About


Misty Mountain Books' unknown author was a feisty old character from a village very far away. An unwilling writer and irritable illustrator who just wanted to be left alone. Sometimes, in the middle of a sleepless night,  the old withered woman would get into the zone with an unprecedentedly good idea which she then quickly wrote down and forgot straight away. The next day she would discover it again in her knitting bag and wonder who put it there. She'd read it, read it again, read it aloud so her ears could hear it also, and then a miracle would happen: she'd start to see pictures in her head. She'd dream about it every night and every day, even with her eyes open, until with some urgency she'd go rummaging for paper and pencils, brushes and paints and sit down at her wobbly old table and start to draw... totally against her will, of course. 

Old Creaky Boots from down in the village would pay her a visit once a year to "check the chimney" just before winter. He didn't want a fire again like the first year she moved in. He always mumbled about the crumpled up papers and pages full of paint splatters everywhere and she would allow him to clear them away.  "Fire hazard" was his excuse.

What she didn't know was that he would take all of it back to his printing shop, spread open those very papers and then proceed to straighten every page out carefully with his big knobbly fingers, sort all of it into the correct order and start to print some wonderfully weird books.

Every year around Christmas he would put another wonderfully weird book in the old girl's letterbox, together with an envelope with lots of thank you notes and notes of another kind. She would find all this in her letterbox when she goes for her daily stroll and for one whole day and maybe for a few days after, she'd be less grumpy and quarrelsome and momentarily wear a hint of a smile on one corner of her mouth as she wondered who had brought her this wonderfully weird book along with the rest of the goodies, enough for another year. She was old enough to know that Santa didn't really exist and below the title of the book it only stated: "by Misty Mountain". Who was that anyway?

It remained a mystery, a wonderfully weird one at that.


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