It would be perfect if Joan herself were here to write this blog – with her many years of experience from her own early days of struggle and rejection slips, with her wide reading and appreciation of all kinds of life and literature, and her great sympathy for fellow writers, she would have had […]
From the same team that brought you The People’s Pennant comes a thought provoking and informative book on design entrepreneurship. Kern and Burn: Conversations With Design Entrepreneurs features candid conversations with 30 leading designers who have founded startups, channeled personal passions into self-made careers and taken risks to do what they love. Through insightful stories, quotes and quips they share their failures, successes, and perspectives.
The distinguished group of guests include: Armin Vit, Keenan Cummings, Ben Pieratt, Riley Cran, Don Clark, Kate Bingaman-Burt, Jessica Hische, Kyle Sollenberger, Tad Carpenter, Duane King, Joe Gebbia, Aaron Draplin, Mikey Burton, Katie Kirk and many more. Pick up a copy here.
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Brent Couchman
Jason Munn Interview
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By: Leila Roy,
on 5/16/2013
However! It'll be a bit different this year:
MotherReader has decided to take a well-deserved break from hosting duties, so Ms. Yingling and Abby the Librarian have waded into the fray and TAKEN CHARGE.
Regardless! Start organizing your TBR pile, because June 7th will be here BEFORE YOU KNOW IT.
I'd better remind Joshua that he'll need to find something to do that weekend that DOESN'T involve standing in front of me and chanting, "PAY ATTENTION TO ME, PAY ATTENTION TO ME, PAY ATTENTION TO MEEEEEEEEEE!"
Huh. In retrospect, I realize that I should have hidden The 5th Wave from him until that weekend: then he could have participated, too! (He's LOVING it, by the way. Judging purely by his reaction to it—he's been going to bed EARLY every night so he can start reading SOONER—I'm really looking forward to my turn with it.)
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By: Carmela Martino and 5 other authors,
on 5/16/2013
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Howdy, Campers!
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By: Leila Roy,
on 5/14/2013
There are several ways to celebrate Children’s Book Week – May 13-18 2013.
1. Take the children to your local library for story hour. Check the library to see what special programs are available during this special week.
2. Visit a local independent bookstore and browse the racks for the latest children’s books. Call ahead to see if you can co-ordinate your visit with those of authors who might be signing books.
3. Read, read, read your favorite children’s stories as well as some new ones you’ve never read. There are so many wonderful authors and picture books. Looking for a place to start? Try the Newbery and Caldacott winners for the best in writing and illustrating for children.
4. Have a book trading party. Bring books you’ve had for awhile and trade with other parents or children for some new stories. It’s a great way to expand your child’s reading on a tight budget.
4. Dress up as your favorite character from a book and spend the day pretending to BE that character. What would he/she/it eat, play with, etc?
Happy Book Week!
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By: linda sarah,
on 5/12/2013
Oh good lord this is so adorable I just had to share it with you. I'm sure books by May Gibbs are very familiar in Australia, but we don't see that many of them in the UK. I've seen copies of Snugglepot & Cuddlepie and the Gum-Nut Babies in the past, but this is the first time I've seen Scotty in Gumnut Land. I'm a dog lover so anything about dogs always appeals, but this particular little dog is just wonderful! I'm sure you've already guessed that Scotty is a Scottish Terrier, but this is a terrier with attitude!
Scotty lives with his humans in a town in
It’s not long before he’s set upon by two other dogs and ends up with an injured paw. Miles from home and lonely, Scotty meets a strange creature called Tiggy Touchwood who dresses in a conical black hat and scarf. Tiggy can conjure up spells that change the shape of things, bring them alive or turn them to stone. She has a friend called Mifrend (my friend), who works in a vast cavern filled with jewels. At one stage in the story, Mifrend, Tiggy and Scotty have to face a monster in the depths of the caves. But, as in all good stories the three friends end up living happily ever after!
This is the weekend of my favorite book sale. It’s held by a small library upstate, very few books are over a dollar, and if you buy a $10 tote bag, you can take home as many books as will fit in it. And that, of course, is what I did.
