This is the chapter of the book I originally set aside to tell you about how reading is like playing with a toy, how books are like toys you play with by reading, but when Andrew, having just returned to Houston from a visit to his home in England, handed me a treasury of fairy tales he used to love to read as a child, now battered and falling apart, missing its first thirty-four pages, colored with pencil and crayon marks, its spine completely collapsed, its remaining tattered pages barely holding together, I decided to just describe in words the scrawlings I found in that book, and use that for the chapter instead.
Battered beige fabric coating the cover is worn away at the corners to reveal glimpses of heavy cardboard. THE FAIRY TALE TREASURY printed in dark olive capitals at the top of the cover. Below the title, a large olive frame commanding the cover’s central acre. Inside the frame, one of those primitive plastic holograms popular in the sixties: a thin slab of plastic sits raised inside the painted frame, glued to the fabric of the cover. When I skate the nail of my thumb across the plastic’s subtle ridges it makes a skate-scratching, skate-scratching sound. A puppet-lady dressed in a soft and fancy pink dress looks more like a torso-and-head stuck onto a mound of fabric ruffles, one of those half-dolls you plant on the top of a mound-shaped layer cake. The puppet-lady may or may not have two tiny feet. I can’t see what’s going on under her dress, what with all those voluminous pink ruffles and mountains of lacy undergarments. For all I know she may be balanced on a horizontal platter of plastic, propped up on one of those pedestal stands used for doll-posing. Her hair is a swept-up ball of spaghetti-colored yarn crowned with a string of pearls and two tiny pink feathers. Behind her is a sideways carriage, horse-drawn I imagine, although whatever’s pulling the carriage has already passed beyond where the plastic rectangle ends, so it could as easily be a pair of ostriches. The horseman-puppet holds up two red reins that trail off horselessly to the edge of the hologram.
When I hold the book at different angles, tilting it and rotating it like a gem whose dazzle I’m assessing, the position of the puppet-horseman in the hologram changes. Red reins in hand, he reclines then moves forward, reclines then moves forward. The crescent moon behind his head lurches forward and scoop-slides backward in a starless indigo sky, suggesting a kind of motion, like he’s urging the horse onward. When I hold the book still and instead rotate my head from side to side, the effect is roughly the same. The horseman-puppet and the crescent moon perform the same pretend-routine.
Beneath the hologram, IN LIVING COLOUR, also in dark olive green, but in a smaller, slightly slanted font. And finally, below this subtitle, three hand-penciled letters – capital A, small n, capital D – written by a child, the sloping sequence interrupted before his name could be completed, almost certainly by an adult who told him he shouldn’t be writing in books.
The spine, when the cover of the book is opened, opens flat. I can see how the pages have been folded and stacked into several small threaded-together bundles. The inside front cover is covered with pastel-striped paper. Scribbled down three of the nine stripes, staying roughly within the stripe’s bounds, down the lavender and pink and lemon yellow aisles, now zig-zagging, now scratchful pencil marks. At the top of the inside cover, in the odd-numbered stripes, rune-like inscriptions reminiscent of lightning bolts and fish hooks decorate the paper. And floating across the pastel rainbow, an oblong, machine-shaped marker-doodle, a yellow cartoon underwater taxicab perhaps.
On the right hand side, page 35, the first page of this book anymore, a yarn-wigged Little-Red-Riding-Hood-puppet, snug in her little red riding hood, holds a basket of goodies in the crook of her left elbow, smiling and prancing her way through a meadow of yellow paper wildflowers. The text begins, “She had not gone very far when she met a wolf.”
Wearing wire-rim spectacles with temples long enough to reach from around the back of his ears to where the lenses sit at the end of his long snout near his nose and scraggly whiskers, a wolf-puppet on page 41 licks his lips, revealing his pointy teeth, and pulls a patchwork quilt up to his lace-collared throat. The text on page 40 begins, “Presently there was a knock on the door,” and ends, “what big eyes you have!” Little Red Riding Hood, a clueless red smile stitched onto her puppet-face, clutches a posey of paper wildflowers. In the center of the page, the colours are noticeably lighter, where Andrew once flooded the image with water to watch the colors pop.
Four half-pieces of tape, brittle and brown, bridge pages 40 and 41. The pages were taped together to keep them from separating, but the tape, over time, just split down the middle and their layers have peeled apart from each other, leaving four rectangles of translucent plastic and four matching bands of brown adhesive. One half-piece of tape, just the plastic part, no longer sticky, not in a long while, flies away when I touch it with the tip of my pencil, and is carried away by the wind.
The Ugly Duckling, italicized at the top of the left-hand page, page 56. The lines of a large blue ink X intersect at the center of a puppet-hatchling’s featureless blue eye. The hatchling, a duckling, is sandwiched between the tips of a cracked-in-half egg shell, his beak parted into a smile. Shards of shell are scattered around him in the pretend-nest fashioned from straw. On the opposite page, page 57, the mother of the duckling looks on, a blue ink X centered on her breast-bone.
“So lovely was her colouring that she seemed merely asleep, but try as they would the dwarfs could not awaken her.” A puppet-dwarf wearing glasses holds Snow White, eyelids closed, by her waist, and proposes that her half-alive body, still quite beautiful, be displayed in a glass coffin. Near the pearl-lined and ruby-sequined pink mantle splayed out around her limp figure, a patch of carnation pink crayon scribbles, seven strokes of pink, echo the hue of the garment. A second puppet-dwarf, crouching, holds his hands over his mouth in horror.
In the white wide open space of the inside back cover, a large ink oval is shiny with graphite. On the left-hand side, the last page of the book, a boy and a girl in the center of the page are frozen mid-skip. The girl holds a basket on the crook of her left elbow; the boy holds the girl’s right hand. When the book’s closed, he’s smashed up against the shiny oval. When the book’s open, he’s smudged with a cloud of graphite that’s rubbed off from the opposite page. A scribble of lavender pencil color, scribbled sharply enough to carve small rivulets into the paper, haunts the skipping girl.