Gill, Bob; Balloon for a Blunderbuss, A

This lovingly restored 1960s children’s classic takes design lovers of all ages on a fantastic journey, via an imaginative and entertaining series of trades and swaps that starts small, with a butterfly, and ends up including absolutely everything in the world, from straw hats to the stars in the sky. A beautifully woven sequence of entertaining text and bold illustrations, written by Alastair Reid and illustrated by Bob Gill, this book will delight the youngest and oldest of readers.

This book takes the reader on an imaginative, inspiring journey around the world. It all begins with a drawing of a pair of hands, gently cupped around an unseen object:’I have a butterfly in my hands. What will you give me for my butterfly? “I will give you a wishbone.” What would I do with a wishbone? “Well, you could trade it for a kite with a tail…or a Chinese Lantern. Or, if you like, for a flag. Then you could trade your flag for a straw hat, and for a straw hat, you could get a green umbrella or a sea horse. “I could trade my sea horse for a row of tin soldiers or ninety-seven stamps or six hundred and fifty toothpicks or a shirt with my name on it. But I think I’d wait and trade it for a ship in a bottle. Now, a ship in a bottle is worth a gumball machine. And I might trade a gumball machine for a brass horn, and the brass horn for a blunderbuss, and the blunderbuss for a balloon I could fly in.”

From the unseen butterfly in the hand to the blunderbuss, the balloon and beyond, Bob Gill lovingly illustrates an ever-expanding list of items, which grows to encompass, among other things, two rocking horses, a small zoo with a lion, a little town and eventually a whole forest with thousands of trees, which you could possibly trade for two stars, if you wanted to. But it would be even better to trade it for an island, and the ocean all round, until in the end, after many, many more trades, you would have everything.