“Our cult of decade anniversaries—the tenth of 9/11, the twentieth of ‘Nevermind’—are for the most part mere accidents of our fingers: because we’ve got five on each hand, we count things out in tens and hundreds. And yet the fifty-year birthday of a good children’s book marks a real passage, since it means that the book hasn’t been passed just from parent to child but from parent to child and on to child again.”
Adam Gopnik explores “Fifty years of The Phantom Tollbooth.”