Dear Reader,

You are holding a special English language issue of Csodaceruza, Magic Pencil, a children's literature review in Hungary. In the five years of the history of this monthly this is the first time to present ourselves in a foreign language, as Hungarian children's books and their illustrations will also be shown this year to a wider audience in the world's largest forum for juvenile books, in Bologna, where Hungary has been invited as a honorary guest.
In our country book publishing and illustration for children has had a long and illustrious tradition. From the end of the nineteen nineties on, due to a liberalized book publishing, undemanding commercial works flooded the shelves in book shops, and illustrations had to suffer of the same situation. Our artists, mainly the new generation of them, has a double task: to maintain and enhance the renown of our graphic art, and to conquer a section of the market from mass products.
In this issue you are informed about changes, tendencies and recent events in the field of our children's literature. Changes and novelties are tied here to reviews of books by a handful of authors, accompanied by their portraits in most of the cases. We pay a special attention to the problems of book graphics, and enumerate the best of our illustrators, presenting a characteristic picture of each taken from books published by Móra.
We wish to give our readers not only theoretical lectures about, but also a glance or two into our children's literature. Surmounting the "embarras de richesse", we have chosen a selection of poems by Sándor Weöres, a tale by Ervin Lázár, one of the prize-winning poems by Ottó Kiss and a fragment from the mock-epic poem by Dániel Varró.
Our monthly has a special column for introducing illustrators; this issue gives us a glimpse of Líviusz Gyulai's atelier.
We hope that our readers will enjoy browsing these pages and the meeting with the authors and illustrators of Hungarian children's books.

Csilla Sándor
editor-in-chief