text.
The book begins at a pitch-black night when a pitch-black sheep was coming back home through a pitch-black forest. It became very imprudent of her because she was met by a pitch-white wolf there. At this very place the book could end without any further adventures, as the wolf would eat the sheep. But suddenly it turned out that there was a pitch-black hole in a wolf’s pitch-white tooth.
Without any hesitation the kind (or silly) sheep took a drill out of her bag and filled the tooth cavity. The glad wolf was going to eat the sheep once again. But there appeared a little obstacle. You cannot eat at least for two hours after filling the tooth. So the characters had nothing more to do but wait. They whiled away talking pleasantly about black and white topics. The book lasts for these two hours and ends with someone’s possibly eating another someone. But we cannot see whom exactly in the dark beca use the sheep turned out a torch.

1.The Pitch-Black Hole (black holes as astronomical objects)
2.Of Square Shape But Not a Square (“The Black Square” by Kazimir Malevich)
3.Black That Does Not Exist (why black is not a colour)
4.White That Does Not Exist (why white is not a colour plus an experiment of resolving the white light into components)
5.The Pitch-Black Experiment (mixing of three colours)
6.The Pitch-White Experiment (mixing of three coloured lights)
7.White Out Of Black (a play on words with proverbs about white and black)
8.Black Out Of White (black and white optical illusions)
9.The Absolutely Black Sun (why the Sun is an absolutely black object)
10.Blacker Than the Blackest (making an absolutely black object with one’s own hand)
11.A Black Cat in a Dark Room (a play on words and meanings of the famous Confucius’ quote)
12.The Black Place (a real geographic object – the Black forest with the Black swamp in the middle of which there is Black lake with a black crucian)
13.The Black Night (that’s the name of a black tree)
14.Blackish and Blackfish (a play on words)
15.Black and White, Though Red (black and white species of animals listed in the Red book of Ukraine)
16.Is It Black as a Sheep? Is It White as a Raven? (“a black sheep” and “a white raven” idioms)
17.Why a Blue Sea Is Called Black and Why the Black Mountain Is Not a Mountain (Ukrainian placenames)
18.Laughable But Not Funny (black humor and the first kids’ book in this genre – “Shockheaded Peter” by Heinrich Hoffmann)
19.The Story of Bad Frederick (a poem from the Heinrich Hoffmann’s book)