The story of Jim: a very lucky, very special, very grubby dog, who lives, improbably, in the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Emma Thompson magically weaves the real-life tale of Jim - beloved dog of Sir Henry Cole who created the first Christmas card - with a fantastically warm and heartfelt Christmas romp, brilliantly illustrated by bestselling illustrator, Axel Scheffler.
A Christmas book to treasure, and an adventure filled with high emotion, guilt, redemption, unexpected presents and a life-changing brush with royalty.
Axel says:
I had to do some research for this book as it is partly based on a real story about the Victoria and Albert Museum and on real characters. In the late 1980s I took on a commission from Emma Thompson, but then it took about 30 years until we actually met in person at a book signing. A little later she wrote the lovely text for Jim and I was very pleased to be asked to illustrate it.
This old picture of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert helped me to draw my versions of the characters
This is a pencil sketch of one of the scenes in the book
This is a sketch of my Victoria and Albert, but I had to research what they looked like in real life first
The publisher sends pages with the text and blank space for me to draw rough pictures