Tuesday, July 3, 2018

"...he is not for children, of whatever age"

You grew up with this guy; his books are important to you. In 1960 he published this, his second book of cartoons. It’s not part of his Children’s canon, it’s for adults (you discovered THAT body of work later, of course). The publisher is still around, indeed is still a major player, yet despite the deathless popularity of the author the publisher has let this title stay out of print for more than 40 years; and due to the predictable effects of living in a dumb old Economy, this has drive up prices of the original into the $200, $300, and even $400 range. This is, as John Cleese’s Professional Logician character pointed out, “pure bullshit”. And so for the $6 cost of an interlibrary loan, and specifically thanks to the generosity of St. Mary’s College of Maryland who has this book in its collection and so bravely allows it to have the kind of cross-country adventures that led it to land in my grubby mitts, and following a few hours restoration work by yours truly, here’s a clean PDF of the whole book.

TL;DR = There’s a scan of this book at Archive.org, but it isn’t very good. 



(Technical note: This book has 128 pages of guts at roughly 8.35” x 11” page size, but all the pages with cartoons are laid out to be read one two-page spread at a time, so those pages of the PDF are all 11” tall and 16.7” wide.)

And here you go