You’ve heard of deja vu, the sensation that you’ve seen something before? Well, yesterday I experienced deja boo.
My library has an area where they put free books and magazines. I glance through the offerings every so often. Sometimes there is treasure. Yesterday, there was a very odd kind of treasure.
I picked up a picture book–and immediately recognized the weeping ghost on the front. I had read this as a child, and hadn’t thought of it in years. Decades. I would not have been able to remember the title —What’s a Ghost Going To Do?–and don’t think I ever knew the author’s name (Jane Thayer).
I definitely didn’t know someone else (Seymour Fleishman) had done the pictures…but I definitely recognized each simple, cartoonish image as I read through the book, and remembered tracing Gus the ghost’s outline with my finger a long, long time ago.
The book came out in 1966, and so is quite wordy compared to many modern picture books. (For example, page 2 has 14 lines of text, and some later pages are nothing but text.) The language is simple, but it is more of a told story with illustrations than a modern fully integrated image and text book.
That being said, there’s still real pleasure here, and a kind of innocence to this earlier book. It feels like Thayer followed the story of this ghost losing his home wherever it wanted to go, rather than holding to a strict contemporary pacing and page breakdown.
And Gus can now live with me. Again.
