While sorting through his late father’s filing cabinet in his family home on Historic Hill, John Barry unearthed a part of his father’s legacy he hadn’t expected to find: A draft for a sequel to “Mr. Willowby’s Christmas Tree,” the popular children’s book his father wrote and illustrated in 1963.

Now, with help from publisher Penguin Random House, the unpublished sequel gets a life of its own for a new generation.

“After he passed in 2012, I was just trying to pull his files together and everything in our house in Newport,” John Barry said. “For really as long as I could remember, there was this gray filing cabinet which had sat in a dark hallway, and I had no idea what was in this filing cabinet … in the back of one of the drawers there were folders that had sketches of children's b

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