The Kidnapping of Prince Oleomargarin

In a Paris hotel, one evening in 1879, Mark Twain was staying with his daughters, who begged him to tell them a story. Choosing a sketch from a magazine to start from, Twain began telling the story of John, a poor boy who owned some magic seeds, who finds himself facing the task of rescuing a kidnapped prince. Twain would later jot down some rough notes about this story, but the tale remained unfinished… until today.

Taken from the Mark Twain archive at the University of California, Berkeley, Twain's notes are today the basis of a fairy tale, picked up again more than a hundred years later. With fragments of Twain's tale and an interrupted travel story, author Philip Stead has written a tale that lets us imagine what Twain's work would have been like had it been written in full. Adorned with the beautiful, delightful and tender illustrations of Erin Stead, this is a story that reaches us for the first time in the form of a children's picture book. This story by America's most legendary author comes under the vision of two of the most important names in contemporary children's literature.