Where's Wally? In Hollywood

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But there is something frightening about the books as well, something about the inherent malignity of crowds.

Where’s Wally? asks Cambridgeshire County Council’s library Where’s Wally? asks Cambridgeshire County Council’s library

And clearly all the activities you find in our libraries are really important to that as the nights draw in and people can feel lonely and isolated. And everywhere, jammed together, teetering on ladders, in crow's nests, on tightropes, are Handford's utterly distinctive crowds. In the first book the scenes were familiar - on the beach, at the station, on the ski slope - but witty and energetic and beautifully executed. And that's not to mention the obsessive effort that must be necessary for Handford himself to construct these human anthills.

If I'm going to find Woof's bones, not to mention Wally in the land of the Wallies, I'll need a year's sabbatical and my first pair of reading glasses. Over the years I've been addicted to the usual sorts of things - chess, Tetris, sudoku, Twix bars - and in the early 90s I briefly became addicted to the Where's Wally? James Joyce reputedly said that he wanted people to spend their lives solving the puzzles of Finnegans Wake. The first book wasn't exactly sparsely populated, but by comparison with the new one it looks like Waiting for Godot. And Wally's role in the crowd is strange as well, always there, somewhere, peeking out with his calm smile, untouched, uninvolved, all-accepting.

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More than that, despite the giant scale, the huge scale, there's no sense of the sublime or the vertiginous.In the book after that, The Wonder Book, the climax was finding Woof in the land of Woofs, which was like looking for a black pin in a black pinstack in a dark room with your hands tied behind your back. Handford's settings vary from the humdrum to the hallucinogenic, from a sporting field (full of characteristic visual puns that children will love: a pear skater, a tennis "ace" and so on) to a world where balloons and Victorian steamers battle green dragons.

Happy hunting | Books | The Guardian Happy hunting | Books | The Guardian

They're like the teeming CGI hordes in The Lord of the Rings, but the closer you look the more you see - little patterns, jokes, connections, sly references to previous pages or previous books. Wally was on a quest, along with a Gandalf-like wizard, and wandered with his equable smile through worlds of battling monks, flying carpets, red dwarves, underground hunters and, most disturbing of all, the Land of the Wallies. The individuals are lightly sketched, a couple of dots and a squiggle for a face, seen from a great distance. Each one is like a vast Victorian narrative painting, Frith's Derby Day, but done in the style of Tintin - and with jokes, and infinite patience.As winter draws in, and people look for low-cost fun things to do, a visit to the library is among the most economic things to do in Cambridgeshire.