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Morning folks. I’ll start today with a video that contains some classy tunes. It’s my recent interview with Eric Rohmann about his new book GIANT SQUID. Delicious delicious giant squids. Sorry. This interview occurred on a day when I was half hoping the staff recording the interview would have a big steaming plate of calamari waiting for me. Twas not to be.

Britain’s doing that thing again. That thing where they throw a bunch of celebrities into a video for charity. I could recognize about 5.5 of them. You may have better luck in the end. How did Brittany get in there, by the way?

Hmmm. Boyz II Men plus The Snowy Day? Sure! What the heck. I’ll bite. This is for the new Amazon Prime Video holiday special. Oddly, it was the only clip from the special I was able to find online.

Oops!  Did I not post KidLit TV’s live presentation of School Library Journal’s Best of 2016 list!  Where are my manners?

And finally for the off-topic videos, Matt (the resident husband) had two more new one about the process of writing.  First up, finding that odd moment of humanity in your characters . . .

Second up, fun with exposition!

I have a two-year-old son. He is very cute. He is also the most stereotypical boy reader I’ve ever encountered in my life. Trucks, trains, construction equipment, you name it. Unsurprisingly he’s also keen on community workers so every other day we read through Richard Scarry’s Cars and Trucks and Things That Go. Or, when we’re feeling a bit jaunty, we’ll reach for Everything Goes On Land by Brian Biggs. Combine that with his other relatively new obsession with the Brownie and Pearl books (also illustrated by Mr. Biggs) and you’ll understand that Chez Bird is The House That Biggs Built.

When I heard that Mr. Biggs had a new series coming out from Abrams called Tinyville Town, I was naturally curious.  What’s interesting about the books and the series is that rather that conform to the usual Scarry model, the stories examine “the city” as a concept in and of itself.  So we had a talk about it and the more he spoke about it, the more interesting it became.  The end result is this interview.  Bear in mind that this isn’t just about Brian’s work on the series.  In the course of this interview he delves into some really interesting ideas about the influence of Italo Calvino, city planning, what Sesame Street did along these same lines, and what we mean when we say something is “timeless”.  I urge you to pay particular attention to what he has to say about gender roles and picture books as well.

By the way, I usually do interviews where the interviewer (me) and the interviewee (in this case, Mr. Biggs) are represented solely by their initials.  Today, for obvious reasons, that’s not going to work out.

Betsy Bird: I’m interested in how this series tackles the idea of “the city” as more than just one of those random places that people live.  Historically, Americans mostly lived in the country.  Now we mostly live in cities but books that convey how interconnected we all are to one another there aren’t all that common.  So what was the impetus for starting this series in the first place?  And what, if you’ll forgive me, makes it different from your average everyday Richard Scarry fare?

Brian Biggs: To be honest, the argument could be made that the impetus for Tinyville Town came from a blog-entry you wrote about Everything Goes back in 2011. That series was definitely about vehicles, but I think you were on to something when you wrote that the first book, Everything Goes On Land, was really about my love for cities. Three years later, when I was playing with the idea of a series of little books about people and their jobs, it occurred to me that this, too, was potentially an excuse to draw another city and explore the streets and buildings within.

I’d put it on the record that Italo Calvino is just as big an influence here as Richard Scarry, and that’s not something you can say for just any board-book for three-year-olds. I read Invisible Cities when I was living in Paris, in 1991, just after college, and the book adjusted the way I looked at these random places that people live, as you write. I could close one eye, and Paris was a chaotic mass of people moving about, with no order, no sense. I could look with the other eye, and it was a latticework of streets and alleys with recognizable patterns and clear intents of the designers. I could squint, and imagine the connections between people in my neighborhood, from the taxi drivers to the family that ran the Chinese restaurant below my building to the woman who operated the laundry across the street. I don’t want to get carried away here — Tinyville Town is not a philosophical prose poem on the nature of our existence. But when later that year I left Paris for the Fort Worth suburb of Euless, Texas, I was able to find these stories there as well. Euless and Paris are nothing alike, yet they are. People go to sleep there, and wake up there, and go to work there, and live their lives there.

When I was a kid, I watched a lot of Sesame Street. Sesame Street did a great a job of finding connections and figuring out how to make a Brooklyn city block relevant to this kid watching tv in Little Rock. That neighborhood sure looked different from my neighborhood. But what I identified with were the people who lived there and their relationships to one another. Bob and Maria and Gordon, and even Oscar and Ernie and Big Bird, interacted with one another in ways that I did and my parents did with neighbors, and the guy at the grocery store, and the mailman. It wasn’t lost on me that, years later in Texas, what Euless and Paris had in common were those same people living vastly different yet very similar lives.

So, Sesame Street is a show that teaches numbers and the alphabet, and entertains kids so their parents can get the laundry done. But it’s much more than that, isn’t it? By hanging these lessons on this setting and with these people, Sesame Street teaches us so much more. Yes, Tinyville Town began as a simple series of little books about people with jobs. A day in the life of a fire fighter, and a veterinarian, and a librarian, doing the things that these people do. And while it might be difficult to explore the nature of existence and sociology in 24 pages, I’m hoping that these influences and these roots give me a stage that’s a little bigger than what might be immediately visible, and a setting in which I might be able to do a little more than count to ten.

Betsy: You’ve done books that take broad concepts and then define them in simple terms that no one else has really thought of before.  Your “Everything Goes” series, for example, was both broad and meticulous.  Are you doing something similar here?

Brian: Oh, sure. At least, I hope so. The structure of the series is built on this very idea. The larger picture books in the series, “Tinyville Town Gets to Work” being the first, are about the town. How the people of Tinyville Town work together to get something done. These books are the “broad” you mention. The smaller board books are the “meticulous,” each telling the story of one citizen of Tinyville Town. Visually, Tinyville Town doesn’t fill the page the way that Everything Goes does. There aren’t the hidden details and birds with hats. The surprises reveal themselves more slowly and are more relevant to the stories of this town.

Betsy: I mentioned Scarry earlier, and I suspect that of all the classic children’s authors of the past he’s the one you get compared to the most.  We’ve this feeling that he’s “timeless” in some way (though anyone who has ever eyeballed Ma Pig’s Jane Fonda-esque headband in Cars and Trucks and Things That Go would take issue with that statement).  “Timeless” is a goal of a lot of authors.  It’s a kind of key to perpetual publishing.  Is that something you consciously think about when you make a series like this one or does it not concern you?

Brian: It does concern me, and I’ve had discussions with Traci, my editor, about ways to make Tinyville Town “timeless.” But I haven’t really worked out exactly what this means, or even whether it is a good idea or not.

For example, one of the first things I decided about this series was that there are no mobile phones in Tinyville Town. When we see a group of people standing at a bus stop waiting for the bus, they were going to be reading books and newspapers, not staring like zombies at their smart phones. I can’t tell you how long it’s been since I saw someone waiting at a bus stop with a book, but there is just something about that scene that I could not bring myself to include. On the other hand, I think readers really like to see things like that they recognize. Early on, in the first Everything Goes book, I have a driver cutting through traffic, talking on his mobile phone. Kids often point this particular detail out. They know it’s something you’re not supposed to do, and they love it on the next page when we see the same driver pulled over by the police car, getting a ticket. Twenty years from now, will a reader know what the heck is going on there? Will we get pulled over in the future for talking to our robot helpers on our telepathic com-links while our automated flying Google cars get us from place to place? Will this scene render Everything Goes dated and dull?

When I was researching firefighters for Tinyville Town, I learned that firehouses aren’t built with sliding poles any more, for insurance reasons. And the firehouses that do have them, don’t use them. But when you talk to kids about fire stations, a pole is still among the first things they want to see. I gotta have that pole, even though it’s an anachronism. So, what is it that makes a book “timeless,” anyway? Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel was one of my favorite books when I was a kid. I had no idea what a steam shovel was, and that book was big-time dated when I read it in the 1970s. But I loved it. It’s timeless. Not because a steam shovel was still a relevant piece of cool construction technology, but because the theme of “new and improved” versus familiar and reliable, and the David and Goliath story buried in that book will always be relevant.

Betsy: So I did this post the other day about gender and how construction workers (and even their equipment) are shown to be both male and female or simply male.  Some folks wrote in saying they’d never seen a female construction worker in all their livelong days.  You, however, do give professions of every sort dual genders (I was always quite grateful for the female pilot in Everything Goes in the Air).  How do you reconcile this with a real world that isn’t always as gender neutral as we’d like it to be?

Brian: I’m going to quote a friend here, who told me that “even if it isn’t seen, that doesn’t mean it’s right and it doesn’t mean things should stay that way. If kids can see it, it’s easier for them to imagine being it.” This friend recently became one of the few female electrical linemen in Philadelphia. A while back, when she saw some early sketches I’d posted for I’m a Firefighter, she pointedly asked me why there were no women working at the Tinyville Town fire station. I couldn’t believe I’d let this get by me. And I was so so happy she’d pointed it out. But did I ask myself how many women really are firefighters? Do I need to go by all the fire stations in Philadelphia to see how many women work there before I can include them in my book?

This ties in directly with the discussion about timelessness, doesn’t it? Ten years ago there was this big brouhaha when someone noticed that the Busytown books he was reading to his kids were different from the ones he had when he was growing up. At some point the publisher had redrawn many of the characters and even some complete scenes to reflect a more modern sensibilty. A father bunny rabbit had joined a mother bunny rabbit in the kitchen preparing dinner. The “pretty stewardess’” job description had changed to “flight attendant” and the “pilot” was no longer “handsome.” The mouse in the canoe was no longer wearing the potentially offensive and stereotypical feathered headdress, and a menorah had been added onto the holiday celebration. These changes came along right around the time I was reading Scarry’s books to my own kids, and as a responsible parent, I was pleased. There was a part of me, the sentimental child within, that wondered if I should be angry at this absurd kowtowing to political correctness, but do I want my daughter thinking that flight attendants are supposed to be pretty? Do I want my son to think that husbands are supposed to be waited on by their wives? These books aren’t supposed to be snapshots of a particular time. They’re not Little House on the Prairie.

Before 2008, one could set a tv show in the near-but-still-far-away future by having a U.S. President be African American, or female. It was maybe somewhat conceivable, but it hadn’t happened yet. Now, there’s a fairly good chance we’re going to elect a female president this year, which would mean that in 2020 there will be a generation of kids who don’t know how impossible this so recently seemed. To these kids, those 43 previous white guys are mere history. That’s just amazing to me.

People have never seen a female construction worker? They’re not paying attention.

Betsy: What’s the ultimate goal with this series?

Brian: Well, of course, the ultimate goal is to create an entertaining, satisfying series of books that kids like to read over and over again. I actually don’t think much about teaching lessons when writing these things, and I don’t think that reflecting the world I live in, or I want my kids and eventual grandkids to live in, is any sort of political agenda, and certainly not a hidden one.

I don’t expect Tinyville Town to be some kind of a catalyst for change. Really, I just want a kid to read I’m a Firefighter, make loud siren noises as the fire truck speeds through town, and cheer when the fire at the bakery is put out at the end. If she then goes to bed thinking “I want to be that,” well, that’s just gravy, isn’t it?

I want to thank Brian for taking quite a bit of time to put down these thoughts for us today.  Tinyville Town Gets to Work hits shelves September 6th alongside the board books Tinyville Town: I’m a Veterinarian and Tinyville Town: I’m a Firefighter.  And yes, in case you were wondering, there is a librarian on the horizon as well:

Who? What? Where? When? Why?

It’s a blog tour, kiddos!  A tour of bloggy goodness.  More than that, it’s a graphic novel blog tour done to celebrate Children’s Book Week in all its fancypants glory.

