My First Dictionary

A library assistant in Leeds, England, is doing wickedly subversive things with the illustrations he finds in children’s books. Ross Horsley’s blog, My First Dictionary, matches the drawings to definitions of his own devising: Pocketbook is described as the bag Mother uses to carry money and Xanax. A clone, we learn, is “a copy of a person. How would you know if your daddy had been replaced by a clone?” The adults in Horsley’s world tend toward the lecherous; the pets are abandoned; the children, sinister. Older readers will be reminded of Shel Silverstein’s classic Uncle Shelby’s ABZ Book. And younger readers should probably be warned away.