★Rights sold to China!
★One of the best children's books of the year in the 5th China Children's Book List in 2017! Top 100 children's books!
★Selection for the Outstanding Books 2011
IBBY DOCUMENTATION CENTRE OF BOOKS FOR DISABLED YOUNG PEOPLE
★Desetnica award 2011 nominee

This is an unusual picture-book, which can be read, searched through, touched – and even smelt. The witty text tells of Spaghetti Joe who escapes from the cooking-pot and, on his way into the world, comes across an apple. The apple is convinced that this strand of spaghetti is an enormous worm that will eat him up. The picture-book as a whole (visual, tactile, even olfactory stimulus) functions in a multi-channel way, offering the ultimate artistic enjoyment – also to the fully-sighted reader.

The particularly valuable quality of the tactile picture-book is that it is intended not only for the blind or partially-sighted children, but also for the fully-sighted, who are only now discovering the world of reading. This is why the text is printed in raised-point type and in Braille script. Experience has shown that tactile picture-books are indeed of immense importance for all children – when using them, the blind can touch the illustrations, while the fully-sighted are for the first time encountering Braille script and beginning to think about their schoolmates with special needs, which develops their empathy towards 'otherness'.

Aksinja Kermauner was born in Ljubljana. She works as a Slovenian language and art teacher at the Institute for Blind and Visually-Impaired Children in Ljubljana and is completing her PhD in specialised and rehabilitation pedagogy with an emphasis on blindness and visual impairment. She has written the first tactile book for the blind Snow Flower (Snežna roža) which was chosen as an exceptional achievement at the Bologna Children's Book Fair in 2005. Her youth novel Berenica's Curls was included, together with two other Slovenian books, in the White Ravens Catalogue – a list of 250 best newly published books worldwide, compiled by the International Youth Library; the book was displayed at the IYL's stand at the 2008 Bologna Children's Book Fair. In 1997, Aksinja Kermauner was also awarded by the Slovenian Government Office for the Disabled.