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I would just like to extend a thank you to two talented artists in their field who chose to visit the Donnell Central Children's Room yesterday. Accompanied by a posse of publishers and an agent, up-and-coming Derek Landy is the author of that nice skeleton book all the kids are talking about, Skulduggery Pleasant. I desperately want to start calling it that-jive-talking-skeleton book, but though this sounds good it's not strictly true. Pity. Mr. Landy is a quiet sort, and I never quite had the chance to inform him that the title of his book is doomed to be misspelled Skullduggery Pleasant due to the nature of its subject matter. I gave the group a little tour as well. In the course of the tour I couldn't help but notice that almost all our significant point of interest (Winnie-the-Pooh, Mary Poppins' umbrella, a signed Harry Potter book) are British. Go figure. Now with its up-and-coming release date there was nothing on hand to give Mr. Landy to sign aside from my own much battered, much dog-eared ARC of his book. He did so quite nicely. A lovely time was had by all.

Then a little later in the day we were treated to the appearance of illustrator Robert McGuire. A relatively new up-and-coming artist, Mr. McGuire was bringing some friends of his to the library to view the illustrations he did for Sid Fleischman's The White Elephant (published last year and on NYPL's 100 Books For Reading and Sharing list). My co-worker and I managed to convince him of the necessity of signing our Reference copy for posterity, and even got the name of his 2007 picture book due out in March (The Furry-Legged Teapot by Tim "I Get All the Best Illustrators To Do My Books" Myers).

Thanks to both men. We'll be looking forward to seeing how your books fare this year.