Betsy Bird's Blog, page 176

One Betsy Bird + One Dan Santat = The Great Santa Stakeout Cover Reveal/Greatest Interview of All Time*

Lemme tell you a story. Ten years ago I had the chance to interview this illustrator by the name of Dan Santat. And Dan, being a novel fellow, suggested that we do a video interview just to shake things up a bit. So on my Flip camera (remember . . . this was ten years ago) I recorded my side and then he recorded his. The two sides were edited together. Easy peasy right? Only, I didn’t count on the fact that Dan would pour more work into that little video interview than most people pour into t...

Unexpected Jolts of Children’s Literature: Seusses and Ludwigs and Baums (oh my!)

Now that we’re done with the award announcement delights of the 2018 season, I’d say it was high time to start thinking about something completely different. And what could be more different than cases where adult books mention children’s books and children’s book creators in some way? As you may know, my day job is as the Collection Development Manager of a library system, and that means keeping up-to-date with the latest in adult publications. In my travels I ran across the following books....

Fuse 8 n’ Kate: The Day Jimmy’s Boa Ate the Wash by Trinka Hakes Noble, ill. Steven Kellogg

It’s the Memento of the 1980s! Take a trip back in time with me to 1980 on the nosey. An era when children apparently eschewed backpacks for satchels and school lunches were just as elaborate as those in Bread and Jam for Frances. Don’t believe me? Then you haven’t taken an up close and personal deep dive into one of Kellogg’s most famous stories. Kate had never seen a Steven Kellogg book on the show before, so I figured I’d give this one a go. It’s perfect for us since Kellogg was the master...

Review of the Day: Apocalypse Taco by Nathan Hale

Apocalypse Taco
By Nathan Hale
Amulet Books (an imprint of Abrams)
$14.99
ISBN: 978-1-4197-3373-4
Ages 10 and up
On shelves April 2nd

Before I get into the book before me, I need to give you a little history lesson. That’s a bit ironic since author Nathan Hale is best known for his history comics, but bear with me. So I have in my possession a book called The Seduction of the Innocent written by American psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, published in 1954. This is the book that almost singl...

Video Premiere: Creators IRL (Part 3): Identity

Today’s video is a little different. Normally when folks ask if I’ll post stuff and it’s video related it’s either a book trailer or, on occasion, a video that supports a Kickstarter of some sort. Penguin (with whom I have published a book in the past) reached out and asked if I had any interest in posting the third “Creators IRL” video. To which I replied, “What the heck is ‘Creators IRL’?”.

Apparently this is something Penguin created to “offer a safe space for conversations, questions, rev...

Cover Reveal – Just Like Beverly: A Biography of Beverly Cleary by Vicki Conrad, ill. David Hohn

For a brief period of time I lived in Portland, Oregon. I loved it. I loved how, even though I had a dead end job, I could see a frigging beautiful mountain in the distance when I came home from work. I loved the outdoor art fair on Saturdays and Powell’s Bookstore (where I read the entire His Dark Materials series) and how easy it was to go on hikes and explore seashores. The one thing Portland didn’t have? A library school. So I packed up my bags and left.

Years later I’d occasionally retur...

Behind The ABC of It: A Talk With Curator Lisa Von Drasek

It was one of the greatest children’s literature exhibits in my lifetime, and yet it produced no catalog. How is that possible? How did NYPL manage to create its most popular exhibit in its history, and yet it left no trace in the world?

When I heard that Lisa Von Drasek, the curator of the Children’s Literature Collection at the University of Minnesota had given a home to a new ABC of It, I was intrigued. And when she allowed me to interview her about it? I was thrilled. Here’s Lisa explaini...

Fuse 8 n’ Kate: Doctor De Soto by William Steig

And we’re back to the classics. So far on this podcast, Kate and I have tackled only one William Steig (Sylvester and the Magic Pebble). I was thinking maybe we should do Shrek next, but then I thought better of it. It seems to me that there’s a lot more fodder for discussion in this title. And, as per usual, Kate notices things. She notices that the initials of Doctor De Soto are DDS, which is a dental detail I’d never thought of before. She notices a rather lovely umbrella stand bedecked wi...

The Past Is Never Static. The Same Can Be Said of Our Books

Sometimes it feels as if the people that write Nonfiction and the people that write Fiction exist in entirely different worlds. Both are held accountable for what they write, but depending on the mix of fact and fancy, and how it’s applied to the text, that accountability can be a strange, shifting thing. Plenty of authors have gotten in trouble for rendering the past inaccurately. Others have gotten in trouble for excluding certain elements or depicting elements in ways that meet with disapp...

Fusenews: All the news that’s fit to fuse

Boy, howdy. I haven’t done a good old-fashioned Fusenews in a long time. How do these work again? I just sort of throw up the recent children’s literature news from a variety of sources with comments of some sort? Honestly, I used to do these pieces fairly regularly. That is, until I realized that PW Children’s Bookshelf basically had this game in the bag. They know what they’re doing over there. Still, there are always some interesting tidbits that catch my eye. On beyond the usual suspects:...