It's hard to tell in the picture, but this is a really big tote bag.
I usually limit myself to as many books as I can carry in my hands, so when my arms started to hurt, I went to check out. But once I’d gotten by books into my bag, the woman at the counter said, “you know, there are more books in the other building.” That was my downfall.
Anyway, here are the things I got, in reverse order as I unpack.
I didn’t by all the Nero Wolfe books–just the cuter, older paperbacks and In the Best Families because it’s In the Best Families. Apparently my cat likes Nero Wolfe too.
Not the Felix Salten one with the deer, but the Marjorie Benton Cooke one with the people. The woman who helped me check out said she heard it was pretty racy, which seems unlikely, but I told her I would be pleased if that turned out to be the case.
I keep meaning to try Mary Stewart. And at this point I had well over $10 worth of books, so these were basically free.
Some miscellaneous paperbacks–One Hundred and One Dalmatians because my copy is missing pages, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold because I can’t find my mom’s copy, and a romance by Meredith Duran for no reason at all.
This is the Mary Roberts Rinehart portion of the haul. All of these books are more battered than all of the other books, but who cares? I own a copy of K
now.
This is the Ethel M. Dell portion of the haul. I…own a copy of The Way of an Eagle now. So, uh, that’s a thing.
The last few miscellaneous things: Rose in Bloom, my favorite Alcott bok I’ve never owned; Trustee from the Toolroom, which I buy whenever I find it so I can give it as a gift; and Brat Farrar, which I own a couple of times over, because this copy is super cute. I assume the girl in the sheet on the cover is Eleanor, but I don’t understand why.
Creating her own period of alternate history gave Joan Aiken the freedom to exercise her endless imagination, but also provided her with the opportunity to use a variety of stored information from her wide ranging reading and her life-long fascination with all kinds of study. These elements, combined with an absolutely riotous ear for dialogue […]
By: Hazel Mitchell,
on 5/9/2013
By: Leila Roy,
on 5/8/2013
I've been out and about buying lots of new stock over the last few days. When I buy new things, my first job is to check for any missing/torn pages, colouring, inscriptions and/or any other damage. This is not a hardship because I get to spend time looking at all the beautiful illustrations and reading the odd page or ten as I go along. But, having spent the entire winter huddled indoors the recent spring weather was too much of a temptation. So the whole 'checking for problems' operation moved outside. What could be nicer than sitting in the sun with a cup of coffee and a pile of new (old) books to enjoy?
Not all of these are listed on the website yet, but they will be over the next few weeks. If you would like to see what other delights we have in stock, you can do so here
By: bookkm,
on 5/8/2013
By: Mo Willems,
on 5/8/2013
Great excitement here at Knuffle Manor as our preview copy of DON'T PIGEONHOLE ME! TWO DECADES OF THE MO WILLEMS SKETCHBOOK has arrived! The project is a labor of love, compliling 20 editions of my annual sketchbooks that I've sent to clients and pals every year over the holidays. Some of the sketchbooks are collections of gag cartoons, some are stories, some are funny, some are serious, some
Several years ago we featured the Philographics poster series by UK based Genis Carreras. We just received word that the popular series will soon be available as a book as well as a postcard set. Currently Genis is raising funds to being print production. You can support this effort here.
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Irving Harper:Works in Paper
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Featured Book: Irving Harper: Works in Paper.
By: admin,
on 5/6/2013
There are 37 days left of my Lilly Badilly Literacy Project. Let’s make it happen!
By: Abigail Halpin,
on 5/3/2013
By: Jerry Beck,
on 4/29/2013
What are the essential reference books that anyone with an interest in animation history should have on their bookshelf? It’s a question I’ve rarely seen discussed and would be curious to hear readers’ feedback. I’m not asking about the best written books about the art form, but rather the books that offer valuable information to those pursuing serious study of the history of 20th century animation.
