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• The biggest news of the day came in the form of a single headline in The New York Times yesterday: New York Library Drops Plan to Renovate Flagship. Whoa!   So.  That happened.  Wowzah.

• This news comes to us less than a week after Coldplay (yes, that Coldplay) hid something in one of the books in my Children’s Center at 42nd Street.  Apparently the doors opened that day and people tore into the room demanding, ultimately, Jeff Belanger’s Who’s Haunting the White House?  One wonders what Jeff Belanger thinks of all this.  Or if sales of his book have gone up.  Six copies of the books are now checked out of my system, I see.

• Oh, and it only took a year but The Paris Review finally made it over to NYPL to check out the current children’s book exhibit The ABC of It.  They liked it, which is good when you consider that it’s up and running until September now.

• May as well seek out the Secret Libraries of New York City as well, if you happen to be in town.  I knew some of these but others (the Conjuring Arts Research Center?!) who wholly new unto mine eyes.

• Unless you resided under a Wi-Fi free rock you may have missed the #WeNeedDiverseBooks campaign that went wholly and totally viral.  PW summed the whole thing up with its piece BookCon Controversy Begets Diversity Social Media Campaign.  At the time, I didn’t think to alert NYPL to the campaign, but as it turned out the folks there were already on board with it.  They whipped a Celebrate Diverse Children’s Books list out of some of the titles that have appeared on our 100 Titles for Reading and Sharing lists over the last three years.  It’s a nice list too.  Good show.

• There are, of course, children’s awards out there that remain under the radar, no matter how many diversity campaigns spring up.  Such is the case with the Children’s Africana Book Award.  Their history?  According to their site: “In 1991 the Outreach Council of the African Studies Association accepted a proposal from Africa Access to establish awards for outstanding K-12 books on Africa published in the U.S. The awards are designed to encourage the publication of accurate, balanced children’s materials on Africa, to recognize literary excellence and to acknowledge the research achievements of outstanding authors and illustrators. Collectively CABA winners show that Africa is indeed a varied and multifaceted continent. CABA titles expand and enrich our perspectives of Africa beyond the stereotypical, a historical and exotic images that are emphasized in the West.”  I was pleased beyond measure to see that Monica Edinger’s Africa Is My Home: A Child of the Amistad won in the Best Book for Older Readers category.  Well played, Monica!

• In other news the Tomás Rivera Book Award Winners which honors, “authors and illustrators who create literature that depicts the Mexican American experience” were announced and amongst the winners was Diego Rivera: An Artist for the People by Susan Goldman Rubin.  Woohoo!

• Just to round out the awards, the winners of the 2014 Irma Black Award were announced and the results were absolutely splendid.  PAR-ticularly The Cook Prize for the best STEM picture book.  The Boy Who Loved Math was a shoo-in to my mind, but it’s nice to see folks agreeing on that count.

• And here I thought I knew the bulk of the Maurice Sendak illustrated classics.  So how is it that only now I’m hearing about the fact that he illustrated The Velveteen Rabbit?  The technique is fascinating.  Like he wanted it to look as if a child had scribbled all over the book at strategic moments.  See, here’s what I mean:

• There are just too many folks to congratulate with the recent bout of 2014 ALSC Election Results but I will give one or two shout-outs just for the heck of it.  Big time congrats and woohoos to Andrew Medlar, our bright and shiny new Vice-President/President Elect. On the Caldecott committee, our fair GreenBeanTeenQueen Sarah Bean Thompson will be serving (yay, bloggers!).  The Newbery committee is seeing the delightful Allie Bruce of the Bank Street College of Education (did you see her latest SLJ article?) and Christine Scheper, my Materials Specialist colleague at the Queens Library System.  Well done, everyone!

• The issue of when one should begin telling kids about the Holocaust has come up time and time again in conversation.  How young is too young?  What makes a book appropriate or deeply inappropriate for a given age?  Well, Marjorie Ingall over at Tablet Magazine has some thoughts on the matter, even as she examines two very recent Holocaust titles that she admires (and that I need to read stat).  As Marjorie puts it, “A lot of us drag our heels when it comes to discussing the subject at all. We tell ourselves we want our kids to maintain their innocence for as long as possible. But what avoidance means, practically speaking, is that someone else often does the educating.”

