Picture Book Nostalgia

With a newborn growing up and starting to interact with the world around him, I was thinking about the kind of things that might be entertaining for him at this stage. And one thing that includes is picture books.
When I was a kid myself I was a keen library visitor (which I still am ) and I remember borrowing different books almost every week. But I had a very vivid memory of two particular picture books I used to borrow several times when I was quite young. And that sent me on a quest to find out what those two books were. While the memory might have been vivid I only remembered certain details of both books, which made the search interesting.

For the first book I remembered it contained full page pen drawings of landscapes viewed from a bird's-eye view. The setting of those landscapes was quite rural and felt like it was set in medieval times. And the key character that came back on every page of the book was a rider on horseback.
So I started my search by trying to find picture books featuring horse riders. But that didn't seem to bring anything up in various online book stores or through image search results.
But a few weeks later a name popped into my head that felt familiar when thinking about this book: Anno. The book must somehow have Anno in its title. And this key piece of information actually helped me find the book I was looking for.
It led me to the Japanese illustrator Mitsumaso Anno who has created a number of wordless picture books, with one of them being Anno's Journey. This book was first published in 1977 and features a person travelling on horse across Europe, visiting various countryside and town locations. When I saw some images of the book's illustrations I knew immediately that this was the book I had been looking for.

But for the other book the search was a bit trickier. What I did remember was that this book also depicted city scapes and landscapes, but they were a lot more colourful. I couldn't remember anything of the title, but if I had to guess I would say the book might be German based on the drawing style and colours I remembered.
My initial searches didn't give me any results, which isn't strange if you're trying to find a needle in the haystack. So then I resorted to searching the Dutch library catalogue in the hope the book would still be around in some form (bear in mind it was the 80s when I last saw the book). A search for wordless picture books in my home town library's collection didn't give many results when sorting them by publication date, with the earliest books being from the mid 90s. But the nice thing is that you can also search the catalogue at a regional and national level. And when doing this nationally it had results starting from the late 1950s, so this looked more promising.
The search results included a thumbnail of the book covers, so I clicked through page after page in the hope that one image might look familiar. After more than 15 pages I was about to give up when one book cover stood out. Immediately I had a feeling of recognition at the illustration style of that book. And when viewing it in more detail, I realised this was indeed what I had been looking for!
The illustrator in question was Ali Mitgutsch from Germany (so my hunch was right) who has created a number of picture books during his career. The books are called Wimmelbücher, which translates to teeming books and refers to the full-page illustrations teeming with people, animals and objects. In the 1970s and 1980s he created a series of books themed around the village, city, mountains and waterside. And those were the books I remembered from my childhood.

It was great to find both books in the end. While writing this I did come across a website called Wordless Books which lists both books as well on the same page. That would have made my search a lot easier, but it was actually quite fun to have a dig around and find them.

I managed to get a few new copies of the books as well, so I can share them with my son once he is a bit bigger. And if he doesn't like them, then I will still enjoy them.