I picked up three outstandingly beautiful picture books at the Oakland Public Library’s Friends of the Library booksale for one dollar each, a terrific deal. Generally, I spend about five bucks on the old titles I pick up at my local used bookstore and somewhere between five and ten for the titles I buy off ThriftBooks on ebay but from time to time I’ll drop a bit more moolah on something special. Something like this:
Thurber is great but I really bought it for Simont, who’s art I absolutely love. Also, for the paper texture. Look.
The Wonderful O is the fifth of Thurber’s fairy tales. It’s been a while since I’ve read Many Moons (1943) and The Thirteen Clocks (1950) but I think this book has a thinner plot. It’s centered around a mysterious figure who bans all Os from the island nation of Ooroo. The citizens of R (as Ooroo comes to be known), need to fight back but the secret of their salvation is hidden in a missing word.
The islanders remember HOPE, they reclaim LOVE, they have VALOR. What do you suppose the fourth word is? The book is sixty-eight years old so I’m not worried about spoilers. Here’s the word: