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With President's Day upon us, people are pulling out picture books about Lincoln, like Maira Kalman's Looking at Lincoln. The child in the book reveres Lincoln. Most Americans do, I think, but what we know about him is... incomplete.

What do you know about Lincoln and Native peoples?

Most people do not know that he issued an order for the mass execution of 38 Dakota men. It was the largest mass execution in the United States. That is not included in Kalman's book.

Is mass execution not age appropriate? Violence is ok, as these pages demonstrate.

One page shows a uniform with a bullet hole in it:

Maira Kalman has become well-known as an artist and an author. On Dec. 6, she will serve as the host of a popup shop called radish.

Kalman teamed up with Caitlin O’Shaughnessy to curate a variety of book, snacks, ceramics, and other gift items. All of the proceeds generated from this business will be donated to charity.

This shop will be housed inside a New York City-based independent bookstore called McNally Jackson Books. Visitors can stop by from 1:00pm to 5:00pm

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Liz discusses Fireboat, by Maira Kalman, as a special book to share with a young reader around the topic of September 11.

Maira Kalman’s solo exhibition, “My Favorite Things,” has opened at the Julie Saul Gallery in New York City.

According to the press release, Kalman “explores the human condition, presenting objects that create a picture of daily life as she sees it and lives it. The disparate elements, she says, are bound together by sheer luck.”

Several of Kalman’s paintings are featured in her latest book which shares the same name as this art show. The closing date has been scheduled for February 08, 2015. Follow this link to listen to Kalman’s New York Public Library podcast on her favorite things.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The “Maira Kalman Selects” exhibit has opened at the Cooper Hewitt (the Smithsonian Design Museum). Kalman, an acclaimed author and illustrator, chose 40 objects for this display. She (pictured, via) sourced these items from the Cooper Hewitt, the National Museum of American History, and her personal collection.

According to the Smithsonian website, Kalman’s objective with this project was “to suggest the journey of a life story, from birth through death.” A closing date has been scheduled for June 14, 2015. Follow this link to hear Kalman’s TED talk.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Maira Kalman's Thomas Jefferson, Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Everything got starred reviews from Kirkus and Booklist. 

Horn Book noted its candor and substance, and The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books praised Kalman's candid discussion of Jefferson's contradictory views about slavery.

Me? The title alone brought me up short. As far as I've read, no one else has noted the title.

Apparently, the author, her editor and publisher, and obviously the reviewers, did not think how a Native person--especially one whose ancestor's were removed from their homelands--would read the phrase, "The Pursuit of Everything."

Like the presidents before him, Jefferson wanted land.

Like presidents before him, Jefferson chose to act as though Native people were primitive hunters. He wanted them to be farmers, not hunters! In fact, Native peoples of their respective nations all along the coast had been farming for hundreds of years, and Jefferson knew that. He wanted them to stop hunting, though, because if they did, they wouldn't need all that land. But it was their land. Treaties said so!

So, what to do?! Jefferson wanted that land!

In American Indians, American Presidents (published in 2009 by HarperCollins), Robert Venables quotes from a letter Jefferson wrote to William Henry Harrison:

To promote this disposition to exchange lands, which they have to spare and we want... we shall push our trading uses [familiar trading customs], and be glad to see the good and influential individuals among them run in debt, because we observe that when these debts get beyond what the individuals can pay, they become willing to lop them off by a cession of lands.

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I think the nicest thing about the internet, for me anyway, is that if you wait around long enough things that you’ve seen live will appear online and then you can let lots of people know about them.  For example, this video of Daniel Handler/Lemony Snicket and Maira Kalman is not new.  It does, however, contain the only known record (known to me) of them both talking about the photograph game they would play.  The photo involving the catapult and the giant ice cream is a bit dangerous as it makes me giggle for long periods of time.

Next up, the only thing better than bad lip reading of Twilight?  Bad lip reading of New Moon.  True fact.

Read a really good independently published children’s book this week.  Self-published and remarkably fun.  It even has one top-notch book trailer to accompany it.  Check it out, peoples.

If the author’s name sounds familiar, that would be Ms. Lynn Messina of Little Vampire Women fame.  On an unrelated note, she also owns awesome boots.

Big time thanks to David Maybury for directing me to his link to this video of Laureate na nÓg Niamh Sharkey working with students from Griffeen Valley Educate Together on a Christmas Window for Hodges Figgis Bookstore in Dublin.

I’m now harboring fantasies of some store in New York doing something similar.  Books of Wonder maybe, though Bank Street Bookstore would probably get more foot traffic watching.  I mean, if Dublin can do it, we can too, can’t we?

And finally, for the off-topic video sometimes you just gotta give cred to the science/digital geeks.  Serious cred.

Thanks to BoingBoing for the link!

Thanks to the Huffington Post for sharing this quite, um, laudatory video of Daniel Handler and Maira Kalman performing, as you will, an Ode to Libraries.

I couldn't figure out how to embed the video so follow this link.  It's lovely.  And it features my FAVORITE instrument.  Guess which one.

…and for The Horn Book Guide! Maira Kalman, whose art from Why We Broke Up graces our new Spring Guide, also just illustrated her thirteenth New Yorker cover.

Check out these Fuse #8 and Seven Impossible Things posts for Betsy Bird’s and Jules Danielson’s intriguing explorations of the connections between children’s illustrators and The New Yorker.

Why We Broke Up Daniel Handler, illustrated by Maira Kalman

Dear Ed,

In a sec you'll hear a thunk. At your front door, the one nobody uses...I'm telling you why we broke up, Ed. I'm writing it in this letter, the whole truth of why it happened. And the truth is that I goddamn loved you so much...

The thunk is the box, Ed. This is what I am leaving you. Every last souvenir of the love we had, the prizes and the debris of this relationship, like the glitter in the gutter when the parade has passed, all the everything and whatnot kicked to the curb. I'm dumping the whole box back into your life, Ed, every item of you and me.

And the box does have everything from their relationship-- bottle caps and flower petals, ticket stubs and a coat, a protractor and some sugar... and the world's longest letter, detailing every detail of Ed and Min's relationship and where, and how it went wrong.

Ed is the jock, co-captain of the basketball team, with a string of popular girl girlfriends. Min is... not arty. Don't say she's arty. But she's smart and I guess we can call her alterna-girl. Not the kind Ed usually goes for. But he goes for Min.

We know it won't work for a number of reasons-- the premise of the book and the first page tell us it already ended. As an adult reader, you just know they're doomed from the set-up of personalities, but as Min details their relationship, pointing out all the red flags, you still end up cheering for them and their love and you hope they won't break up.

I love the structure-- the telling through the objects that Maira Kalman so beautifully paints. I love this book as an object-- the paper is heavy and glossy, like a coffee table book.

I had a hard time getting into it at first, but I think that was more about my head space than the book itself. But, because of it, I read it over the course of a month and in that drawn-out time frame, I became really invested in this doomed love. The way Min writes about it, it sounds like a relationship that slowly unravels and then you get to the moment of the actual break up and... Min, sweetie. You don't need 354 pages to tell Ed why you broke up. It's one sentence. He isn't worth the ink.

And that was a very disappointing end.

But, I did like portions of it. I like that Min was an "arty" girl who wasn't arty. I like that she thought she was so much deeper than she was. It was a bit annoying, but very, very, very true.  I was friends with Min in high school. I like that we never found out the exact deal with Ed's mom. I liked Ed's sister and I liked that we saw more to Ed than the stereotypical jock, but he was still a total popular boy jock.

My favorite was Min's friend Lauren, who would sing hymns at Min to torture her into spilling information. When Lauren was seven, she saw symbols in a speech balloon, and her super-Christian parents were too God-fearing to explain that the symbols meant fuck so freshman year she had this joke of saying "numbersign questionmark you" and "astrisk exclamtionpoint the world." If I were still in high school, hanging out with Min, this would be a speech p

By Bianca Schulze, The Children’s Book Review
Published: January 25, 2012

Winner

Honor Book

Honor Book

Honor Book

Honor Book

“The Michael L. Printz Award is an award for a book that exemplifies literary excellence in young adult literature. It is named for a Topeka, Kansas school librarian who was a long-time active member of the Young Adult Library Services Association. The award is sponsored by Booklist, a publication of the American Library Association.” ~YALSA

©2012 The Childrens Book Review. All Rights Reserved.

My husband Matt pairs well with me for a number of reasons.  Amongst them is our mutual inclination to collect things we love.  As such, Matt has systematically been holding onto all his issues of The New Yorker ever since he got his subscription in college.  Over the years these issues have piled up piled up piled up.  I was a Serials Manager before I got my library degree and one of the perks of the job was getting lots of lovely magazine holders. For years these holders graced the tops of our bookshelves and even came along with us when we moved into our current apartment a year ago.  Yet with the arrival of our puir wee bairn, we decided to do the unthinkable.

Yes.  We ripped off all their covers.

Well, most anyway.  We have the complete run of New Yorker text on CD-ROM anyway, and anything published after the CD-ROM’s release would be online anyway.  Thus does the internet discourage hoarding.

In the meantime, we now are the proud owners of only three boxes worth of New Yorker covers.  They’re very fun to look at.  I once had the desire to wallpaper my bathroom in such covers, but that dream will have to wait (as much as I love New York apartments and all . . .).  For now, it’s just fun to flip through the covers themselves and, in flipping, I discovered something.  Sure, I knew that the overlap between illustrators of children’s books and illustrators of New Yorkers was frequent.  I just didn’t know how frequent it was.  Here then is a quickie encapsulation of some of the folks I discovered in the course of my cover removal.

Istan Banyai

Zoom and Re-Zoom continue to circulate heavily in my library, all thanks to Banyai.  I had a patron the other day ask if we had anything else that was similar but aside from Barbara Lehman all I could think of was Wiesner’s Flotsam.  Banyai is well known in a different way for New Yorker covers, including this controversial one.  As I recall, a bit of a kerfuffle happened when it was published back in the day.

Harry Bliss

Author and illustrator of many many picture books, it’s little wonder that the Art Editor of The New Yorker, Ms. Francoise Mouly, managed to get the man to do a TOON Book (Luke on the Loose) as well.  And when it comes to his covers, this is the one I always think of first.

A package arrived in the mail for the small Bird the other day.  Though she has no hand-eye coordination and questionable social skills, Baby Bird occasionally gets a toy worth noting.  I’ve done one post before on the array of children’s literary toys that are out there that I have seen.  Here is another for now I find that there’s a new toy on the market and it’s only available through the Jewish Museum Shops.

Those of you familiar with the artist Maira Kalman have probably stumbled upon her Max books at some point.  Max is ostensibly a dog.  He exists in a variety of picture books, including Max Makes a Million, Ooh-la-la (Max in Love), Max in Hollywood, Baby, and more.  Had you asked me how to make an actual Max doll I’d have been hard pressed to say.  I mean, here’s an average image of Max:

Making a doll from that would take some doing.  It’s not like you’re making a Mo Willems Pigeon with its straight black lines.  And yet, and yet, it could be done.  In conjunction with the current Kalman exhibit Maira Kalman: Various Illuminations (of a Crazy World) I present to you this limited edition Max doll:

I have to admit, I’m utterly charmed by him.  His inner pockets reveal two pieces of writing.  One is a shopping list that lists the following:

Herring!
Brown socks
Jelly doughnuts
Itching powder
Cheese juice
Suspenders
Rubberbands
More jelly doughnuts
Map of Iceland

The opposite pocket contains a note with this to say:

Blitz
Blatz
Blootch
Bloob
Boop
Bloop

I showed Max to Monica Edinger the other day and she wondered, rightly, about the state of his underwear.  All good dressed toys make sure not to skimp on the knickers.  So we pulled down his elastic waisted pants and voila!  Red underwear with white polkadots.  Add in the removable shoes, the pocket handkerchief (also removable), his hat, scarf, and shirt and you have a remarkable toy.  Everything he wears can be taken off, yet none of it falls off of him of its own accord.  This is one well made little guy!

Fans of the Max books may be able to clarify a mystery for me too.  Why on earth does he have the mysterious initials “MS” sewn into the back of his coat?

And for those of you looking to buy one for someone in your own life, you can find them for sale here and a host of other Maira Kalman objects d’art (including her famous New Yorkistan New Yorker cover as a shower curtain) 0 Comments on Children’s Literary Toys: Max by Maira Kalman as of 1/1/1900