Animated ThumbtackWhen I was in fourth grade, a classmate introduced me to a rather bizarre book that he had found in our school's library. The book was "The Animated Thumbtack Railroad Dollhouse & All-Around Surprise Book (Evening Edition)" by Louis Phillips and Lynn Braswell" and I had never seen anything quite like it. The book was basically a hodgepodge of silliness, irreverent jokes and strange black & white graphics. I absolutely loved it. Over the course of my next few years at that school, I checked it out a number of times. When I left the school, I suppose I forgot about it for a long time although from time to time, I got the urge to look around for it at libraries and bookstores, but I couldn’t find another copy.
 
Several years ago, back when finding used books on the web was a bit more difficult than it is today, I got the urge to seek out a copy of this book to see if it was still as cool as I remembered it to be.  An initial search through Amazon.com netted a used copy for somewhere around $110.  I pretty much figured that I would never find an affordable copy at that point, so I stopped looking for a while.  Imagine my surprise when I looked on Abebooks.com a few weeks ago and found an ex-library copy for $10!
 
My copy of the book arrived in the mail a few weeks ago and it is indeed just as I remembered.  The book is quirky, eccentric, and really, really funny.  It starts with a dedication by author Louis Phillips to " the one person who has stuck with me through thick and thin and whose faith in my work is not diminished:  ME." On the Library of Congress info page at the beginning of the book, the reader is advised that he/she is holding a "Deluxe Autographed Edition" of the book which is signed by none other than William Shakespeare.
 
The narrator, or "host" of the book, is a character named Peter Gerard, Esq. Mr. Gerard looks suspiciously like one of the knights from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail." The illustrations in the book are a lot like the illustrations in the "For Beginners" series (see "Einstein for Beginners," "Marx for Beginners,"  "Darwin for Beginners," etc.), as they include a fair amount of humorously captioned reproductions of paintings, advertisements, et cetera.   "Animated Thumbtack" features number puzzles, historical trivia and information about animals, including a series of pages devoted to ostriches.  About midway through the book, there is a feature called "The Real Life Retreat Game" which is basically a two-page spread that resembles a board game in which each space requires the player to go back 2 spaces.
 
One of my favorite features of the book is "The Peter Stuyvesant Two Heads Are Better Than One Page" which basically just consists of the page title and several identical portraits of Peter Stuyvesant.  It’s funny because it makes absolutely no sense.

The book’s index includes an acknowledgment of the “Society of Indexers” for “providing the proper index format and assisting in the preparation of (the) index.”  As for the index itself, here’s a sample:
 
eight, page, 8
eighteen, page, 18
eighty, page 80
eighty-eight, page 88
 
...and so on.  I dont know about everoyone else, but to me, it's just hilarious.

All in all, this is a really unique book that is extremely entertaining. To this day, I’ve really never seen anything like it and it will be a real pleasure to pass on the laughs by sharing it with my own kids.
Further Reading
The Animated Thumbtack Railroad Dollhouse & All-Around Surprise Book (Evening Edition) Amazon.com listing