The subject of today’s interview is none other than Eric Colossal.  Colossal, if the name is new to you, is the author of the danged funny RUTABAGA series.  I’m a big fan of those books as they combine two of my favorite things: quests and eating.  And in a bit of a twist, I won’t be doing the interview here today, though.  That honor goes to John Patrick Green, author of the upcoming HIPPOTAMISTER.

Take it away, John!

• Your series is about a plucky adventurer who constantly finds himself in sticky situations that he manages to get out of by cooking delicious foods. How did this concept come about?

Growing up, I loved fantasy stories filled with weird beasts and mystical magic but I was always confused about why no one talked about the food in these lands. I mean, here in the real world we eat some pretty strange stuff. We eat bee barf and call it honey, we grind up a rock and put it on our food and call it salt. How come people who live in these magical lands never eat the strange beasts they fight in the bottoms of dungeons? So I created Rutabaga to do just that!

• At the back of each book are a few complete recipes that readers can cook. How do you come up with those? I’ll admit, even the fictional recipes Rutabaga makes on his quests look tasty! Where do you get the ideas for those?

There are two criteria I have for making a recipe to share: Does the recipe contain a fun activity and does the final product look unique. For instance, there’s nothing new about dipping grapes in chocolate but taking that idea and adding steps to the recipe that make the final product look like a chocolate spider with a big ol’ squishy butt, that’s a perfect recipe for Rutabaga! In fact, that recipe is in book 2 and it’s one of my favorites! 

• What is your creative process like?

I watch a LOT of documentaries on food and food culture. My favorite ones talk about why people eat what they eat. Sure it’s fun to find out HOW to cook something but if you tell me WHY a culture has the diet it has you don’t just learn about food, you learn about people, and stories are about people. Other than that, most of my time is spent at my computer writing and drawing. I make the entire book digitally which is really handy when you have 2 cats who like to chew on paper!

• Which do you love more: food or comics? Please explain your answer in a piechart. Or maybe just a pie.

It’s a tough choice but I’m going to have to say I love food more. A comic can take up to a year to write, draw, and color but you can cook a huge 3 course meal in about 2 hours. Imagine if it took a year to make breakfast! And just for fun here’s that pie chart you asked for:

• What else are you working on? Can we expect further adventures of Rutabaga and his trusty kettle, Pot? Maybe an entire cookbook?

I have so many Rutabaga stories to tell, you have no idea! I probably have enough material for at least another 8 books! As long as there are people who want to read about my goofy little chef and his metal pal, I’ll keep making them!

• What comics or children’s books are you currently reading?

The last book I read was a young adult book called “Below The Root” by Zilpha Keatley Snyder. It’s an older book about a society of people who live in cities built on gigantic trees. They wear long flowing robes that allow them to glide around in the air to get from branch to branch. They’re an extremely peaceful race, they don’t eat meat, they don’t fight, they won’t even write on paper because it would hurt a tree to make the paper. The books follow a group of children as they uncover the history of their people and the sinister things that have been done in the name of protecting them. It’s a three book series and I greatly enjoyed it!

Thanks for the interview, guys!  And what a fantastic book to end on.  Honestly, it would have been even more awesome if you’d mentioned the Commodore 64 game of Below the Root that was based on the book (to the best of my knowledge, the ONLY children’s book to be adapted into the Commodore 64 gaming system format), but we’ll let it slide.

Want to read more of these interviews?  Here’s the full blog tour:

