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The Big Orange Splot cover
RAISE THE FUTURE

The Big Orange Splot

by Daniel Pinkwater

A seagull drops paint on his roof. He decides to go with it.

For you if

your child needs permission to be exactly as strange and specific as they actually are

⚡ Choose Your Route ⚡

Not sold directly on this site. Support indie bookstores with a new copy, or go sustainable with a used one.

Buy New on Bookshop.org

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Find Used on Better World Books

Secondhand & sustainable

$9 MSRP
Reference price shown. Other editions may be available.

Mr. Plumbean lives on a neat street where all the houses look the same. Then a seagull drops a can of orange paint on his roof. Instead of repainting, he decorates his house to look like his dreams. His neighbors are horrified. Then one by one, they do the same. Pinkwater published this in 1977 and it remains the most joyful picture book about nonconformity ever written. No moralizing, no villain, no big lesson — just a man who decided his house should look like his dreams and the neighborhood that eventually caught the feeling. The book that tells children: your neighborhood should look like your dreams.

Where This Book Lives

Themes
conformityindividuality

Related Viewing

Shares a topic, theme, or setting with this book in the catalog.

Idiocracy poster

Idiocracy(2006)

dir. Mike Judge

Anti-intellectualism, played out five centuries ahead.

An average man wakes from hibernation 500 years in the future to find humanity's intelligence has collapsed so far that he's now the smartest person alive.

Why it’s here: A dumb comedy about the actual thing this whole catalog exists to resist — what happens when a culture stops valuing thinking at all. Funnier and more direct about anti-intellectualism than most films that take the subject seriously.

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