‘At birth they should give every child a PhD’: Norton Juster at home in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 2011. Photograph: Getty Images Norton Juster, who has died aged 91, wrote The Phantom Tollbooth, which became a classic for children of all ages. It tells the story of a boy named Milo, who is both bored and boring. One day he finds a package in his bedroom, from which he assembles the flat-packed eponymous tollbooth, and through which he proceeds in his toy electric car. He finds himself enmeshed in an ongoing conflict between Azaz the king of Dictionopolis and his brother the Mathemagician, ruler of Digitopolis. Tasked with rescuing the princesses Rhyme and Reason, Milo – accompanied by Tock, a watchdog who sports an alarm clock on his torso – begins an epic journey through a world filled with wordplay. Juster recalled his own childhood, in which he experienced synaesthesia. “I couldn’t do numbers if I didn’t see colours,” he explained, and in many ways his writing is about translating things differently from what may have been intended. As Milo learned: “So many things are possible just as long as you don’t know they’re impossible.”