Flashback to ’05. It’s my first year as an elementary school librarian and I’m eager to share my personal favorite books to students. I love Roald Dahl and I especially loved his funny, exciting, and poignant “Boy: Tales of Childhood“. Our library didn’t own a copy, so I fired off an order and waited with anticipation of how I was going to promote it to high heavens and watch the circulations pile up. When it arrived I pulled it out of the box and saw this:

It’s an unfortunate cover. An otherwise stellar book that is covered in something less than kid-friendly. Sure enough, try as I might, “Boy” was an extremely hard sell. Come to find out this is the cover for adult readers. Adult readers shmabult readers, this one just doesn’t work. Luckily there are many other versions available.