Chris Barton's Blog: Bartography, page 36

Jenny’s new book, my new shirt, and our same old dog

Whoosh!-ing into Scholastic Reading Club

I got the news from Charlesbridge last week that my second book with Don Tate, Whoosh! Lonnie Johnson’s Super-Soaking Stream of Inventions, is going to be available as a paperback through Scholastic Reading Club (which used to be known as Scholastic Book Clubs). That means a lot more kids and families are going to be […]

Modern First Library: Connecting shoppers with diverse books for two years and counting

In spring of 2014, I had an idea for something a bookstore might try out — an idea for selling more copies of diverse books by leveraging shoppers’ impulses to buy well-known books as baby gifts. So I emailed a friend at Austin’s BookPeople and asked, “Would there be an effective way to encourage these […]

A Horn Book review, a custom-made pie, and other good stuff for 88 Instruments

There’s been an accumulation of splendiffery in the four weeks since 88 Instruments was published, and I can’t stand to keep it to myself. For starters, there’s this 88 Instruments Educators’ Guide and Activities download from Random House. On her new blog A Book and A Pie, Lindsay Leslie has paired her review of 88 […]

The newest good news for Whoosh!

Whoosh! will be among the 230 titles included in the 2016 ABC Best Books for Young Readers catalog put out this fall by the American Booksellers Association. The complete list spans from board books all the way up to YA fiction and nonfiction, and you can view the titles here. Celebrate Picture Books featured Whoosh! […]

“We succeed anyway,” and lots more from Lonnie Johnson

If you know a reader who has enjoyed Whoosh! — or if you yourself have enjoyed it — I urge you to check out this recent BBC interview with Lonnie Johnson. In it, Lonnie goes into greater detail about many aspects of the story Don Tate and I tell in Whoosh!. He also offers up […]

August 2016 Bartography Express: The smashiest, the crashiest — and the animalsiest

To get Bartography Express in your inbox each month — and to have a shot at the September giveaway of This Is Our Baby, Born Today, written by Varsha Bajaj and illustrated by Eliza Wheeler — you can sign up on my home page.

Chris Barton and Jennifer Ziegler (and Ernie!) – August 2016

My favorite author in the whole wide world and I (and our favorite quadruped) thought we’d get you all caught up on what we’ve been up to this summer and what’s in store for us this fall.

In which I am interviewed by fourth graders from Graham Elementary

When I visited with the fourth graders at Graham Elementary here in Austin this past April, they followed up with many questions — and artwork. Such as this recreation of one of Don Tate’s illustrations in The Amazing Age of John Roy Lynch: That drawing of John Roy Lynch is just an example of the […]

Sounds like 88 instruments to me…

The author bio for my picture book being published today, 88 Instruments, says: “Chris Barton doesn’t have a favorite instrument, but his favorite piece is Rhapsody in Blue because it has everything there is to love about music.” But I don’t mean just ANY recording of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. I mean THIS version, […]