![]() ![]() "I had no idea Arthur and Maurice were working on anything. She sent it to Sendak and Yorink's longtime editor, Michael di Capua. Life got in the way for both men, and the story was put in a drawer-until Lynn Caponera, Sendak's caretaker, now president of the Maurice Sendak Foundation, found the manuscript in 2016. The authors spent months fine-tuning that brainstorm into a manuscript, intending to publish it one day. In the end, like so many of Sendak's books, the friends return home safely (having eaten cake). They spun an absurd tale of two best friends, Presto and Zesto, who get caught in a strange land where they encounter goats, a pants-destroying monster and a tragic lack of cake. "It was really a way of wasting an afternoon, not often done by Maurice," Yorinks says. He said to Sendak, Why not make the pictures into a book? To only be used for two performances seemed a waste to Yorinks. Each bizarre and colorful drawing was based on a nursery rhyme, all were unrelated. ![]() They were riffing off 10 illustrations Sendak had created a decade earlier for two performances of Czech composer Leoš Janáček's Říkadla by the London Symphony Orchestra. "We were two short jazz musicians, two storytellers improvising off of each other," he writes in the Presto afterword. Those themes found their way into Presto and Zesto in Limboland (out September 4), which came about one afternoon in Sendak's studio, nearly twenty years ago. ![]()
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