• This is fun.  Recently I took part in a Facebook chat on the subject of getting kids into summer reading as well as various topics books can cover (the stars, science fiction, and camping, amongst others).  With that in mind the illustrious Lori Ess and I created the Reading Under the Stars Pinterest page.  A collection of spooky, camping, and space titles, it covers ages 0-18 and has a little something for everyone.

• Woo-hoo!  I love hearing whom The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art will honor at their yearly gala.  This year marks the ninth annual gala and fundraiser and so they’ll be honoring the following folks:

Artist: Jerry Pinkney

Angel: Reach Out and Read represented by Brian Gallagher and Dr. Perri Klass

Mentor: Henrietta Smith

Bridge: Françoise Mouly

For what it’s worth, I had the honor of hearing Dr. Perri Klass speak recently at the opening of a new NYU library and she was fan-friggin’-tastic.  So pleased she’s getting her due!  Henrietta Smith, for her part, is a children’s librarian so cool she has her own Wikipedia page.  And she served under Augusta Baker!  Man!  I wanna meet her stat.

• When I was asked if I had heard about the anthology Altered Perceptions I had to confess that I had not.  And here I thought I knew all the anthologies out in 2014.  Turns out, Altered Perceptions is a unique case.  Thirty-one authors ranging from Shannon Hale and Sara Zarr to Lauren Oliver and Brandon Mull have joined together to help out writer Robison Wells.  Rob suffers from four different mental illnesses, so his friends have donated writing to help him out of his financial debt.  It’s sort of a win-win situation.  You buy a book that includes work from one of your favorite authors and you help a guy out.  They’re halfway to their stated goal with only 17 days left to raise the funds.  Be a sport.  Help a guy out.

• When I hear that the Huffington Post has an article out with a title like 50 of the Best Kids’ Books Published in the Last 25 Years all that I ask of the universe is that when I open the dang thing I don’t immediately cringe upon seeing the picture book image they used to headline it.  So I opened this piece up and . . . yep.  Sure as shooting.  Cringeworthy.  Now add in the factual mistakes (the Galdone version of The Three Billy Goats Gruff came out in 1973, folks, not 1989).  Most of the books are fantastic, but man oh geez it’s an odd little list.

• Daily Image:

I’ve blogged the Little Golden Book Gown before on this site, so the fact that it exists shouldn’t be too much of a surprise.  What I did not know was that it’s about to be on display here in NYC on May 30th.

Stats about the dress include the fact that the paper skirt is comprised entirely of the original book illustrations sewn together with metallic gold thread and that the bodice is made from the books’ foil spines backed by tape adhesive.  So if anyone wants to lend this to me for an upcoming Newbery/Caldecott Banquet . . . hey, I’m totally game!

Coldplay (pictured, via) launched a library-themed scavenger hunt to reveal the lyrics of the nine songs featured on their forthcoming CD, “Ghost Stories.” The seven-time Grammy Award-winning band left sheets containing the lyrics, handwritten by lead vocalist Chris Martin, in libraries all over the world.

Clues have been shared on the official Coldplay twitter account with the hashtag #lyricshunt. Some of the hiding spots include the NYPL’s Stephen A. Schwarzman Building in New York City, the Vasconcelos Library in Mexico City, and the Rikhardinkatu Library in Helsinki. Each one was nestled inside the pages of a book. Thus far, fans have uncovered eight out of nine sheets.

Visit the Coldplay website to view scans of the lyrics sheets. The band unleashed the final clue at 8:08 a.m. EST. They also shared a blurry photo to go with it. We’ve embedded the two tweets below. Where do you think they hid the final sheet? (via The Gothamist)

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

By Simon Thomas

Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin (better known as an Oscar-winning actress and the Grammy-winning lead singer of Coldplay respectively) recently announced that they would be separating. While the news of any separation is sad, we can’t deny that the report also carried some linguistic interest. In the announcement, on Paltrow’s lifestyle site Goop, the pair described the end of their marriage as a “conscious uncoupling.” So … what does that mean?

The phrase was picked up by journalists, commentators, and tweeters around the world. Some called it pretentious, some thought it wise, others simply didn’t know what was going on. Let’s have a look into the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) and see what we can learn about these words.

