I just discovered today there is a little kids book called "who's afraid of the big bad book" where the main character jumps into a book of fairy tales!!!

how cool!

What's the author's name?

How many other earlier (pre-Thursday) bookjumpers can other fforumites remember? There were Harold Shea & his associates, in the 'Enchanter' stories by DeCamp & Pratt (&, more recently, Stasheff), who visited several works of literature as well as various mythologies. And the children in at least one of Edward Eager's books. And...

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"Warning! Prifjfygeyegyugrjkhththith!"

*giggle* at Simon's sig.

But I can't think of any bookjumpers.



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Do something pretty while you can...

The author is Lauren Child.

But i'm not sure this is pre-jasper...

Not a book, but there's a n episode of Dangermouse where he falls asleep reading 'Don Coyote', and Penfold ends up tilting at a giant windmill that Greenback is using to suck up all the vegetables in La Mancha. Fortunately Stilletto gets a bit carried away and shoots the sails off the windmill as the felons try to escape.

I realise this may make no sense to the majority, but thought it worth mentioning...



PSD

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This is the work of an Italian narco-anarchic collective. Don't bother insulting them, they can't read English anyway.

I just watched a Scrappy doo (not by choice, i hasten to add) where Scooby falls asleep at the cinema when they're watching Pinocchio, and ends up with a huge long nose. Oh, and they all get turned into donkeys, for some reason. It's a while since i've seen/ read Pinocchio...did that happen????

This makes little sense *and* is entirely irrelevant. I thought it would fit in nicely.



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Do something pretty while you can...

*attempts to pronounce Simon's sig*

Phthunnily enoupffth... exthpghcuse me... *adjusts tongue, teeth and soft palate* ...ah, that's better. Funnily enough, as I was saying, shortly before I read LIAGB, I actually had an idea for a book-jumping character myself. The idea was that she earned a living from playing various minor roles in pulp fiction, to save the authors the trouble of actually writing certain stock female minor characters. Then I read LIAGB (before I read TEA, as it happened), and that rather killed that idea. I thought, aaargh, it's not original, this Mr Fforde has done something similar and much better!



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That which does not kill us makes us stranger.
(Llewelyn the dragon, Ozy and Millie)

Sarah

The Edgar Eager books with book jumping are "Knights Castle", where the children enter Ivanhoe, "The Time Garden", where they meet the characters from Little Women and from E. Nesbit's The Phoenix and the Carpet series, and the last one, "Seven Day Magic", where they check out a magic book from the library and find that it is recounting what's happening to them.

Scenarios where someone dreams they're in a book don't count. Too mundane. Only scenes where the premise is that someone is really going into the book in a way that has lasting reality for their lives counts. Bonus points if their actions can affect the story for other readers. "Seven Day Magic" is the only one of Eager's books that gets the bonus points.

I seem to have this vague recollection of seeing some movie where there was a picture of a page, and the words on the page changed because of something that happened in what the book was about. It might not have been book-jumping, though. It may have been a time travel setting, with a history or biography book getting rewritten as the travelers to the past altered history. Hmm, maybe "Somewhere in Time"? I'm not sure. I just had this feeling when I was reading the sections in Eyre Affaire where someone watched in dismay as the words rewrote themselves on the page that I'd seen that image before.

Didn't the children in Eager's books visit Oz, as well, or was that somebody else's work? (Joan Aitken?)

Oh, and the protagonists in one of Heinlein's later books visited both Oz and the universe of Doc Smith's 'Lensman' series (and maybe some other books too, but if so then I've forgotten which ones.)

I checked Eager's bibliography on the web yesterday: Four of the books have been reissued as a boxed set. I may have to get a copy of this...

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"This was willed where what is willed... can be rather silly."

And there's "The Never Ending Story" too -- but the book the kid 'jumps' into is "The Never Ending Story" so it's all quite confusing.

I seem to remember that the words on the page changed as you watched in that too.

The original edition had the text printed in two colours, with bits that were happening in 'fairytale' world in green and bits in the 'real' world in red, iirr.



Jesus saves; Buddha does incremental backup.

Ah, yes! The Never-Ending Story. That may have been the movie image I was thinking of.