Monday, May 2^nd – Forever YA featuring Gene Luen Yang

Monday, May 2^nd  – Read Write Love featuring Lucas Turnbloom

Monday, May 2^nd – Kid Lit Frenzy featuring Kory Merritt

Tuesday, May 3^rd – Sharp Read featuring Ryan North

Tuesday, May 3^rd – Teen Lit Rocks featuring MK Reed

Wednesday, May 4^th – Love is Not a Triangle featuring Chris Schweizer

Wednesday, May 4^th – SLJ Good Comics for Kids featuring Victoria Jamieson

Thursday, May 5^th – The Book Wars featuring Judd Winick

Thursday, May 5^th – SLJ Fuse #8 featuring Eric Colossal

Friday, May 6^th – SLJ Scope Notes featuring Nathan Hale

Friday, May 6^th – The Book Rat featuring Faith Erin Hicks

Saturday, May 7^th – YA Bibliophile featuring Mike Maihack

Saturday, May 7^th – Supernatural Snark featuring Sam Bosma

Sunday, May 8^th – Charlotte’s Library featuring Maris Wicks

Sunday, May 8^th – The Roarbots featuring Raina Telgemeier

Thanks to Gina Gagliano and the good folks at First Second for setting this up with me.

To celebrate First Second Books and the rise of graphic novels, we thought it would be fun to have graphic novelist veteran, Leland Myrick, who has been with First Second from the beginning, and Andy Hirsch, a 2016 debut graphic novelist, interview each other.

Picture book extraordinaire Tara Lazar and the frightfully creative S. Britt interview each other about Normal Norman (Sterling Children's Books, 2016), a laugh-out-loud book that explores the meaning of normal through the study of an exceptionally strange orangutan.

Patrice Barton’s artistic talents were discovered at age three when she was found creating a mural on the wall of her dining room with a pastry brush and a can of Crisco.

This gem comes to us from Kim Krans, the creator of The Wild Unknown—a lifestyle website offering prints, calendars, and more.

I like my comics like I like my men. Chock full of lunch and Pearl Harbor references.

Hm? That didn’t make sense? Maybe not, but if nonsense is pouring out of my mouth then I believe it may have something to do with the excitement I feel about today’s guest. If the term “Nathan Hale’s Hazardous Tales” means nothing to you then please be so good as to read this and this and then come back to me. As many of you know, he is the one-man genius factory behind some of the best history for kids out there today.

That’s in one corner.  In the other corner is the Comics Squad series put out by Penguin Random House.  The concept is simple.  The books are about the size of your average Babymouse or Lunch Lady comic book.  Inside, a bunch of different comic book creators riff on a theme.  Last time it was recess.  This time, lunch.  And our man, Nathan Hale, did a story for it involving . . . well . . .

So where did that come from?  He was kind enough to answer my questions on the subject.

Betsy Bird: I don’t know about anyone else, but I was pretty psyched when I saw The Hangman standing on the cover of the latest Comics Squad release.  I think the reviewers are already mentioning that yours is a bit more serious than the other fare (Babymouse, kid Lunch Lady, Snoopy, etc.).  How’d the editors approach you for the job?

Nathan Hale: Thanks! It is fun to see the Hangman on the cover. He must have looked a little too monochrome for the cover, because someone turned his gloves blue. He looks like he’s working with industrial chemicals or something.

You’re right about the tone. I hope the readers are cool with it. Reading the stories is like: silly story, funny story, goofy story, haha story, PEARL HARBOR!?! I figure readers will either love my story, or skip it completely.

Jennifer Holm approached me for a story. I loved COMICS SQUAD 1, and of course, I’ve always loved BABYMOUSE (fun fact: BABYMOUSE is the reason the Hazardous Tales books are colored in one color. I even got coloring tips from Matthew Holm early on.)

BB: The tale marks the first time WWII has been mentioned in the Nathan Hale’s Hazardous Tales series.  Did you already know that lunch-related story, or did you have to hit the books to find it?

NH: I had to hit the books. I started researching for an essay about the different meals soldiers ate through history. While doing that, I stumbled across this WWII potato story, I knew I had to do it.

BB: Did you have a competing lunch story you thought about using, or was this always your #1 choice?

NH: My first idea was to skip the history, and just do a goofy story about some chips. When I was a kid I didn’t have a TV. And there was a very popular show at the time called C.H.I.P.S.–California Highway/Interstate Patrol Squad. I never saw the show, so I thought I was missing an amazing show about walking talking tortilla chips who fought crime and had adventures. I drew my own version of CHIPS in my childhood notebooks. I was going to reboot that old idea for COMICS SQUAD. I’m really happy with how the WWII story turned out. But don’t count the CHIPS out just yet. They are still in development.

