“The one thing even more profitable than buying low and selling high is taking something free, and selling it”

Marten Toonder is one of the most celebrated writers of the Netherlands, and also near-impossible to translate. 2012 is the ‘Toonderyear’, according to his fans. He wrote what one might call ‘fables’, about the characters of Oliver B. Bumble and Tom Puss, the latter being loosely based on Puss In Boots, and the former on the Marquis Of Carabas. Much like proper fables, his stories are often parables of the real world.

5 thoughts on ““The one thing even more profitable than buying low and selling high is taking something free, and selling it””

  3. Youri Carma

    Who is Maarten Toonder http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marten_Toonder

    From 1941 published in the Dutch newspaper ‘De Telegraaf’ called comic novels which made Maarten Toonder the most famous, with the main characters Tom Poes and Oliver B. Bommel. The graphic novel has its own characteristic size: a text page with a page wide band of pictures above, no balloons. This focuses the attention to the pictures so not distraction by balloons and the text takes on its own life. This was a mandatory requirement of the then editor JC Fraenkel of ‘De Telegraaf’. There appeared 177 Bommel stories as comic novel, later re-released several times in book form. They are commonly referred to as “newspaper comics”.

    The best stories are characterized by subtle humor and a more or less veiled social criticism (eg in the top stories The Bosses, The sample Trotteldrom, The cry of Urgje, the new thinking and the liberation of Sollidee).

    They are also characterized by a particular language. Words like ‘frame of mind’ and ‘minkukel’ got commonly known outside the adult cartoons of Toonder.

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