Conscious is perhaps the less controversial word of the pair. A look through the Oxford Thesaurus of English brings up adjectives like aware, deliberate, intentional, and considered. But did you know that the earliest recorded use of conscious related only to misdeeds? The OED currently dates the word to 1573, with the definition “having awareness of one’s own wrongdoing, affected by a feeling of guilt.” This sense is now confined to literary contexts, but it was only a few decades before the general sense “having knowledge or awareness; able to perceive or experience something” became common. The idea of it being used as an adjective referring to a deliberate action came later, in 1726, according to the OED’s current research.

Portrait of Geoffrey Chaucer by Thomas Hoccleve in the Regiment of Princes

The verb uncouple has an intriguing history. The current earliest evidence in the OED dates to the early fourteenth century, where it means “to release (dogs) from being fastened together in couples; to set free for the chase.” Interestingly, this is found earlier than its opposite (“to tie or fasten (dogs) together in pairs”), currently dated to c.1400 in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In c.1386, in the hands of Chaucer and “The Monk’s Tale,” uncouple is given a figurative use:

He maked hym so konnyng and so sowple
That longe tyme it was er tirannye
Or any vice dorste on hym vncowple.

The wider meaning “to unfasten, disconnect, detach” arrives in the early sixteenth century, and that is where things rested for some centuries.

The twentieth century saw another couple of uncouples – one of which is applicable to the Paltrow-Martins, and one of which refers to a very different field. In 1948, a biochemical use is first recorded – which the OED defines “to separate the processes of (phosphorylation) from those of oxidation.” But six years earlier, an American Thesaurus of Slang includes the word as a synonym for “to divorce,” and this forms the earliest example found in the OED sense defined as “to separate at the end of a relationship.” Other instances of uncouple meaning “to split up” can be found in a 1977 Washington Post article and one from the Boston Globe in 1989.

So, despite all the attention given to the term “conscious uncoupling,” people have been uncoupling in exactly the same way as Gwyneth and Chris – and using the same word – since at least 1942. So perhaps not quite as controversial as some commentators suggested.

A version of this article originally appeared on the OxfordWords blog.

Simon Thomas blogs at Stuck-in-a-Book.co.uk.

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Image: Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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I’m a music geek. Until I got married I was that character from ‘High Fidelity’, endlessly scouring Crouch End record shops for the most obscure stuff I could find. And for as long as I can remember, music has played a major part in my writing.

Long before I ever finished anything as long as a novel, I conceived of a grand concept: a novel with its own soundtrack, perhaps contained in an attached CD. My dream is still unrealised (because I can’t compose) but even now, when I write, I find myself constructing a soundtrack to the story out of songs and tracks that I happen to be listening to at the time.

It all began when I was writing a (terrible) fantasy novel as a teenager, when for some reason or other I was heavily into The Eagles. I was listening to one of their tracks ‘Journey Of The Sorcerer’ (better known as the theme tune from ‘The Hitch-hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy’) when suddenly the plot came to me, crystal clear, in one blinding flash. The fact that it was a bad plot hardly matters now. I’d discovered that music could lead me places I might never find on my own. Even now, when I play that Eagles instrumental, I think not of Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect but of that unpublished fantasy novel.

These days I do it deliberately. When I have a new idea, I start hunting around in my CD racks for ‘that song’ which might capture its mood. When I have it, I might look for other tracks to orchestrate other key scenes. These imaginary soundtracks are inevitably cheesy – subtlety doesn’t work in this context. Until recently, I couldn’t stand the band Coldplay. Suddenly, heaven help me, I found an entire album of theirs (X&Y) which seemed to reflect the atmosphere of my book-in-progress. As a result, I had to play it constantly. At the same time, by way of contrast, a track by the progressive heavy metal band Dream Theater got straight to the heart of the book’s climactic scenes (if anyone is curious, that track is ‘The Ministry of Lost Souls’ from the album ‘Systematic Chaos’. And no, it sounds nothing like Coldplay).

It’s bizarre, this hard-wired link between my musical ear and my writing hand. But it has its uses. I know that a cure to writer’s block lies only as far away as the nearest record shop.