BB: How about yourself?  Do you have a lunch story about yourself that you’d care to tell me?

NH: Once, when I was standing in the lunch line of my fifth grade school cafeteria, the cutest girl in the class, who was wearing a black turtle neck, sneezed and shot an unbelievable amount of snot all over herself. It was like she shot two barrels of silly string out of her nose. She was mortified, tried to wipe it all away, but, of course, she was in the black turtle neck, so it wasn’t going anywhere. She ended up just becoming entangled in it, like a Spiderman villain. The kids in line were so impressed by the biological display, that we didn’t even think about laughing until she had run from the cafeteria. It wasn’t “Ha-ha” it was “WOW!” As a kid, I thought, well, that must be a thing that happens to people. Yet, to this day, I’ve never seen it equalled.

Pretty gross. And, no, that was never a story I was tempted to do for COMICS SQUAD. Although, now that I think about it…

BB: Ew!  And . . . kinda awesome.  By the way, I don’t suppose you’d happen to be able to mention what the subject of the next Hazardous Tale will be, by any chance?

NH: Hazardous Tales #6 comes out in three months! It’s about the Alamo!

Right now I’m taking a one-book break from history comics to do a science fiction comic (not the CHIPS), then I’m going straight back into Hazardous Tales #7 and #8. I can hint that book #7 takes place in a VERY similar time to the COMICS SQUAD: LUNCH story.

BB: Fantastic.  Gonna go over to Abrams now and poke ’em, poke ’em, poke ’em until I get my hands on that Alamo comic.  Thanks go Nathan for chatting with me and to Cassie McGinty for setting the whole thing up.  The new Comics Squad issue comes out January 26th, so keep an eye peeled for that one as well.

Jackie Morris lives in Pembrokeshire, Wales, with children, dogs and cats. Her latest book is the retelling of Hans Christian Andersen's The Wild Swans.

What drove you to start creating children's books? A revolt! When I had my first child, children’s books looked like some stupid marketing thing.

Carolyn Conahan is the author and illustrator of several picture books, including The Twelve Days of Christmas in Oregon (Sterling), and The Big Wish (Chronicle), which was awarded the 2011 Oregon Spirit Book Award for Picture Books by the Oregon Council of Teachers of English.

JENNIFER GRAY OLSON is a graduate of California State University, Fullerton, where she earned her bachelor of arts degree in art education. She is a glassblower and sculptor. In addition to writing and illustrating ... Read the rest of this post

Tracy Dockray's most recent book is “Izzy and Oscar”, an octopus out of water tale, by Allison Estes.

Hervé Tullet is known for his prodigious versatility, from directing ad campaigns to designing fabric for Hermès. But his real love is working with children, for whom he has published dozens of books, including Press Here.

John Rocco discusses his newest picture book, Blizzard, the companion to your Caldecott Honor-winning Blackout.

Ruth Paul is an award-winning author and illustrator of ten picture books, including Hedgehog’s Magic Tricks. She works from a small straw-bale studio in the middle of a pasture just outside Wellington, New Zealand.

Jeffrey’s Darth Vader series was originally geared towards adults as it was about the experience of being a parent; however, parents shared it with their kids and now both adults & kids love the series. Goodnight Darth Vader was created with both audiences in mind.

I had the pleasure of meeting Arree at an SCBWI conference schmooze and I was struck by his dedication, enthusiasm and humility.  [JM] Illustrator or author/illustrator? If the latter, do you begin with words or pictures? [AC] I consider myself … Continue reading →

Christopher Weyant’s work has been published worldwide in books, newspapers, magazines, and online. His cartoons are in permanent collection at The Whitney Museum of American Art and The Morgan Library & Museum in New York City. YOU ARE (NOT) SMALL is his first children’s book.

Bob Shea has written and illustrated over a dozen picture books including the popular Dinosaur vs. Bedtime and the cult favorite Big Plans illustrated by Lane Smith.