I whittled down my ‘desert island’ list of animation reference books to just seven titles. There are, in fact, dozens of other excellent books, journals and articles related to specific filmmakers, studios, techniques and styles. I could have easily added another dozen titles to the list and still come up short. However, these are the seven books that I find myself returning to time and time again, and I think they provide a solid overview of 20th century animation for any intrepid researcher/historian/fan of the art form. Please share your favorite reference books in the comments.
1.) Before Mickey: The Animated Film 1898-1928
(1982, revised in 1993) by Donald Crafton — Walt Disney was an important figure in the development of animation, but so were Raoul Barré, James Stuart Blackton, John R. Bray, Emile Cohl, Winsor McCay, Otto Messmer, Lotte Reiniger, and Paul Terry. This book covers all of them, and is essential grounding in the early history of animation.
(1980, revised in 1987) by Leonard Maltin — Capsule histories of Golden Age theatrical animation studios, still unsurpassed as a primer on that era.
(1999, paperback in 2003) by Michael Barrier — The yang to Maltin’s yin. A highly opinionated and meticulously researched take on Golden Age American animation. The book will be best appreciated if you have some existing knowledge of classic animation.
(1981) by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston — Everything that could have already been said about this book has been said. Suffice to say, if you can own just one book about Disney animation, this is it. The development of the studio’s approach to character animation has never been more clearly documented.
(1994) by Giannalberto Bendazzi — From Argentina to Zaire, this is the most thorough survey of global animation. I refer to this book frequently, and more often than not, I’ll find the name I’m looking for. A long-awaited updated edition is due out later this year, which I plan to purchase the moment it’s released.
(1976, reprinted in 1988 as Experimental Animation: Origins of a New Art) by Robert Russett and Cecile Starr — Many of the innovative techniques we see in commercials and music videos nowadays were done decades ago by the likes of Walter Ruttmann, Viking Eggeling, Hans Richter, Oskar Fischinger, Len Lye, and Norman McLaren. This book is still the best source of information about these important abstract and experimental animators of the twentieth century.
(second edition released in 2011) by Graham Webb — Expensive but useful. This is a pure reference work and not something intended to be read, but with over 7,000 entries, it is the most complete listing of credits for Golden Age theatrical shorts, with plenty of credits not even found on IMDB.
Honorary mentions to the following three books: Design in Motion
(1962), Film & TV Graphics
(1967), and Film + TV Graphics 2
(1976) — These books are short on text, but filled with great images from animation produced between the late-1950s and mid-1970s. This vital, and poorly undocumented, period in animation history coincided with the growth and expansion of international and independent animation, which is fully flourishing today. Many important names and films are represented in these books, and I find myself often referencing them.
By: Ruth Ayres,
on 4/29/2013
So I was planning to try a new kind of post last Friday. And then Friday came and went. How does this happen? So right now, let’s just pretend it is Friday. Or… Read More 
Usually a novelization of a play retains a fair amount of the original structure. The author of the novel may add in new locations and stuff, but you can still tell that, say, one particular group of chapters used to be the second act and originally took place entirely on someone’s front porch, or that one lengthy bit of narration used to be a monologue, or something. The Strange Woman, adapted by Mary McNeil Fenollosa (writing as Sidney McCall) from a play by William Hurlbut, puzzled me because I couldn’t see the underlying structure of the play, and none of it seemed like it had come from a play — until more than halfway through the book, when John Hemingway returns from Paris with his fiancée. Or his sort of fiancée.
Now that I’ve read a couple of reviews of the play, though, everything makes sense. The last third or so of the book, the section full of unpleasant people and awkward situations that made me wonder why I had liked anyone or been invested in the book up to that point — that was the bulk of the play. The first half or so, in which John Hemingway goes to Paris and is desperately lonely until he meets and begins a relationship with American-born Inez de Pierrefond is apparently original to the book.
