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Why do some great Broadway shows fail, and mediocre ones thrive? How does the cast onstage manage to keep tabs on the audience without missing a beat or a line? Ken Bloom, author of Show and Tell: The New Book of Broadway Audiences, delves into the inner workings of the Broadway stage and the culture surrounding Broadway hips and flops.

The post Secrets and trivia from the Broadway stage appeared first on OUPblog.

September marks the new Broadway musical season and the opening of fledgling shows like Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 and familiar revivals like Cats.

The post How well do you know your Broadway trivia? [quiz] appeared first on OUPblog.

When Out of the Box started over five years ago (!!), it was primarily show-and-tell type posts: a look at what we literally pulled out of boxes we received. The scope of the blog has widened considerably since then — adding app reviews, movie reviews, event recaps, and lots more — but I still collect notable items to give you a glimpse at how wacky, weird, and wonderful our mail can be. With 2015 drawing to a close, it’s time to do a big swag post (and clean out my desk shelves!).

We’re not really sure of the provenance of some of this stuff, so if you can shed some light on what items are and where they came from, please do! For more swag and surprising mail, check out the tag show and tell.

First category is…sweets! We love getting treats. Bonus points if they are beautiful and bookish.

cookie with art from Ashley Spires’s The Most Magnificent Thing

gummy bears celebrating Ben Bailey Smith and Sav Akyüz’s I Am Bear

mystery international chocolate milk mix (we think?)

Journals and other writing-related tools:

awesome quill-and-ink set accompanying Don Tate’s Poet: The Remarkable Story of George Moses Horton

Star Darlings wish list pad and magnetic board

companion journal for R. J. Palacio’s Wonder

journal and magnetic poetry set with Tamara Ireland Stone’s Every Last Word

Prints and posters:

signed print of Little Tree by Loren Long

signed prints: Appleblossom the Possum by Gary Rosen (written by Holly Goldberg Sloan) and The Marvels by Brian Selznick

signed print of Waiting by Kevin Henkes

postcards with illustrations from several Chronicle picture books

poster for Anna Kang and Christopher Weyant’s That’s (Not) Mine!

poster for Leo: A Ghost Story by Mac Barnett and Christian Robinson

Lizi Boyd’s big bear little chair print and masks

Tote bags:

tote bag and to-do list featuring characters from Bethanie Murguia’s Cockatoo, Too

Lectura Books Literacy Project tote bag

Miscellaneous:

story blocks from Daniel Nayeri and Brian Won’s kit How to Tell a Story

mystery seeds, from two separate correspondents

Jake Halpern and Peter Kujawinski’s Nightfall with creepy note, candle, and matches

mystery (but cute!) rhino stuffie

Commentarii de Inepto Puero (a.k.a. the Latin edition of Jeff Kinney’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid)

stickers of Annie Barrows and Sophie Blackall’s Ivy + Bean

The post Last show and tell of 2015! appeared first on The Horn Book.

1. Christmas Trolls by Jan Brett: always our first book of the season. My younger three love it every bit as much as my older three did. I’m right there with them—the troll voices are so much fun to read aloud, and there’s a bit at the end that chokes me up every single time. Plus we have a red wooden horse exactly like the one in the book!

(Why has Amazon started slapping a copyright notice on book covers? They’re fair use.)

2. I really appreciate the downloadable lock-screen calendar Inkwell Press provides for free every month. What a nice gift! I like being able to turn on my phone and see what day it is without clicking to my actual calendar. I’m lazy that way. If you sign up for their email list, Inkwell will send links to each month’s wallpaper options—lock screen, home screen background, and desktop. Pretty nifty.

3. I mentioned this on Facebook and Twitter last night, but for those who missed it: 50 Incredible Minecraft Seeds You Must Try is free on Kindle right now and it’s pretty darn cool. It includes seeds for PC, Pocket Edition, XBox, etc. My kids and I were pretty excited to explore some of the Pocket Edition maps today…there’s one with four villages squished together and another with a mountain village that looks like something out of Howling Fjord. I ran around the mountain one for a while and it was a hoot. The blacksmith shop is high up on a rocky crag above the rest of the town.

4. The Jacquie Lawson Advent Calendar! We look forward to this every year. It’s an animated Advent calendar with some new little piece of story to click on every day. I’m glad my friend Phoebe reminded me to download it today. (Costs $4.) This year’s theme is “Victorian Christmas,” which, you know, had me at hello.

5. Periscope: I’ve done about one scope a week since I started. I never know if I should post them here! You can view all my replay videos at katch.me/melissawiley, but I could upload them here on the blog, too, if it would be helpful. Actually, I suppose I ought to start posting a list of links for stuff I mention in each scope, since show-and-tell seems to be what I wind up doing every time. Okay, there’s a plan (but not for tonight). Yesterday’s was called “A quick Monday hello” and is pretty chatty. Sometimes I have a structured topic, and other times I’m just there to gab.

