With their flattened perspective, the book’s pages have the allure of the poster, brazen, sleek and sturdy. The images look like they were born as ads, or billboards — which, we learned in the 1970s, contained big, subversive messages. A tattered paperback copy of “Subliminal Seduction,” an influential 1974 book by Wilson Brian Key, was in heavy play in my house as I hurtled toward adolescence. Its cover showed a drink with melting ice and asked, “are you being sexually aroused by this picture?” If you looked at it closely, you could make out sexual imagery — penises?! — in the photo. Key informed us that they were present in many ads, the better to appeal to our subconscious and manipulate us. As a prepubescent, it was thrilling to be in on this secret about how the grown-up world operated.

Subliminal seduction, indeed: Sendak’s book is seeded with deeper meanings, not just about “the dignity and truth of the human body” but about his own homosexuality, and his Jewish historical consciousness. The name of his father, Philip, and a tribute to his partner, Eugene Glynn, are right there, on the can of “Philip’s Best Tomatoes” and a building shaped like a milk carton that says “PURE” on one side and “E. Glynn” on the other. Also hidden in plain sight is the historical horror Sendak evokes in the gonzo plotline of a child trying to avoid being put in an oven. “Mickey Oven,” it says in red letters. The bakers carry a container of salt with a Jewish star on it, and their caterpillar-like mustaches evoke Oliver Hardy’s, but also, when you look twice, Hitler’s. (“The Holocaust has run like a river of blood through all my books,” Sendak said once, but does every grown-up shudder, as I did, to see it here, as naked as Mickey himself?)

The third book in the trilogy, “Outside Over There,” published in 1981, covers its darkness of theme with ravishingly beautiful, painterly art. In this book, Sendak is inviting us to grapple with adolescence and its definitive break with the securities of childhood. Hence the more grown-up aesthetic: The archaic cadences of the words and the ornate, cascading illustrations evoke German Romanticism, and also the music of Mozart, which Sendak adored. So long, streetwise 1970s urban vernacular. We’re in the Reagan era now, where leftward-leaning free spirits must find solace in their living rooms, immersed in a PBS-style classicism. Yet the book is not offering some idealized vision of safe, genteel life — far from it. The protagonist, Ida, has a green-eyed prettiness, her hair soft, straight, long and honey-colored, her dress ruffled and draped just so, but her bare feet are enormous and wide, like someone who digs up potatoes in a shtetl.