Stephen Biesty has worked as a freelance illustrator since 1985 creating a wide variety of information books for both adults and children.

Shirow Di Rosso is the Artmaster behind the new comic-book-style picture book series about malicious cyber attacks, The Cynja.

Honestly, I don’t quite know why I even bother doing Fusenews posts on Saturdays.  As you might suspect, my readership dips considerably when the weekends hit, but an old Fusenews post is like a week old fish.  Time does it no favors.  As such, I shall cut through my seething envy of everyone at BookExpo this week (honestly, why are you folks having SO much fun anyway?) and pretend that Maureen Johnson’s tweets about how bad the coffee is there will convince me that it’s not that interesting anywa . . . wait a minute . . . they’re giving away copies of that Scieszka/Biggs early reader series in the Abrams booth?!?!  WAAAAAAHHHHHH!

• New Site Alert: We begin with the big, interesting, important news.  Phil and Erin Stead aren’t just Caldecott Award winners.  No siree bob, they also happen to be innovative interviewers.  Having just started the site Number Five Bus Presents (I approve of the title since it fits in nicely with 7 Impossible Things Before Breakfast, A Fuse #8 Production, and 9 Kinds of Pie . . . we just need a blog that uses the number 6 to fill in the gap), the two are conducting a series of conversations with book makers.  There will be 9-12 episodes per “season”.  So far they’ve spoken with Eric Rohmann (consider this your required reading of the day) with many more interviews on the way.  You can read the reasons why they’re doing this here.  Basically it boils down to them wanting to connect to fellow book makers in what can often be a lonely field.  If I were a professor of children’s literature, I would make everyone in my class subscribe to this site.  Many thanks to Jules for the tip!

• About a month ago I was at an event where a venture capitalist with an interest in children’s literature was asking how much money a new children’s book prize should pay out.  “$20,000?  $30,000?” he ventured.  We all sort of balked at the amounts, assuring the man that any author would be grateful for $10,000, let alone a larger amount (the authors in the room, as you might imagine, were gung ho for the original mentioned amounts).  Meanwhile, had I but known, the people at Kirkus were debating the self-same thing.  Only when they came up with their brand new book prize monetary amount, they decided to play for keeps.  On October 23, 2014 some amazingly lucky children’s or YA author will win a $50,000 (you read that number right) prize for their book.  All it needs to have done is receive a star from Kirkus to be eligible.  The initial announcement in The Washington Post made the big time mistake of saying that the youth award would only go to YA.  Happily, the subsequent Kirkus announcement clarified that this was not the case.  Man.  I really really want to be on that jury someday.  The power!

• Just a reminder that the Kids Author Carnival will be up and running here in NYC today (Saturday).  Got no plans at 6 tonight?  Now you do.

• Aw, what the heck.  Need a new poster for your library?  How bout this?

You can download the PDF here if you so desire.

• Sure, the blog post Trigger Warnings for Classic Kids Books is amusing, but I would bet you dollars to donuts that at least half of these “objections” have been used in legitimate attempts to ban or remove from shelves these books somewhere, sometime.

• I did not know that Sun Ra and Prince were both influences on Daniel Handler but when said, it makes a certain amount of sense. PEN America’s biweekly interview series The Pen Ten recently interviewed the man and justified my belief that the most interesting authors are the ones that don’t give the same rote answers in every single interview they do.  Of course good questions help as well.

• In L.A.?  Wish you were in New York attending BookExpo?  Wish you had something in your neck of the woods to crow about?  Well, good news.  If you haven’t heard already, the Skirball Cultural Center is featuring the show The Snowy Day and the Art of Ezra Jack Keats from now until September.  Lucky ducks.

• Speaking of BookExpo (and is there anything else TO speak of this week?) I was much obliged to the folks at Shelf Awareness for their #BEA14: Pictures from an Exhibition post.  From that amazing diversity panel at SLJ’s Day of Dialog to singing sensation Michael Buckley and the Amazing Juggling Authors to James Patterson’s $1 million given out to bookstores (way to go, Watchung Booksellers!) it’s a great post.

