Where's Wally? In Hollywood

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Last week we launched our BeWinterWise campaign to join up all the activities, events and advice to keep people safe, well and active during the winter months,” said Cllr Tom Sanderson, Chair of the Communities, Social Mobility and Inclusion Committee. 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.

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

by author and illustrator Martin Hanford – listed among missing titles, it tops the list of books that the county council’s library staff want to recover. Of course, we have to find Wally and Wenda and the rest of them, as well as various objects they've dropped: a key, a camera, a scroll, Woof's bone. 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. In warm and friendly surroundings, you can find a good book – either printed, audio or e-books, a free game or online access or join a special activity like a reading group. 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 Wally's role in the crowd is strange as well, always there, somewhere, peeking out with his calm smile, untouched, uninvolved, all-accepting. Is someone who plays in a chamber orchestra more skilled than a person who plays in a philharmonic orchestra?

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

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. Handford's simple idea was to draw a dozen or so crowd scenes, in each of which you had to find Wally, a cheery bespectacled nerd in a red-and-white hooped sweater. 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.And everywhere, jammed together, teetering on ladders, in crow's nests, on tightropes, are Handford's utterly distinctive crowds.

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More than that, despite the giant scale, the huge scale, there's no sense of the sublime or the vertiginous.

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