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• In my current job I’ve become somewhat fascinated with what could easily be considered the key tool in a librarian’s toolbelt: Reader’s Advisory.  Patron asks you to recommend a book based on a set of preferences and you knock it out of the park.  That’s our job and we do it well.  Booksellers do it too, don’t get me wrong, but we have the advantage of an extensive backlist of out-of-print titles at our fingertips.  It’s taken a little while, but recently I noticed that a LOT of folks are getting in on the Reader’s Advisory game.  Companies like Bookish, Zoobean, SelectReads, certainly, and now?  An actual publishing company itself.  The Penguin Hotline is pretty much what it sounds like: A publishing house doing RA.  Says their site, “Tell us as much as you’d like about the reader you’re buying for this holiday season and our expert staffers will find you just the right books. You’ll get personalized recommendations from real Penguins! Every request is handled individually by one of our in-house editors, marketers, designers, salespeople, publicists, and more.”  And they actually do.  What all this says to me is that libraries need to double down on their RA skills.  Take some tips from Multnomah County’s My Librarian site for starters.  That idea is crazy good.  We could all learn a thing or two from it.

• Monday, January 11th.  It’s almost a month away.  The happiest day of the year.  The day when they announce the Youth Media Awards, better known to the rest of the world as Newbery/Caldecott Day (and by “rest of the world” I mean “my brain”).  In preparation, I was pleased to see Monica Edinger’s thoughtful appraisal of the Newbery itself in the piece Thoughts on Newbery: The Nature of Distinguished.  In it, Monica talks quite a bit about Laura Amy Schlitz’s The Hired Girl, a book which (coincidentally) also showed up on Marjorie Ingall’s fantabulous Best Jewish Books 2015.  Seriously, if you need Hanukkah gifts for any kid of any age, your prayers have been answers.  For the rest of you, her voice is just so good.  Downright sublime, some might say.  Miss it and you’re missing out. (She also has stellar taste)

• I’m not the first, second, third, or forty-fifth children’s literature enthusiast to link to this, but nonetheless I think the Atlas Obscura article C.S. Lewis’ Greatest Fiction: Convincing American Kids That They Would Like Turkish Delight is dead on.  I grew up thinking it would be akin to sugar powdered squares of chocolatey confectionary delight.  Then I went to London for foreign study and I and each of my classmates individually had to make the discovery that the stuff ain’t worth betraying much of anyone, let alone your blood kin.  Edmund should have held out for fudge.  Thanks to mom for the link.

• Love and adore this.  From 100 Scope Notes: Everything You Need to Know About Reading Levels in One Image.  Nuff said.

• Bookish (mentioned earlier) had a rather delightful encapsulation of fantastic literary-themed Christmas tree ornaments, just in case you’re scrambling to get something for that reader in your life.  My personal favorite (aside from the library lion a.k.a. Patience which I MUST have):

• In other news, Yahoo News recently announced that a Tintin expert was just named as an official “professor of graphic fiction and comic art.”  Wouldn’t mind having one of these stateside as well.  Perhaps an expert in Pogo.  A gal can dream.

• The resident 4-year-old is on a picture book biography kick right now, so on Saturday we went to the library’s bio section to find some new fare.  We ended up in the Lincoln section and lo and behold her eyes alit on that old d’Aulaire’s Caldecott Award version of the life of Abraham Lincoln.  I steered her clear, knowing its contents very well indeed.  I never thought of it as the d’Aulaires’ best work, and we took home the Judith St. George/Matt Faulkner Stand Tall, Abe Lincoln instead.  The d’Aulaire version had already been on my mind because of a recent PW announcement that a small publisher is bring the book back to the world.  Mind you, “they made minor modifications to the original art and text to reflect contemporary views about race politics and to reflect historical accuracy.”  Guess I’ll have to reserve judgement until I see it for myself.

• Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: Now with more indelible images that will haunt your nightmares until doomsday!  Don’t try to unsee it.  Don’t even bother.

• Daily Image: 

This week in our popular series Children’s Books from 1907, we take a look at a little number that just makes me inordinately happy.

I think you get the gist.  You may read the book in its entirety here.  Thanks to Mara Rockliff for the link.

pic.twitter.com/UEtjQ1f2zS

— Zelda Williams (@zeldawilliams) August 12, 2014

Zelda Williams, the daughter of the late Robin Williams, shared a quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince on Twitter and Instagram in remembrance of her father.

In her posts, Zelda wrote: “You – you alone will have the stars as no one else has them…In one of the stars I shall be living. In one of them I shall be laughing. And so it will be as if all the stars were laughing, when you look at the sky at night…You – only you – will have stars that laugh.”

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Nice movie poster, right?  Wouldn’t look too shabby in your local cineplex.  Well, don’t get too excited quite yet.  It seems that Sean Astin (a.k.a. Sam from the Lord of the Rings trilogy) is raising money to start production on this film, to be shot in Denmark.  Lowry reports on the process, though she is understandably leery since she saw what happened with The Giver film.  Which is to say, not much.  Thanks to Marjorie Ingall for the link.

There’s nothing like going viral to sell a book or two.  Though The Order of Odd-Fish by James Kennedy came out a good three years ago, thanks to the 90-Second Newbery film of A Wrinkle in Time it caught the attention of Cory Doctorow over at BoingBoing.  And I like to write reviews, but I feel true green-eyed review envy when I read someone write a descriptive sentence like, “An epic novel of exotic pie, Götterdämmerung, mutants, evil, crime, and musical theater, Odd-Fish is a truly odd fish, as mannered and crazy as an eel in a tuxedo dropped down your trousers during a performance of The Ring Cycle.”  Geez, Cory.  Make it hard for the rest of us, why doncha?  In any case, you Chicago folks might want to attend Mr. Kennedy’s Odd-Fish Art Show to be held in a creepy old mansion.  He says of one room, “full of antique printing presses, priceless art, unclassifiable knickknacks, and so much garbage it’s like the trash compactor scene from Star Wars.”  He ain’t wrong either.

• For some reason I feel inclined to keep a close eye on children’s book apps these days.  I don’t know exactly why this is.  I just have a feeling they’re going to be more important than we initially expect later on down the road.  It’s hard to figure out what’s actually important and what’s just self-promoting dribble, though.  I mean, I’m pretty sure the new Kirkus App Discovery Engine is important, but it’s hard to say.  Monica Edinger, therefore, did me a bit of a favor when she presented her recent round-up of app news on her Huffington Post blog.  Makes for good reading.

• Recently Mr. Mo Willems had his picture taken.  It was not the first time.  It was not even the first time he’d been to that particular photographer.  But it was the first time I’d been made aware of the photographer Marty Umans.  Mr. Umans happens to have photographed quite a few children’s literary folks, including Mr. Mo, Harry Bliss, Raul Colon, Randall de Seve, and more.  You can see a whole host of them here.  Thanks to Mr. Mo for the link.

• In case you missed it, Travis Jonker does 7 Comments on Fusenews: Time to class the joint up, last added: 3/1/2011