This is a book to read! This is a book to see! It's a book to have, it's a book to give. It will inspire, it will amaze. If you don't have a coffee table, it's worth getting one just to put this book on top of it.

For someone who, as far as I have been able to discern, never directly participated in the medium, Buster Keaton is a key figure in the development of animation. He was a direct inspiration for some of the finest artists in the field. His influence on Walt Disney and his studio are obvious.

Included in this book's 240 pages are 225 photographs chosen from thousands of images of Buster -- family photos and film stills -- and many from the original 8x10 negatives. As Manoah Bowman points out in his notes on the photography, "...[S]ome of the most famous stills of Keaton were cartoonish 'gag' shots that did not even appear in the films they were supposedly representing. For example, two of the most instantly recognizable photographs of Keaton from The Navigator (Keaton sitting stoically on the steamship, and Keaton hanging off the rigging ropes looking out at the sea) are nowhere to be found in the film."

Keaton's use of publicity "gag" shots was picked up by the Disney studios in their use of special publicity artwork for individual cartoons. A picture can be worth a thousand words, or maybe sell a thousand tickets. Mickey Mouse's first starring release, Steamboat Willie (released November 18, 1928), was a clear pun on Keaton's recent (May 12, 1928) success Steamboat Bill Jr. Moreover, Buster meets Mickey Mouse in one of Mickey's earliest cartoons. Buster's films were screened regularly to "inspire" the animators and gag men at the studio. The "borrowing" of gags or ideas was inevitable.

Buster as Lonesome Polecat, with Granville Owen as Li’l Abner and Bud Jamison as Hairless Joe. © 1940 RKO Radio Pictures, Inc. Courtesy of The Aarchives/Will Ryan.

Buster guest-stars as an animated character in cartoons for other studios, too. He played a cartoon character in the first Li'l Abner feature film. And of course he began his career as a living cartoon. The family act, The Three Keatons, consisted of knock-about, grotesque caricatures of shanty Irish -- right out of the funny pages. They presaged Happy Hooligan and Jiggs and Maggie, who later went on to star in animated cartoons.

And speaking of funny pages, here's a conundrum for the ages: Which Buster came first, the Keaton or the Brown?

Buster was responsible for making a film actor out of an East Coast mug named Edward Brophy, who went on to create the voice of Timothy Mouse, famed sidekick of Dumbo. Buster was longtime pals with fellow ukulele strummer Cliff Edwards. They were in three feature films together including one shot primarily in Buster's Beverly Hills home! Cliff went on to create the voices of Jiminy Cricket and another Dumbo sidekick, Jim Crow (if that's still the character's name). Buster's co-star in his early talkies was Jimmy Durante, who later famously hosted (as an animated figure) a Rankin-Bass stop-motion perennial.