By Philip Ressner, Illustrated by Jerome Snyder
I’ve gotten to that inevitable stage of life in which I try to recapture all of those hallmarks of my youth that I didn’t pay enough attention to the first time around. That includes such common geek symptoms as collecting the recent Battle of the Planets DVDs or speaking sentences to my children that begin with “When I was your age…” or “I remember the first time that I…”
One more symptom, especially for one with a literary bent such as I , is to track down some of the children’s books that informed my childhood. How Fletcher Was Hatched. The Duchess Bakes a Cake. Cranberry Thanksgiving. My whole family has been doing this, actually, and various parents and siblings have used modern technology to scan in and copy for others the books they’ve been able to reclaim. (Were it not for this, I doubt that a copy of Pickle-Chiffon Pie would ever have come into my hands, or Small Pig, or The Penguin Who Hated the Cold.)
Which brings me to Jerome, a book I used to read to my younger brother Jared when he was four and I was eight. I snagged a copy on eBay a couple of years ago, and being a “practical collector,” I didn’t put it on a shelf to collect dust; I read it to my kids. They loved it. In fact, it’s now Sariah’s favorite bedtime story.
And it’s getting hashed. Last week, the cover came clean off. And I realized that, honestly, this could well be the last copy of Jerome in the world. There were some preservation steps to be taken.
So I stuck it in the scanner and made some ungodly-huge scans of it, of which what you see here are but optimized copies. (Hey, I didn’t think you’d want to open 3MB image files — and what’s more, on my dial-up connection, I didn’t want to upload them.) So now, even if the book itself is finally loved to death, it will not have passed on entirely. (Unless my hard drive crashes: Note to self: Burn a backup copy to CD.)
I didn’t realize when I was young, naturally, just how weird the illustrations are. I didn’t know the world “psychedelic” back then. But looking at them now… well, all I can say is, it explains an awful lot about me, doesn’t it?
Anyway. Without further ado, enjoy… Jerome.
(Next up to find: Miss Suzy.)