I just love this. I heard on NPR this afternoon, that a previously unpublished chapter from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory has been revealed. With gems like the Vanilla Fudge Mountain and (my favorite) the Pounding and Cutting Room, we also get a glimpse at early characters such as Augustus Pottle, Wilbur Rice and Miranda Grope. Ultimately, scenes were cut as they were deemed too racy for impressionable young minds…such as this:

[after two vile little boys ignore Wonka’s warning, they jump into wagons that carry them off into an opening in the wall] “That hole,” said Mr Wonka, “leads directly to what we call the Pounding and Cutting Room. In there the rough fudge gets tipped out of the wagons into the mouth of a huge machine. The machine then pounds it against the floor until it is all nice and smooth and thin. After that, a whole lot of knives come down and go chop chop chop, cutting it up into neat little squares, ready for the shops.”

So good.

Thanks to The Guardian, you can read the chapter in its entirety here. And…we also get a peek at Sir Quentin Blake’s accompanying illustration (pictured below, courtesy of The Guardian).

Do you have a favorite Roald Dahl book? The Witches tops my list.