CLICK THE IMAGE ABOVE TO READ THE ENTIRE BOOK.

The Coloring Book was on sale all over the world in places like the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum Bookstore and the MIT Museum Shop.


Shown below is a plagiarized "pirate" translation of my FORTRAN Coloring Book, first from English to German and then from FORTRAN to Pascal! The nerve of some people!


The FORTRAN Coloring Book gave rise to a flood of other books done in the style it created. Shown below are the original Coloring Book, the Hungarian translation that was authorized by the MIT Press, the pirate German translation, and two of the computer books that came along later using the Coloring Book's style. (If there is any doubt as to where the inspiration for these books came from, one has only to look at the lettering in the Index in the back of the various books.)

Larry Gonick has written a half dozen books in the general style which the Coloring Book introduced, including The Cartoon Guide to the Computer, The Cartoon Guide to Genetics, The Cartoon Guide to Physics, and The Cartoon History of the Universe. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. I just wish he didn't call my book "Witty, Bordering on Corny" in his bibliography. My book isn't bordering on corny- it is corny!


Here is a review from a review. I guess that makes it a review squared:


One of my favorite reviews was this one, from the American Mathematical Monthly for November, 1978. It was printed as a one-line summary in verse:

"A lively approach to seduce,/In manner quite sim'lar to Seuss./Handwritten, with drawings and lots of guffawings/Disposed to make Fortran transluce."


(In fact, Ted Geisel- the real Dr. Seuss sent me a nice note complimenting the Coloring Book and saying he wished he'd had a text like that when he was a student at Dartmouth. We traded autographed copies of our books. I expect that his autographed copy of my Coloring Book will bring big bucks someday at auction at Southeby's, compared to my autographed copy of The Cat In The Hat.)



 

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