Today’s mail brought a box of (foam) carrots*,

buttons, stickers, bookmarks,

and a very nice note from Wolfie the Bunny author Ame Dyckman. Thanks, Ame! In our March/April Magazine, Wolfie receives a starred review and Ame tells us a bit about Wolfie’s eating habits; look for the issue in your mailbox very soon.

*I have to confess we had hoped they were chocolate carrots — there are some Wolfie-sized appetites for sweets in our office!

The post The Carrot Patch comes to us appeared first on The Horn Book.

“Katie! There’s a pretty package for you!” Martha said this morning when the mail arrived. For me?

Sure enough, the holographic, hot pink package was addressed to me, and inside was…

a galley of Bob Shea’s early reader Ballet Cat: The Totally Secret Secret (Disney-Hyperion, May 2015), a super-cute tote bag, and a letter addressed “Dear Friend of Ballet.” Being both a friend of ballet and a friend of cats, I claimed the tote bag before anyone else even got to see it. (MY Ballet Cat tote bag! MINE!)

Another recent delivery — also from Disney-Hyperion — was more conducive to sharing. A crate of apple-shaped stress balls emblazoned “Wickedly Good!,” “Bad Apple,” “Rotten to the Core,” etc., arrived to promote Melissa de la Cruz’s novel Isle of the Lost (May 2015).

Isle of the Lost is a prequel to the Disney Channel’s upcoming Descendants movie, which will follow the banished children of Disney villains such as Maleficent, Jafar, and Cruella De Vil. Tucked in with the “apples” was a note (which shrieks when you open it!) reading “We cordially dare you to share these wickedly good apples, produced on the Isle of the Lost.” All five stress balls went to happy homes on Horn Book desks.

Thanks, Disney-Hyperion!

The post New swag! appeared first on The Horn Book.

We just received this lovely advent calendar — “Christmas in the Square” by Eve Tharlet — in the mail from publisher NorthSouth. What a nice surprise (and a good way to combat my case of the bah-humbugs). Thank you, NorthSouth!

The post Special delivery appeared first on The Horn Book.

A box from Dina Sherman at Disney-Hyperion arrived just in time for after-lunch dessert.

With a label like this,

clearly the contents were going to be awesome. But they were awesome even beyond our expectations:

Thanks so much, Dina and Disney-Hyperion! The cookies are almost too cute to eat, but we’re all looking forward to a Pigeon-themed afternoon sugar high.

For more Pigeon madness, see our reviews of The Duckling Gets a Cookie?! and Don’t Let the Pigeon Run This App!

If you're not familiar with prolific type foundry, House Industries you should be. Some of the most incredible illustration, design and typography work comes out of their studio. House Industries has made a considerable impact on the world of design. Their fonts scream from billboards, wish happy whatever from tens of thousands of greeting cards, serve as the basis for consumer product logos and add elements of style to a wide range of mainstream media. In their illustrious career, House artists have mastered a large cross-section of design disciplines. Their typography deftly melds cultural, musical and graphic elements. From early forays into distressed digital alphabets to sophisticated type and lettering systems, House Industries’ work transcends graphic conventions and reaches out to a broad audience. What ultimately shines in the House Industries oeuvre is what always conquers mediocrity: a genuine love for their subject matter.

Watch this video out of the House Industries shop… Ed Rondthaler on English spelling

AN Interruption of My STRUCTURE Posts for a Public Service Announcement Concerning “Show Don’t Tell.”

DO NOT LISTEN TO THIS ADVICE: “Show don’t tell.” When someone gives it to you (and they aren’t specific), give them the fisheye. I don’t really know what the fisheye is but I know it’s not good. Give it to them. This ridiculous advice is passed along like it’s one of the Ten Commandments. I’m hear to tell you, brothers and sisters, it is not. No novel only shows. Read any novel you like, and you will find plenty of show AND tell. So it is a useless piece of advice UNLESS you’re speaking about a specific part of a novel that should be showing more and telling less.

In scenes you do mostly want to show. You want to reveal your characters longings and fears and you want to show the reader, make the reader live them with your character. Showing involves the reader emotionally.

BUT there is information you will need to tell. You might summarize all kinds of things. Summary of what the character does for a living or where he always went on vacation or some thought he has about the nature of the universe or his love of bacon, all of these might be important but not important enough they need scenes. Or you might summarize something that happens that isn’t that important to the story but that adds needed information or explains some movement of the story. Anything that doesn’t require a scene might be summarized, might be told. Doing so emphasizes the importance of what is shown and keeps the novel moving.

So the really difficult part show and tell is deciding what’s important enough, essential enough to developing your character and story, to be shown. Show and tell is ultimately about is this critical choice.