I’ve just read that Norton Juster has died. His most famous book - The Phantom Tollbooth - was published in 1961. From the very first sentence (“There was once a boy called Milo who didn’t know what to do with himself - not just sometimes but always”) I was hooked. Milo is sent a “strange package” containing “One Genuine Turnpike Tollbooth”. He gets in his electric car, puts a coin in the booth and drives into a new world where the colours are “richer and brighter than he could ever remember”, and the flowers shine “as if they’d been cleaned and polished”.
The book is full of imaginative wordplay, and idioms take a literal turn. Milo is arrested by Officer Shrift, who, unsurprisingly, is short. How does Milo get to an island called Conclusions? By jumping, of course.
In his book proposal, Juster said he wanted "to stimulate and heighten perception - to help children notice and appreciate the visual world around them”. The Phantom Tollbooth remains my favourite book from childhood, and I’d be happy to read it again... to remind myself how playful language can be.
Licenced today: two Yorkshire rivers - the Ouse in York and the Wharfe at Tadcaster - to the same customer…
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