The rulebook for a million summers
I bought my daughter a magic colouring book last week. It is amazing. You open the book and it's just black-and-white pictures of fairies and flowers, the lines of the illustrations heavy and rather sooty, as if they've been copied from some ancient fairy and flower 'zine. Anyway, it's all black-and-white, and then you run a paintbrush loaded with water over the pictures and - shazam! - they're suddenly coloured in. The right colours, too: a fairy tunic will be green while their stockings will be pink or purple. A tree will have a brown trunk, a mushroom will have a bright red cap.
"How does it work?" my daughter asked me. Within a year, I reckon, she will know not to ask me this anymore - I never know the answer. Regardless, she had to ask because she had simply never seen anything like this magic colouring book. I had never seen anything like it! And then I realised that - in a way at least - maybe I had.
Do not misunderstand me, I am still dazzled by books with alarming regularity. Every few weeks something will come along and make me feel like it's the first book I've ever picked up - the first and the most urgent. Just yesterday, I finished Christopher Fowler's The Book of Forgotten Authors - Essential, I reckon; it's a banger - and through it I've been thrown into the worlds of Lord Dunsany and - whisper it - Ernst Wilhelm Julius Bornemann. But I'm going to talk about a different level of enrapturement here - what you might like to call the magic colouring book level. An encounter with the kind of book that seems so perfect you suspect it is made for you alone, and so engrossing it is not so much a book anymore but an entire world, so engrossing that you feel inside its covers there is an entire new way of living to be found.
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