Benjamin ArthurIllustrator, animation director & author

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Picture book Peachtree · April 13, 2027

The Treasure Collector

By David Zeltser and Benjamin Arthur, with pictures by Benjamin Arthur

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The jacket of The Treasure Collector laid flat. The back cover shows a heap of labeled treasures under the line: Sometimes you don't know your greatest treasure. The front shows Reginald the raccoon in his den reading his label maker.
Back coverFront cover

Reginald is a raccoon obsessed with the strange things humans throw away. He hauls them back to his den, puzzles over them, and gives each one a label from his trusty label maker.

One night he finds a mysterious sea star named Fiona. He labels her JUNK and tosses her in the trash. But when she fixes his broken label maker, he relabels her HERO.

There's just one problem: Fiona is drying out, and she can't tell him what she needs. To save her, Reginald has to look beyond his labels and see what she's trying to show him. When he finally does, they end up on a journey to a whole new world together.

For readers four to eight, and whoever is reading to them.

How it began

A raccoon with a label maker

David Zeltser and I came up with Reginald together. We both knew people who loved to scavenge and collect lost things, and when I was a kid I had a label maker I treasured. Once we gave the raccoon a label maker, the story unlocked. A determined raccoon labeling everything wrong was very funny to us, and having him mistake a living creature for an object turned out to be the perfect way to shake up his lonely, orderly life.

I was living with David and his family at the time, so we worked side by side. We’d spend the day on the story, and at night I’d sketch pages for us to go over the next morning. Some of those first sketches are still in the book.

The earliest versions had no words at all, only pictures and the writing on the labels, planned like a silent movie. We added words in the end, but the characters kept the expressiveness that silence gave them.

Reginald, wide-eyed, holds up a label maker he has found in a heap of trash: milk cartons, a sneaker, a soda cup, a coiled phone cord and broken glasses.
Reginald finds his label maker

Drawn by hand

Pencil, then color

Every page of the book began as a graphite drawing. The color went on afterwards, over the pencil, so every line of the drawing is still there in the finished page. Scroll on and watch Reginald set out for town.

Reginald, in his green backpack, creeps out of the moonlit woods toward a small town with a church steeple and a water tower. The picture turns from a graphite drawing into the finished color art.

Into town, from the opening pages

Reginald, a red plunger sticking out of his backpack, walks through a violet dusk forest toward the hollow at the foot of an enormous tree.
Home to the den, with a new treasure
On a moonlit autumn night Reginald climbs a maple outside the Pet Palace and spots a sea star in a cracked fish tank on top of the trash cans. The text reads: One night, back on the hunt, Reginald spotted something very interesting.
One night, back on the hunt
Back home, Reginald examines Fiona. Was it a toy? Was it a cookie? He bites her. BLEH! Definitely not a cookie! On the facing page he labels her JUNK and tosses her on the trash pile with the other treasures labeled BORING, USELESS, SILLY and DULL.
Was it a cookie? Definitely not a cookie. Fiona, labeled JUNK, before Reginald knows better.
Three drawings of Fiona the sea star fixing the label maker: tangled up with its spring, wrapped all the way around it, and snapping it back together with a CLICK, CLACK, POP.
Click. Clack. Pop. Fiona fixes the label maker, and Reginald relabels her HERO.

From the drawing table

In pencil

  • Pencil drawing of Reginald bursting out of a trash can with a plunger in his backpack, while a boy shakes his fist from a window.
    Out of the trash
  • Pencil drawing of Reginald sitting back on his tail, tongue out in concentration, punching a label into his label maker.
    Reginald, typing
  • Pencil drawing of Reginald sitting in a puddle of his own tears, head thrown back, wailing.
    Reginald weeps
  • A graphite junkyard: old cars stacked into towers, a jukebox, a carousel horse, a tractor, tires, a bowling ball and a mantel clock.
    The junkyard Drawn from photographs of real junkyards, and from friends' memories of the things they grew up with.

The authors

Two collectors

David Zeltser studied physics at Harvard and now writes picture books, graphic novels and screenplays. His books include The Night Library, illustrated by Raúl Colón, and Ninja Baby, illustrated by Diane Goode. He and Ben have been making things together since 2015. davidzeltser.com

Benjamin Arthur is an Emmy Award–winning animation director and illustrator who has made films and drawings for NPR, Netflix, Radiolab and Freakonomics. Like Reginald, he can’t pass a thrift store or a pile by the side of the road. This is his first picture book. More about Ben

For booksellers, librarians and teachers: for events, school visits and interviews, write to ben@arthuranimation.com.

A black-and-white photo booth strip of David Zeltser and Benjamin Arthur, cheek to cheek and grinning, four frames from top to bottom.
The authors In a photo booth.

Say hello

Write to me

For school visits, festivals and interviews about The Treasure Collector, for illustration and animation, or just to say hello.