“We bought what were called Eurail passes, which would give you unlimited rail travel in Europe for three months. Huck, an illustrator in his own right who splits his time between Gstaad and Vienna, remembers his first trip when he was ten years old in 1963. My father was a very cultured person and I think he always felt very much at home in Europe.” He always loved the Alps, history, languages, good wine, good food. “He came over newly married in 1950 and they spent several months travelling around Europe – most of the time in Austria and Paris.
“My father always loved being in Europe,” his son Richard, nicknamed Huck after Huckleberry Finn, told swissinfo.ch. The Scarry European adventure began after the Second World War, during which the young illustrator had worked on Allied magazines in North Africa. Scarry died in Gstaad, canton Bern, in 1994, having written and illustrated more than 300 books, including What Do People Do All Day? (1968), Cars and Trucks and Things That Go (1974) – can you find Goldbug hidden on every page? – and Best Christmas Book Ever (1981). “It’s a precious thing to be communicating to children, helping them discover the gift of language and thought,” he once wrote. But his career didn’t take off until 1963, with the publication of his Best Word Book Ever, in which his trademark style of “fun education”, using big, minutely detailed and incredibly “busy” pages, is apparent. Generations of children – and parents – around the world have grown up with lederhosen-wearing Huckle Cat, alpine-hatted Lowly Worm and other anthropomorphic characters whose endlessly revisitable adventures have helped sell hundreds of millions of books.īorn in 1919, Scarry (rhymes with “Harry”) now ranks alongside Dr Seuss and Beatrix Potter in the sales charts. Indeed, Switzerland influenced his illustrations, as his son Huck Scarry tells swissinfo.ch, with Swiss clothing, architecture and landmarks appearing in several books.
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