John is a nice but occasionally super depressed architect studying at the École des Beaux-Arts. Inez is from Louisiana, and is about as French as one can get while still being an American, and is technically a widow, although she left her horrible and possibly German husband before he died. They meet in a treehouse, which is kind of great. Their relationship is pretty interesting. There’s a lot of very trite bits, but John is pretty convincingly torn between his attraction for Inez and his morals. He’s also pretty convincingly a massive dork. And Inez is pretty awesome, and eventually wins him over to her way of thinking, including the idea that marriage is a prison.
That one, obviously, isn’t going to go over well in John’s hometown of Delphi, OH. And John’s transformation when they get back there makes sense, although it’s kind of disappointing. And I guess that’s how I feel about everything else that happens in Delphi, too. I keep wanting to say that everyone is out of character, but I can’t put my finger on any specific way in which that’s true. And it’s not terrible, but after the Paris section, which I was really enjoying, it’s disappointing.
Now that I know roughly what was in the play, I keep falling into the trap of thinking of the Delphi section as Hurlbut’s work and the Paris section as Fenollosa’s, which isn’t fair because Fenollosa wrote the whole book. Also, not having read the play, I don’t want to make assumptions. I guess I’ll have to try one of Fenollosa’s other books at some point, to see how she does on her own.
By: bookkm,
on 4/30/2013
It's Tuesday!! Time for a Kids' Book Website.
Check out Grace Lin's website. Grace wrote Starry River of the Sky, which was a Battle of the Kids Book contestant. I loved it. But I have liked Grace's picture books and chapter books for several years. Her Where the Mountain Meets the Moon was a Newbery Honor Book.
Her website offers activities based on her books, Chinese lessons, a link to her blog and a bio.
By: admin,
on 5/1/2013
I am very excited about my interview with paper engineer extraordinaire, Bruce Foster. Read the interview here. If you love pop-up books like I do, you will be in awe of the painstaking process it takes to make a book like America’s National Parks: A Pop-Up Book.
© Bruce Fosster
Bruce Foster with a pop-up of Grand Canyon National Park
By: Jerry Beck,
on 5/3/2013
Rebecca Dart lives in Vancouver and works on animation productions as well as creating comics and drawings for personal projects.
A difficult subject for artists to draw well is the horse. Rebecca renders horses, warriors and all sorts of fantasy creatures in powerful, confidently inked brush strokes that make it seem effortless. Perhaps her horse drawing ability aided her in securing a job as part of the crew that recently rebooted the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic television series, although you won’t see her art from the show on her blog where she has decided not to post any Pony-related concepts.
Instead, you’ll find her slice-of-life comics:
And various pieces from Rebecca’s art book, Battle Kittens, which features fearsome weapon-wielding ladies riding gigantic kittens into battle.
Many more mythical and original creatures are in Recca’s Flickr collection.
ACK! I made a mistake and published early, stepping all over Esther's post. Please take a minute to read her fab post below this one (which inludes an inspiring poetry exercise) and comment. Thank you!
Great Post, Art and writing! I bought "Pitschi" years ago for my son, but probably secretly because I fell in love with the illustrator/writer Hans Fischer. I'll have to check out "The Birthday." Thanks, Michelle
Oh so sweet - those little chicks climbing up the covers and bunnies bearing carrots for the sick kitten! I think I must buy a copy of this quickly! The cover reminded me a bit of "Kitten's First Full Moon."
Definitely spark and ember material!
Wow, what a terrific story, April. And I'm so glad your quest has a happy ending. :-)
I don't know this one, April, but now - oh, I WANT to!
So glad you found your cherished book! What a great story about finally locating it.
I remember loving a story about a King who wanted a special dessert, "as hot as summer and as cold as winter." His subjects tried to create several, which he rejected . . . until someone came up with a hot fudge sundae. Don't remember the title or author and I know somebody else out there has heard of it . . . :)
Jama...I haven't thought of that King's dessert book in fifty years. I DO remember it...I can see the illustrations...I just can't remember the freakin' name of it. I thought it was The King's Dessert...but that is coming up in any of my searches. Woe is the librarian who can't resurrect the title of a long lost favorite book. I WILL find it!