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Comment by andrewla | Hacker News Reader

I never experienced Richard Scarry as a child myself. I discovered it for my own children in a pile of books left on someone's stoop to give away. I was immediately blown away by the whimsy and astonishing care put into every detail. My kids obsessively hunted for the "goldbug" on each page of Cars and Trucks and Things That Go (although they never developed a taste for finding Waldo).

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I “read” cars and trucks and things that go for my 2 year old every night. He recently found out that goldbug is on every page and now he won’t let me turn the page until we find him. It’s genuinely a lovely book. We got ours from buy nothing, it’s very old and taped up and it has a bunch of writing in it by a kid named Max.

When your son's interest in finding goldbug inevitably flags, what worked for my kiddo was theatrically sighing, "I wish goldbug was on this page. Oh well..." and then acting like I was going to turn the page before I could be corrected. Then you can escalate to "accidentally" covering goldbug up with your thumb and pretending not to know he's under there. It's basically DLC for your board book!

I was obsessed with Richard Scarry’s intricate drawings as a very small child (which led into devouring all the cutaway books of all sorts of machines as a slightly older child), but I didn’t pick up on the goldbug thing until someone pointed it out a few weeks ago.

Same. I think I've read C&T&TtG 200 times to my son.

Making it to the beach scene always feels like an accomplishment :D

I got the Swedish translation as a kid more than 40 years ago and also spent plenty of time trying to find the goldbug. Still have the book and my kids loved it as well.

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