Book Report: Matthew Looney’s Voyage to the Earth

I saw Matthew Looney’s Voyage to the Earth, by Jerome Beatty, Jr., on the table at a library book sale right at the end, when they were selling a sack for five bucks, and you could take away as many books as you could fit into the sack. So I shoved it in the sack and walked away with it. The limiting factor, actually, was what I was willing to carry, as I was walking that day, and the notion of free books was in conflict with the notion of severe back pain. Still, a little paperback from the kids’ book area. Well, and half-a-dozen others, sure.

As it turns out, my fond memories of the Matthew Looney books appear to be almost entirely fond memories of the Gahan Wilson illustrations, presumably my first introduction to Mr. Wilson’s work. Not that the book itself is bad; it’s actually fairly good, for boys’ science fiction. But there was nothing at all about the book that I remembered, other than the pictures. Not the powder factory, or the bowling ball, or the nurtle, or the titular Voyage to the Earth. But I clearly loved the characters in Mr. Wilson’s drawings, with the nearly spherical heads, with minimal ornamentation to identify which is which.

While I was schlepping, I bought the second book in the series as well, and it’s sitting on the shelf, waiting. It may wait for a while, or I could grab it on the way into the tub. The problem (if one could call it that) is that since then, I’ve stopped at the Traveler (Books and Food) in Union, CT off 84, and now I have another half-dozen cheap used books on the shelf, and some of those might be even better.

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.