Last week award-winning author and poet Eloise Greenfield did a school visit at Hunnewell Elementary in Wellesley, where I was (very kindly) invited to join Eloise, several teachers, and Wellesley’s elementary school librarians for lunch. Eloise was warm and gracious, well-mannered, modest, and apparently very popular with the kids who’d seen her presentation that day. I snapped a photo of Eloise and the librarians, all the while thinking about all the great authors I’ve met even in just the past couple of months.

One of the things I’m learning about running lots of author events at our store and finding adequate time for blogging: the two generally don’t mix. When we’re busy running lots of events, I’m generally too overrun with work to find enough time to blog about them soon after the fact, leaving me with a backlog of unblogged-about events.

Last fall I fell into an unfortunate (but almost unavoidable) trap, thinking "I can’t post about THIS event, because I still haven’t posted about the last two events," but there wasn’t enough time that week to resize all those photos and assemble my thoughts on three events, so I’d postpone that post until the following week when there would generally be another event or TWO, leaving me with five or six events I then needed to post about and… you get the idea. I now have a few months worth of events posts percolating in this here blog tool. Any day now my fall events recap will magically write itself and appear here before your very eyes! Just as soon as I find some magical blogging elves… Or half a day’s worth of so-called "free time."

In any case, I’ve been trying to avoid that same events posting pitfall this winter and (now) spring, but despite my best efforts it’s already been happening again. At the start of February I blogged about our events with Linda Buckley-Archer and Jeff Kinney. But I didn’t have a chance to blog about the events we had a week later with FOUR of our favorite local authors, Mary Kaye Chryssicas, who just launched her new Yoga for Teens Card Deck, Mitali Perkins, whose new novel First Daughter: White House Rules is perfectly suited to the politics of an election year, and the talented duo behind Priscilla and the Hollyhocks, author Anne Broyles and illustrator Anna Alter.

The rest of February was pretty quiet as events go, but March was abuzz with activity, April has been keeping me plenty busy, and WOW. Wait’ll I try to play catch-up on May!

Here, briefly, is a rundown of whose elbows we’ve been brushing at recent in-store and off-site events.

On March 11 I met Laura Numeroff at the Bennett-Hemenway Elementary School in Natick, where she did a writing workshop with a small group of third and fourth graders. After that she did a public event with our store at the Wellesley Free Library, which drew a crowd of about 200 excited If You Give a Mouse a Cookie fans, happy to learn more about the characters in her newest book, The Jellybeans and the Big Dance.

On March 26, during a week when she was visiting two local schools, Linda Sue Park came to the store to talk to a group of eager listeners about her new novel Keeping Score, about which she recently wrote a great essay for Powell’s.

Linda is a great speaker, and as always her presentation seemed perfectly polished, despite it having been the first time she’s spoken about this particular book. And it was so much fun to learn the inside stories about Linda’s research headaches and triumphs! I enjoyed her talk at the store almost as much as I enjoyed the lively conversation we had over dinner afterward with friends Jacqueline Davies and M.T. Anderson. (Isn’t it amazing to be in an industry with people who are this entertaining and intelligent?? I can’t imagine a better job perk.)

Linda gave a talk in our Used Book Cellar, where she showed some slides (in PowerPoint) that tied in with portions of her presentation. In the UBC photo above she’s sporting one of the baseball jerseys and caps Clarion printed to promote Keeping Score. Linda’s birthday was the day before her event with us (March 25), so (again with the cake theme!) we served up slices of this birthday treat to everyone in attendance. (And yes, it came from the same place as the cake we recently gave to our receiver Pete.)

On Saturday, March 29, wonderful bookseller Pat Pereira and wonderful librarian/occasional bookseller Margaret Aldrich worked with me at the first-ever Belmont Children’s Picture Book Festival, held at the First Church in Belmont, which is home to a beautiful space! The day we were there it was also home to a truly, truly delightful afternoon event, for which the credit goes to Melissa Stewart, who pulled the whole thing together.

At the event, six local authors each talked about or gave a presentation about the themes of their most recent picture books. Melissa Stewart had a group of children from the church perform the text of When Rain Falls. Timothy Basil Ering gave a delightfully lively reading of Necks Out for Adventure! Anne Broyles talked about the discoveries she made while doing research for Priscilla and the Hollyhocks. Leo and Laura Espinosa explained how what began as an idea for licensed characters became the book Otis and Rae and the Grumbling Splunk.

James Kaczman, author/illustrator of Lucky Monkey, Unlucky Monkey and Sarah Brannen, author/illustrator of Uncle Bobby’s Wedding  showed a very entertaining video they collaborated on about the history of clothing-clad animals in children’s books. Following the event all of the authors and illustrators present signed books for their eager and enthusiastic fans, who also enjoyed the opportunity to indulge in a slice of the only wedding cake (cake, cake, cake!) I’ve ever seen topped with tux-wearing guinea pigs (Uncle Bobby and husband Jamie).

Unfortunately I’ve got NO photos from our event on Wednesday, April 2 with Barbara Joosse at the Wellesley Free Library, where she read from her new book Grandma Calls Me Beautiful. That morning I was tending to another event (see below) AND I’d taken the store camera with me, which meant no one could use it to snap shots in my absence! With sincerest apologies to Barbara I report that our booksellers, the aforementioned Pat and Lee Van Kirk (our events coordinator) came back raving about how wonderful she’d been with the 50 or so kids and parents in attendance. I’m really sorry I couldn’t have been two places at once that day.

