BRIGGS, Raymond.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Midnight Adventure. First edition, Raymond Briggs's copy of one of the first books that he both wrote and illustrated, with his posthumous book label.Briggs began illustrating books in 1959 and, frustrated with the quality of some of the books he worked on, decided to write his own. The result was two stories, The Strange House, published in February 1961, and Midnight Adventure, published in September the same year. It was reviewed favourably, with the TLS writing that "little boys will find themselves positively enjoying in imagination thrilling encounters which would in fact scare the daylights out of them if their nerve were ever really put to the test".Briggs was the winner of numerous awards, including the Hans Christian Andersen Award, the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award, and the Kurt Maschler Award. Briggs noted that "the whole point of illustration is that it is literary. If it is not, it remains a drawing only... Something must be 'going on' in the illustration" (Horne, p. 124). He is chiefly remembered for Father Christmas (1973), Fungus the Bogeyman (1978), When the Wind Blows (1982), and the perennial classic The Snowman (1978).

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