Dibs

In today’s weird book news … there’s a crisis in the stuffed-animal industry! Plump squashy stuffed toys (which our Brit pals call “plush toys”) are expensive to transport and hard to keep clean in stores where disgusting little fingers streak them with effluent, according to a man whose company has spent ten years “developing products to deal with the ever growing problem of shipping plush.” Donald Spector and his associates at the Innovation Fund are solving the problem by inventing a line of children’s books whose characters pop out as stuffed toys nearly two feet long: “The value of having a character emerge from the inside is going to be sensational and [the] books are going to be fun. … A book can be about ‘My Trip to Disney World’ and from the back cover a 20-inch plush figure pops out of the book! The technology is a major advance. The product looks and feels like a regular stuffed character but it can be compressed and recompressed continuously. It is like a Jack-in-the-box, except it comes out of the box and feels like a plush animal, not like a batch of springs.” … Well, that’s a relief! I hate batches of springs.