MARTIN, J. P. - Uncle and the Treacle Trouble - (Hardcover in Wrapper)

Book and wrapper still very good even though it belonged to a library before - Illustrated by Quentin Blake - 184 pg. - A very scarce title - 1967 First Edition.   >>>      The fourth book about Uncle, the millionaire elephant who has a B.A. degree.    >>>   Uncle has been alerted that his arch enemy Beaver Hateman is planning to sabotage a gigantic mural depicting Uncle and his good works.   The great mural, commissioned by the King of the Badgers after the defeat of the Badfort crowd at Crack House, is to be painted on the wall at Homeward by Waldovenison Smeare. To protect the mural while it is being painted Uncle employs a watchman called Sleepy Sam, who sleeps in a wheelbarrow and is paid two loaves of bread and two quarts of Koolvat. Sleepy Sam is immediately put to work when Beaver Hateman tries to climb in through Uncle's window .    >>>   Sure, theres lots of trouble with treacle going on, but we still get to meet a barrowful of first-rate Uncle characters, including Sleepy Sam, Lady Lionease, the Giddingses, Thomas and Cora Bear, the Singers and the Soapies, and Trueback and the Crookball People.  (Eric on Goodreads)   >>>   J.P. Martin (1879-1966) was born in Yorkshire into a family of Methodist ministers. He took up the family vocation, serving when young as a missionary to a community of South African diamond miners and then, during the First World War, as an Army chaplain in Palestine and Egypt, before returning to minister to parishes throughout the north of England. He died at eighty-six from a flu caught while bringing pots of honey to his parishioners in cold weather. Martin began telling Uncle stories to entertain his children, who later asked him to write them down so that they could read them to their own children; the stories were finally published as a book in 1964, when Martin was eighty-four. The jacket to the first edition of Uncle notes that the inspiration for these stories seems to come from the industrial landscape that he knew as a child.