Shops and parked cars along an Evanston commercial street. Photo: Eric Fredericks from Rancho Cordova, CA, United States / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0
Through July 31, a small cutout of Waldo, the striped-shirt star of the long-running Where’s Waldo? picture books, is tucked away inside shops and restaurants around Evanston, waiting for children to find it.
How the hunt works
The Evanston hunt is a local version of a national promotion called Find Waldo Local. Candlewick Press, the books’ publisher, created the program around the series’ 25th anniversary in 2012, and the American Booksellers Association helped promote it to independent bookstores. Each participating town signs up local businesses to hide a Waldo, usually somewhere low enough for a child to spot. Kids carry a passport and get it stamped at each business where they find him.
In Evanston the organizing bookstore has been Bookends & Beginnings, whose owner, Nina Barrett, told the Daily Northwestern in 2019 that she took the project on after hearing about it from a publisher. Downtown Evanston, the district’s business organization, has been a partner in later years. Participating businesses have ranged from restaurants and galleries to toy and book shops, and they donate small prizes such as books, toys and ice cream certificates.
Waldo himself dates to 1987, when British illustrator Martin Handford published the first book, known in the United Kingdom as Where’s Wally?. The books ask readers to pick one small figure out of crowded, detailed scenes, which makes a real-world hunt a natural extension.
A hunt that sends families shopping
The appeal for merchants is plain. A scavenger hunt brings families through doors they might otherwise pass, and children with passports tend to bring parents along who stay to look around. For shopkeepers, a July activity helps in a month when summer travel can thin out the usual crowds.
The hunt has since become a yearly tradition. Later versions ran with about two dozen businesses. Children who found at least ten figures got a pin and a discount on a Waldo book, and those who found most or all of them were invited to a prize drawing and party at the bookstore at the end of the hunt.
Background on the national program and later Evanston hunts comes from the Daily Northwestern and North by Northwestern.
Rachel Lindqvist covers community life, the lakefront, dining and the arts for The Evanston Edge.
