Drippy and Sticky have come to the Busytown fire station to paint it. Then the alarm goes off. What follows is exactly the kind of controlled catastrophe Richard Scarry built a career on: hoses that will not behave, firefighters sliding down the pole into wet paint, a fire truck going out the door with everything on it, and one small cat somewhere in the corner of every spread doing something entirely unrelated.

Scarry died in 1994 having taught roughly three generations of children what a wrench is. His pages reward the second and the tenth reading differently, because there is always more happening in the background than the story needs, and a four year old will find it and point at it.

Twenty-four pages, eight inches square, in the paperback Pictureback format. It is light, it is cheap enough to hand over without flinching, and it will be read to pieces by the child who is currently obsessed with fire trucks.