In the 1961 novel The Phantom Tollbooth, a tollbooth arrives in a package for Milo.
Norton Juster’s children’s novel begins with Milo receiving a mysterious tollbooth in his bedroom. He assembles it, drives through, and enters the Kingdom of Wisdom, where he encounters wordplay, mathematical ideas, and memorable characters such as Tock and the Humbug.
The tollbooth is not Pandora’s box, but it serves a related narrative function: an apparently ordinary object opens access to a much larger world of discoveries and consequences. The book uses the object as a gateway into an imaginative landscape rather than as a container releasing evils.
Jules Feiffer illustrated the original edition. The novel is known for turning language, logic, and learning into elements of fantasy adventure. A common mistake is to call the object a box because it arrives in a package and resembles a small booth; its canonical name is a tollbooth, and its purpose is to collect a toll from travelers entering the new realm.