Untitled, 1971 (drawing for I’m Papa Snapp And These Are My Favorite No Such Stories). Collection Musée Tomi Ungerer, Centre international de l’Illustration, Strasbourg © Tomi Ungerer/Diogenes Verlag AG, Zürich. Tomi Ungerer has written and illustrated over 30 books for children, along with over 100 other books.... One of my favorites is I am Papa Snap and These Are My Favorite No Such Stories, 16 mostly absurd stories with illustrations. One story is only 14 words long, another is told in three sentences (although the first sentence runs for 14 lines and gives a whole brief history of the pink gasoline station). I particularly love the story of the very hungry sofa and also the story about Mr. and Mrs. Limpid. Here is the Limpid story in its entirety: Mr. Limpid is blind. Mrs. Limpid is lame. They are old. They are happy. They have each other. There’s a whole tender life of two people contained in these words, which remind me of my parents when they grew elderly, one able to drive, the other able to remember where they were going and how to get back home. I also love Mr. Tuber Sprout, who every morning for seven years runs for the train to work and misses it. “The station clock is always five minutes ahead of mine,” he exclaims. “But at least it keeps me from going to work.” These brief, ridiculous stories make me want to try to write my own no such stories in which no such things probably ever happened (that we know of). But, like Ungerer, we can still imagine a world of wacky possibilities. ....some of Ungerer’s phrases are just hilarious: Mr. and Mrs. Kaboodle buy a new nest from a “local nidologist.” Or here is the Doctor Stigma Lohengreen’s diagnosis of Mr. Lido Rancid: “There is a PICKLE jammed in your vena cava, and the gangliated chords of your sympathetic are all tangled up.” Or, “Zink Slugg bought a new car. It had lots of cylinders, coordinated cram-notch gears, coupled crush-brakes, two-speed grinders, cobra upholstery, an electronic police detector, strobe headlights, and a quantity of whatnots.” (http://www.bookologymagazine.com/article/tomi-ungerer-far-out-toward-the-heart/)