I finally won an original Monster Manual for a fair price in excellent condition on ebay recently. I got home from work yesterday to a lovely brown package to unwrap, my 2 year old son Arthur is very good at unwrapping gifts so he insisted on helping me opened it.
“OOO, exciting book!”, he exclaimed as we revealed the beautifully naive and colourful cover of the seminal work. “You read it to me”, how could a proud father do anything less. A most happy session was then spent as Arthur pointed to every single illustration (OK I skipped a few scary pictures very quickly before he got to them) and said, “what’s that?” Except for the Dragons and real animals because he knew exactly what they were. The picture of the sealion (think merlion rather than the pinniped) fighting the shark was of particular interest, he held the book open at that page as he drank the illustration in. He has got cuddly dragons, now I need to get him some cuddly sealions!