The Disappearance of Ichabod Crane at the Library!

Now you can purchase The Disappearance of Ichabod Crane: A Play in Five Acts at the Clifton Public Library.

Reacquaint yourself with one of American literature’s most famous ghosts, the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow, in The Disappearance of Ichabod Crane: A Play in Five Acts by Andrew Winkel. An abridged version of this play ran from 2006 to 2010 at the Bourbonnais Township Park District’s annual Night at Sleepy Hollow event. Now for the first time readers can see the script as it was originally envisioned.

On the day following Ichabod Crane’s disappearance from Sleepy Hollow, school-children Tom, Mary, and Piper meet to lead a search party for their missing school-master. Over five acts, Winkel uses the frame of the school-children’s search to introduce characters and events from The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving. Through this device readers meet Ichabod Crane, Hans Van Ripper, Katrina and Baltus Van Tassel, Brom Bones, and of course, The Headless Horseman. Will they escape with their heads? Or do they join their school-master?

Winkel has also partnered Washington Irving’s  The Legend of Sleepy Hollow alongside the play. Not content to simply copy a public domain version from the Internet, this specially prepared edition was OCR scanned and edited from a 1920 copy of the story, then compared for consistency against three additional public domain versions. In addition to the original story, Winkel included over forty footnotes to help modern readers navigate the historical context of the story and Irving’s challenging vocabulary.
The 106 page trade paperback book is available for order through most bookstores, online retailers, and will be specially available at the Exploration Station gift shop (459 North Kennedy Dr., Bourbonnais) and the Clifton Public Library (150 East Fourth Ave., Clifton).  Purchase price is $8.95. ISBN 978-0-9837905-0-1.

Many of our patrons are aware that I wear multiple hats: I teach middle school in Bradley during the day, I work at the library most evenings and Saturday mornings during the school year, I live with my family in Clifton; here is another hat  that I wear: I am a writer and have created my own publishing company, Hierophantasm, to self-publish some of my work. As a local writer, there is no better place to have your work available to the public than the public library. I have already donated a copy to the library for those patrons who wish to simply read it without purchasing a copy. As of this posting date that copy is at our cataloging office to be added so it can circulate.