I LOVE YOU DUDE. by Radunsky, Vladimir - (2005)

New York:: Gulliver Books / Harcourt, , (2005). Hardcover first edition -. Fine in fine dust jacket.. First printing. A rather surrealistic children's book by this award-winning children's author and illustrator written from "the point of view of 'a brave young doodle named Dude.' The enigmatic piece of graffiti - an improbably long-legged blue elephant wearing clunky brown shoes, with the words 'I Love You Dude' lettered above it - is painted by a child on a whitewashed wall. 'Nobody was happy with me,' Dude says as passersby grumble about vandalism. 'I was alone, ashamed, and miserable.' He leaps clumsily off the wall and seeks a surface he can call home. At first he enjoys being a decal on a mug, but he gallops away when a garish woman uses the cup for scalding coffee. He contemplates becoming a tattoo on a sunbather's ponderous belly, but decides 'it was not the life for mealways hiding under shirts, rarely seeing human faces... no.' . . Radunsky tells the story in flat mixed-media collages that suggest carelessly painted public walls and cheap wheat-pasted flyers." (Publishers Weekly). Oversized format. 45 pp.