THE PHENOMENAL SUCCESS OF NICK Bantock's Griffin & Sabine and Sabine's Notebook began quite by accident. According to Bantock, the rough manuscript for Griffin & Sabine was discovered only after an American editor happened to notice some of Bantock's personal doodlings. The illustrator had gone to California to pitch conventional projects. "It was at the bottom of my clothes bag," he says, "I was only taking it along to show to a friend. As I threw the other dummies back on top, my red socks parted to reveal the dummy of Griffin & Sabine. "The editor reached over and said, 'What's that?'" Bantock gives full credit to that curious American editor, Victoria Rock, for taking Griffin & Sabine to her senior editor at Chronicle Books, Annie Barrows, who then "basically made it happen."

[BCBW, Summer, 1993]