A book is not written by one person. That sentence sounds wrong, and it is the most useful thing my aunt ever told me.
Here is how her book was made.
In 1976 a school reader for eight-year-olds was ordered by a publishing house in Tashkent. The stories were chosen by a committee of four people, and two of them were rewritten because a word in them was not liked. The manuscript was typed twice. Then somebody remembered that the book had no pictures in it.
My aunt Zulfiya was twenty-four, she had been trained at the art college in Samarkand, and she was paid eleven roubles for each drawing. There are forty-one drawings in that book. A goat on a roof. A boy asleep on a sack of apricots. The plane tree outside her own window, which is still standing in Chilonzor.
The plates were cut with a knife, one line at a time, and the pages were being set in metal type while she was still working on the last three pictures. Two hundred thousand copies had been printed by the autumn of 1978. It is said that the whole edition was sold in five weeks, and that some of it was carried to the districts by train in shoe boxes, because the proper boxes had not arrived.
Her name is not on the cover.
The editor and the committee are named there, in three lines, in gold. The illustrator was left off — not out of malice, she says. It was simply not thought about by anybody in the building.
In 2017 a small publisher in Tashkent decided to bring the reader back, and a young designer spent four months looking for the woman who had made the goat on the roof.
The new edition was published in 2019. The pictures had been scanned from a copy of the 1978 book, because the original plates have been lost. My aunt was sixty-five at the launch, in a bookshop on Amir Temur, and she was given the first copy off the pile.
Her name is on the cover of that one. It is printed under the title, in the same size as the title, and every copy that will be printed from now on will carry it.