Product Details
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Unabridged Classics)

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Unabridged Classics)
By Mark J. Twain

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Product Description

Who could forget the pranks, the adventures, the sheer fun of Tom Sawyer? It’s something every child should experience and every child will love. From Tom’s sly trickery with the whitewashed fence—when he cleverly manipulates everyone so they happily do his work for him—to his and Becky Thatcher’s calamities in Bat Cave, the enjoyment just never ends.
The illustrations for this series were created by Scott McKowen, who, with his wife Christina Poddubiuk, operates Punch & Judy Inc., a company specializing in design and illustration for theater and performing arts. Their projects often involve research into the visual aspects of historical settings and characters. Christina is a theater set and costume designer and contributed advice on the period clothing for the illustrations.

Scott created these drawings in scratchboard ­ an engraving medium which evokes the look of popular art from the period of these stories. Scratchboard is an illustration board with a specifically prepared surface of hard white chalk. A thin layer of black ink is rolled over the surface, and lines are drawn by hand with a sharp knife by scraping through the ink layer to expose the white surface underneath. The finished drawings are then scanned and the color is added digitally.

Product Details

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #25667 in Books
  • Published on: 2004-10-01
  • Number of items: 1
  • Binding: Hardcover
  • 224 pages

Customer Reviews

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer5
This is one of my favourite childhood stories. Tom's adventures are of the kind every child wants to experience. Loved it, read it many times.

Great book, of course, but...3
We wanted to get a hard-cover Tom Sawyer for our son, someone he could treasure for a long time. This edition looks handsome enough, and has a ribbon bookmark, which is nice. It was a little disappointing that this all-American classic was printed in China. The book warps back and forth with changes in humidity; that's something I haven't seen any other book do. The story about how the illustrations were done is what hooked us; they are nice enough, but they are very small and there aren't so many of them. They really don't bring the book to life as we were imagining they might.

The Greatest American of All?5
It being the Fourth of July, or Small Explosives Day as I call it (training kids early to think bombs are fun can pay off with trillions of tax dollars, no questions asked), I am reminded of my favorite American, Mr. Sam Clemens.
I remember it was a hot July day, I was five or six and happily wandering the local library, and I saw an old copy of Tom Sawyer on a shelf. I'd heard of it, saw the cover of a kid with a slingshot in his back pocket, and said, "This is for me!"
I have never looked back.
Huck Finn is a deeper book, no doubt, dealing with deeper issues, while TS is all about the joys and pains of being a kid, and especially the joys of being a smart little rebel. No other book ever made America seem more appealing to me.
Twain understands what this country was meant to be, could be, should be, might be. He knows what kids are about, and how much smarter than adults they can be. From Tom Sawyer to Letters From The Earth rises and falls an arc that few artists of any nation can touch. Twain knows that this is the best and the worst country on earth, full of truly good-hearted if misinformed people who would love to trust their leaders if they could.
Above all, Twain lets us laugh at ourselves while seeing our foibles in the light of day.
There's a game where you pick three figures in history you'd like to have dinner with. I always used to choose Christ, Buddha, and Shakespeare. Thinking about it now, I might have to go with Twain at the head of the table.
Alas, to be betwixt Twain and Shakespeare...o, to lean back and listen. And laugh.
Thank you, Mr. Clemens. You will always be the real Uncle Sam.