This is the week my childhood dies in chunks, apparently

This terrifying image is one of the stage sets for the ballet Nutcracker, designed by Maurice Sendak. His designs and sketches for the show were incorporated into a handsomely bound edition of the actual story "Nutcracker" by E.T.A. Hoffman, which I received as a Christmas present as a kid, read a couple of times and refused to open again for a couple of years because all the very... toothsome... illustrations utterly terrified me.

(As an aside, this was also my first audiobook - six cassette tapes worth of Christopher Plummer (!!!) reading the story and scored with Tchaikovsky's suite.)

Maurice Sendak's books and illustrations continue to terrify me now that I'm grown, but it's a more delicious sort of terror, the sort that remembers what it felt like to be scared of the monsters in the closet or under the bed, but now knows they either don't exist or are harmless.

He will be missed. :(

ha

I must have a list of Other Better Things To Do, if my urge to return to Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates is this strong....

ETA: finding out its available through Steam is NOT helping.