One Potato Review

Strangely, the one in John Burningham’s catalogue that is harder to find than almost any of the others - Courtney, Aldo, The Magic Bed - which are ever in circulation in our nation’s great libraries, though hardly anyplace else. There is no good reason for this, except that booksellers have conceivably mistaken this artist’s timelessness as old-fashioned. Indeed we feel an almost physical nostalgia when we happen upon Simp and Courtney and the rest, because they look like nothing else out there: not beautiful necessarily, or strikingly skillful, still unapologetically original. “You’re not very pretty, are you?” says one of the other strays to Simp in the dog-catcher’s van, “and you’re fat.” Yeah, but she’s getting shot out of a cannon by the end.