• There’s a 2014 Children’s Book Week Bookstore Display Contest?  Oo. Good luck choosing amongst them, guys.

• Adult authors that write books for children are hardly new.  They’re also rarely any good.  Sorry, but it is the rare adult author that finds that they’re a natural in the children’s book realm as well.  There are always exceptions (heck, Neil Gaiman won himself a Newbery so howzabout THEM apples, eh?) and one of them might be Jo Nesbø.  Over at The Guardian, Nesbø discusses how he decides in the morning whether or not to write his gritty adult crime thrillers . . . or the fart books for kids.  Frankly, I’ll always be grateful to Nesbø because of the day I was sitting at the reference desk in the Children’s Center at 42nd Street and a group of young female Norwegians came in asking for Norwegian children’s authors.  Thank goodness for Nesbø and Peter Christen Abjorsen.

• Somewhat along the same lines, this has very little to do with anything (to the best of my knowledge the only children’s book she ever penned was The Shoe Bird) but if you have not already read Eudora Welty’s New Yorker application letter, you’re welcome.  Suddenly I want to see the biopic of her life with the character of Eudora played by Kristen Schall.  Am I crazy?

• It took them a bloody long time but at long last the Bologna Children’s Book Fair has announced when the 2015 dates will be.  So . . . if anyone feels like sponsoring me to go I wouldn’t, ah, object or anything.  *bats eyelashes charmingly*

• A library can lend books.  It can lend tablets.  It can lend laptops even.  But lending the internet itself?  NYPL is currently doing just that (or is about to). In this article you can see that, “The goal of this project is to expand the reach and benefits of free access to the Internet provided by The New York Public Library (NYPL) to underserved youth and communities by allowing them to borrow portable WiFi Hotspot devices from their local libraries for a sustained period of time.”  We’ll just have to see how it works out, but I’m intrigued.

• Tell me this isn’t awesome:

As you can see, this is a selection of animal sounds found in the Orbis Sensualium Pictus (or The World of Things Obvious to the Senses drawn in Pictures), also known as the world’s oldest children’s picture book.  And if you can read through it and not suddenly find the song “What Does the Fox Say?” caught in your head then you’re a better man than I.  Thanks to AL Direct for the link.

• When I read the i09 piece 10 Great Authors Who Disowned Their Own Books I naturally started thinking of the children’s and YA equivalents.  So far I can think of at least one author and one illustrator off the top of my head.  The author would be Kay Thompson of Eloise.  The illustrator I’ll keep to myself since he’s still alive and kicking.  Any you can think of?

• “In France, I can publish a funny picturebook one month and a YA novel about revenge porn the next.” Maybe the best thing I read all day.  Phil Nel directed me to this absolutely fascinating piece by Clementine Beauvais called Publishing Children’s Books in the UK vs. in France.  Just substitute “UK” for “US” (which isn’t that hard) you’ll understand why this is amazing reading.  Obviously there are some difference between the UK and US models, but they share more common qualities than differences.  Thanks to Phil Nel for the link!

• How many illustrators sneak pictures of their previous books into other books?  Travis Jonker accounts for some of the titles doing this in 2014.  Along the same lines, how many authors put in in-jokes?  It was my husband who pointed out that Jonathan Auxier put a sneaky reference to his blog The Scop into The Night Gardener this year.  Clever man.

• Daily Image:

I have good news.  You can order this as a poster, should you so desire.

Thanks to Lori for the link!

Andrew Zettler is an American illustrator, writer and cartoonist. He is a member of the New York Society of Illustrators, originator of the comic strip Half-Baked, author of The Teeniest Tiniest Yawn, and has illustrated children's books including Alphabet Olympics and Albert Acorn.

Carson Ellis is an award-winning illustrator who has provided art for bestsellers such as "The Mysterious Benedict Society" by Trenton Lee Stewart, The Composer Is Dead by Lemony Snicket, and the "Wildwood Chronicles" by her husband, Colin Meloy.