It’s funny but this was one of the first major picture book trailers I ever saw. Full discloser, my husband is an acquaintance of the creator (now on staff of that new Tim Allen TV show), being a film student and all.

I have always remembered and been fond of the book trailer that was constructed for Flotsam. Then he tosses it into the sea, where we see it acting out a couple of adventures until the last picture in the book A girl on a tropical beach reaches for the camera, half-buried in the sand.” When last we see of our hero he has taken a picture of himself holding the last photo with the Melville camera. And when he gets out his microscope he can see all the way back to the very first picture in the batch ever taken. Our boy gets out his magnifying glass and sees even more pictures of kids holding pictures of kids. In it, a girl holds a picture of a boy holding a picture of a boy, holding a picture of a girl, and so on. The last photo, however, is the most interesting of them all. Mechanical fish swimming with real ones, hot-air pufferfish, entire civilizations living on the backs of gigantic starfish… and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The pictures he gets back, however, are nothing a person could imagine. Intrigued, the boy plucks out the film and takes it to a one hour photo store. On its front are the words, ‘Melville underwater camera’. When he emerges he’s sitting on the sand with an old-fashioned camera beside him.

The description from my review reads: “A scientifically minded young man is closely examining the various critters and crabs he finds washed up along the beach shore when he’s suddenly doused in a wave.

Of course, that would mean not getting any more Wiesner books and we cannot have that, can we?

The three time Caldecott Award winner is going to have to stop making books someday if he doesn’t want to cause a revolt amongst all the other author/illustrators out there. Will it continue to slip over the years or will it remain here in the brains of adults and children everywhere? Hard to predict.Īt any rate, at long last David Wiesner makes an appearance on today’s list. Last time this book clocked in at an impressive #58. An amazing book that exemplifies the saying “a picture is worth a thousand words.” A great book for sharing with kids.

Flotsam weisner