The Mushroom Picker: Penny Bun’s Great Escape

Artist David Robinson’s beautiful luminograms, illustrating his story The Mushroom Picker, tell an enchanting tale of mushrooms in an English wood, and of one variety in particular, Penny Bun (porcini), who evades The Mushroom Picker’s dreaded annual harvest. Set against the dark night sky, Robinson’s funghi characters come to life in his glowingly textured images, as Penny Bun and her friends conspire to build a rocket ship to escape the Picker’s grasp. Children will love this magical rhyming storybook, the charming mushroom characters and the scary Mushroom Picker. Adult readers will be amused, and perhaps inspired, to become Pickers themselves, with notes on a range of mushrooms to savour and enjoy or to avoid by all measures. Lovingly crafted by this mushroom obsessive and founder of internationally renowned Sporeboys street-kitchen, these unique images create richly illustrative and highly fanciful portraits and scenes from this charming story. Robinson’s luminograms themselves are created in mysterious fashion, by varying the intensity of light exposed to his subjects - hand-cut mushrooms, of all types and varieties, identified in his light-hearted but authoritative ‘Cast of Characters’ at the close of this book, Robinson’s (and Violette’s!) first book for children.