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In this Franklin Classic Storybook, our hero can count forwards and backwards. He can zip zippers and button buttons. He can slide down a riverbank by himself. He can even sleep alone in his small, dark shell. But Franklin is so messy that he can hardly ever find his things! AGES: 3-8 AUTHOR: In 1983, Toronto journalist Paulette Bourgeois decided to write a children's book. All she needed was an idea. That idea came one night as she was watching an episode of the television series M*A*S*H. The character of Hawkeye Pierce refused to enter a cave because he was claustrophobic. "I'm so scared that if I were a turtle, I'd be afraid of my own shell," he said. Thus was born Franklin in the Dark, a tale of a little green turtle who's afraid of small dark places, including his own shell. The name of the turtle came, Bourgeois thought, out of the blue. "Now I realize that Hawkeye's full name is Franklin Benjamin Pierce!" Brenda Clark began drawing as a small child and realized by the age of 17 that she wanted to become a commercial artist. She studied Illustration at Sheridan College in Oakville, Ontario, and graduated with an honours diploma in 1977. Shortly afterward, Brenda found that there was plenty of work for a freelancer in educational publishing and her first jobs were for elementary school books. This experience gave her plenty of published examples for her portfolio and a better understanding of how to interpret a story with pictures. Colour illustrations