#679 of 1001 · June 10, 2022

Warning: there’s no happy ending here, only a grim and sobering look at history in Gary Crew and @shauncytan’s The Viewer. Tristan, a curious young boy with his head in the clouds, often wanders away from home to explore, much to the consternation of his parents. He develops a particular affinity for the town garbage dump, with its heaps and heaps of hidden treasures. One day, he comes across a box filled with binoculars, magnifying glasses, sextants, and other devices for viewing and measuring. Most fascinating of all is a stereoscope, equipped with discs containing rings of images. Through it, he gets an unvarnished glimpse at humanity’s time on earth: the chaos of the prehistoric era, the tumult of early civilizations, the discord of the Middle Ages, the cruelty of imperialism, the hazards of industrialization, and the horrors of planetary devastation. The more he looks, the more mesmerized Tristan becomes. Ultimately, he is drawn involuntarily into the strange machine and vanishes entirely. Crew weaves a haunting tale that, absent a clear moral, forces the reader to contemplate the dark saga of human brutality. Tan heightens this effect by featuring closeups of discs as the book’s central images, encoding multilayered historical symbolism within the silent, sinister visual narrative. #view #machine #device #history #book #books #childrensbooks #beautifulbook #beautifulbooks #beautifulbookcovers #picturebook #picturebooks #picturebookillustration #picturebookillustrations #picturebookart #classicchildrensbooks #childrensbookillustration #childrensliterature #illustration #kidlit #kidsbooks #bookworm #booklover #booklovers #bibliophile #bookstagram #bookstagrammer #bookstagrammers #instabook #instabooks