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Last night, a dozen or so child_lit contributors gathered at long-time list member Monica Edinger's apartment -- one floor above the festivities of a New York City "neighborhood" Halloween Party (read: in the lobby for the kids in the huge apartment building on West 111th Street.)

Philip Pullman and wife Jude were the honored guests for the night. We chatted about the "lineage" of our child_lit involvement.. from the creation of the list by Michael Joseph, who was there with Constance Vidor, his lovely partner, and Head Librarian at Friends' Seminary. We thanked Michael for creating a space in the cyber world for us to exchange ideas and forge otherwise unlikely friendship. GraceAnne DiCandido, Kirkus reviewer and my Library School teacher, was responsible for the two reviews of His Dark Materials' 2nd and 3rd installments. Other child_lit pals who came to help celebrate the occasion were Waller Hastings, English/Children's Lit. professor from South Dakota, now visiting professor at Rutgers this year, Pooja Makhijani, writer at Children's Television Workshop/Sesame Street International, Cheryl Klein, editor at Arthur Levine Books/Scholastic, John Peters, Supervising Librarian of NYPL's Donnell children's library, past Newbery Chair, and prolific reviewer, Uli Knoepflmacher, English Professor at Princeton University and expert on Victorian and children's literature who just recently joined child_lit, and Kerry Mockler, 4th-year PhD student and teacher of children's literature and baker of a host of His Dark Materials inspired butter cookies. They were incredibly yummy. My students in the sci-fi/fantasy club thanked her for this gift (the next day, while sharing the story Mimsy Were the Borogoves)!

Our dinner was 3 pizzas from, some salad, wine and champagne -- but the main ingredient was the non-stop conversation around the room: all about children's books and once in a while some weird child_lit history surfaced.

Here are just three pictures to mark the evening for me:

This is me talking to Philip. (I didn't quite wash off all my zombie make-up from the day and had to do a little photoshop-doctoring before posting it on the Journal. Haha.)



This is the tray of cookies waiting to be revealed...



This is a picture of Kerry and Philip. We were all so pleased with this perfect ending for a perfect evening. Yeah for Kerry!

These two links that I’ve seen in the past two days seem to be saying very interesting and similar things.

1. Peter Brantley the head of the Digital Library Federation wonders how access to networked information resouces is affecting what we do in reasearch libraries in his post If Libraries had Shareholders. Lively commenting.
2. Over at the Freakonomics blog Stephen Dubner asks If Public Libraries Didn’t Exist, Could You Start One Today? where he talks about the enormous influence of publishers in today’s book world and wondering if they’d even let you start up an institution where you’d share the things they are trying to sell.