I wonder if Jasper would have copyright problems using characters from that world. Probably. That's one problem with making books into movies. The movie companies tend to buy up all the rights and then be very close with them.

'The Princess Bride' is a book within a book (As well as an excellent film that I have some scurrilous anecdotes about the making of...).
Most copies available are tie-ins to the film, but a friend of mine had an earlier edition. The book that the grandfather reads is in a different typeface to the story about the boy and the grandfather. I think one was Gothic, and the other possibly printed in red, but it's over a decade since I saw that book, so memory is a bit vague.

There's also The Pagemaster they made a bad animated version of it with MacCauley Culking doing the voice of the little boy... He gets sucked into the book.

And there's also a short story by Woody Allen called "The Kuglemass Episode" where a magician builds a closet that allows you to travel into books. This community college professor with an unhappy marriage decides to go visit Emma Bovary. He visits her several times and ends up bringing her back to present day NYC and she loves it and wants him to divorce his wife. The machine malfunctions and Emma is stuck in his world. He pays for Emma to stay at a posh hotel and it's breaking him because all she wants to do is shop and eat bon-bons.

The machine is repaired and he sends her back and then decides to go visit her one last time, but the machine breaks and he gets stuck inside of an old Spanish language textbook and got chased by the word "tener" ('to have' in Spanish) for the rest of eternity.

It's actually VERY funny (and I'm not a big Woody Allen fan). As soon as I saw Mycroft's Prose Portal, that was the first thing I thought of. LOL

If you get a chance, it's really worth trying to find. I really enjoyed that story!

I'm sure I've read that story, but can't for the life of me remember where I found it. I don't recall it being written by Woody Allen, but I'll take your word for it. I enjoyed it too.

here's a link to Woody's site talking about it:
[www.woodyallen.com]

This is ringing bells. I'm sure Douglas Hofstadter has mentioned that story somewhere in one of his books (probably "Le Ton Beau de Marot").



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That which does not kill us makes us stranger.
(Llewelyn the dragon, Ozy and Millie)

Sarah

The Princess Bride is hilarious. One of my all-time favourite films. Though no-one I know seems to have heard of it, and I thought it was a very un-heard of film until I started stumbling across all manner of references to it across the net...

Anyone read I,Q? There's a parody bit on The Princess Bride in the middle of that, made me wonder how many other good parody bits I was missing in it...



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There's a hole in my creativity bucket and it's all leaked out.

I love the Princess Bride book, but I haven't seen the film yet. I've read both of William Goldman's books about Hollywood, they're great... So did anyone else read the book without realising the bio bits were fiction too? Very embarassing...

Skiffle, tell us the anecdotes, you know you want to...



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Do something pretty while you can...

Brief anecdote about 'Princess Bride'

Christopher Sarandon, as Prince Humperdink, strides on to the balcony to addess his loyal people in the courtyard below:

"Tomorrow, my dear people.......... I shall remember my lines."

Exit one actor.


More scurrilous story told to me by owner of video rental shop in Broomhill district of Sheffield.
Cast and crew were staying in a hotel nearby. One evening, the director, Rob Reiner, sends a minion to the video shop to hire something for Reiner to watch back in his hotel room. Minion phones director on shop owner's phone, so director can choose from the films available.

Minion reads aloud title after title from shop owner's stock. Reiner is dismissive of everything. He condemns other directors and actors and refuses to hire their films. This goes on and on. Minion is getting increasingly frantic; shop owner getting less amused at hearing his entire stock being described as rubbish.

Minion picks up yet another tape and reads title down phone to unsatisfied director.
"Never heard of it," Reiner announces. "What's it about ?"
Quick-witted and annoyed shop owner promptly answers "It's a thinking man's 'Spinal Tap'."
Sound of disgust from other end of phone.

Reiner alledged to have finally settled for hiring some under-the-counter videos.

Have discovered a Bugs Bunny cartoon where he enters a book - 'Knight-Mare Hare'. It can be dated by one joke - where a sign reads 'Merlin a Monroe'... Not as funny as Roadrunner, in my opinion, but nevermind...



PSD

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This is the work of an Italian narco-anarchic collective. Don't bother insulting them, they can't read English anyway.