Bad Day at Riverbend

VAN ALLSBURG, Chris. Bad Day at Riverbend. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1995. 4to, [30]pp. Black half-cloth spine stamped in silver, with red boards, pictorially stamped in black. Black endpapers; color and b&w illustrations on nearly every page. A bright, clean copy, with light bumping at upper end of binding on pages, in original pictorial dust jacket (slight wear to upper spine end). Signed by two-time Caldecott Medalist, Chris Van Allsburg.

First edition. A clever tale-in-a-tale of a western town beset by a mysterious substance shown in the illustrations as scribbling color lines. At the storys end, the view pulls back to reveal that the story has been unfolding in a coloring book in which a young child now seen has been coloring with gleeful abandon.