While a pack of preschoolers were being charmed by Barbara, I was with a pack of students at Wayland Middle School, laughing our er… butts off at two presentations by Australian author John Flanagan, who is beloved the world over for his wonderful Ranger’s Apprentice series. John is charming as can be and wildly funny! Here he is holding up one of the paper shields (which didn’t fare well with the camera flash) that Penguin printed and sent us piles of. (It was interesting to note which kids thought they were "totally cool!" and which kids were too cool to be seen carrying them.)

After John’s presentations at the school he came to our store, where we had a booksigning at (of all times) 1:00 in the afternoon. On a school day. WHY, oh why, would I schedule something so crazy? Because the Wellesley elementary schools dismiss at noon every Wednesday, and the Middle School does the same on the first Wednesday of every month, and… John was only available during the day! I figured we might as well give his fans the chance to see him without having to travel all the way to Australia. If they could make it, great. If they couldn’t… well, at least we gave them the opportunity.

Make it they did. Even at that odd hour we had over 200 kids and parents come through the store, brandishing books, OVERJOYED at the prospect of meeting one of their favorite authors! It was fantastic! Amanda Bock, the librarian for the Advent School in Boston, organized a field trip and had 10 students accompany her to the store for this honor. They rode the commuter rail out from the city to get to the event! Some parents from neighboring towns actually took their kids out of school for an hour or so, just so they could bring them face-to-face with their author idol. With apologies to the truant officers in town and the teachers whose lessons these kids were missing, how cool is that?? I just love it when a kid’s enthusiasm for a BOOK (or series thereof) trumps all. John seemed as happy with the event as we were.

Two days later, on Friday, April 4th our store hosted a Define-a-Thon for a group of fourth, fifth and sixth graders that was apparently made for a REALLY fun evening! The event was moderated by lexicographer/editor Steve Kleineder and co-sponsored by SCORE, which sits across the street from us on Wellesley’s main drag and did wonders to help us draw together a crowd for the evening’s competition. As for Steve, word at our store is he was charming and funny and made the kids feel 100% swell, even after they gave incorrect answers to the occasional question. Steve was profiled in a New York Times article on Define-a-Thons last year that I can’t resist quoting from, in part because I think "making dictionaries seem sexy" is a noble cause to which I also aspire, though I haven’t got the tattoo to prove it:

For Mr. Kleinedler, who has a tattoo of the phonetic vowel chart on his back, it is not just about fun; it is about the business of making dictionaries seem sexy. Part of
his job is to debunk the notion that lexicographers are “gray-haired people hunched over a drafting table who never see the light of day,” he said.

And last Saturday Vermont author Phoebe Stone was in our store signing copies of her books, which include the new YA novel Deep Down Popular, and apparently had quite a number of people stop by to sing her praises and purchase her books. Once again I had to miss out on the fun, but I hope to make up for it by reading Phoebe’s novel (someday! hopefully soonish!), which I suspect I’m going to love.

So… after this great run of events, what’s up and coming? Well, Susan Lubner will be taking over one of our Friday morning Story Times to entertain kids with a reading from her new picture book A Horse’s Tale. We’ve got an event at the library to launch local author Katie Smith Milway’s new book One Hen AND the full features of the website that’s been created to go with it. The day after that we’ve got the only public event in New England with… (drum roll please) RICK RIORDAN!! And, as if that’s enough, and because I’m apparently a glutton for punishment, we’ve got one day in which we attempt a children’s event triple-header (a new trick for me) of unprecedented proportions. Try this schedule on for size: a school visit with Blue Balliett in the morning, a public event with Jerry Spinelli at the Wellesley Free Library in the afternoon, AND a public event with Jeanne Birdsall and Annie Barrows at a local middle school that evening! Also in May, local author Karen Day kicks off the publication of her new novel No Cream Puffs, and authors Howard Mansfield and Sy Montgomery join us at the Natick Community Organic Farm for a pig-pen party and celebration of Howard’s new picture book Hogwood Steps Out and Sy’s (still-one-of-my-all-time-favorites) non-fiction account of the couple’s porcine adventures, The Good, Good Pig.

Assuming I live to tell the tale, I’ll be sure to give a full report on all of these, hopefully before they’ve become semi-distant memories!

Reading the reports coming out of last week’s Bologna Children’s Book Fair brought back a lot of memories and filled me with longing. Oh, to have been strolling those aisles, admiring that fascinating array of books, and eating that food!

I had the immense honor of attending the Bologna Fair five years ago as a "guest of the fair."  Wanting to increase the attendance of book professionals outside of the publishing industry, the fair itself sponsored three contests in 2003 (one through ABC and two through SCBWI), all on the theme of "the importance and difficulties of books in translation." They paid for the travel, accommodations, and convention passes of three winners: a children’s bookseller (me), a children’s book author (Lisa McCourt), and a children’s book illustrator (Kathryn Hewitt). Lisa unfortunately had to postpone her visit by a year, so we didn’t cross paths at the fair, but Kathryn Hewitt and her daughter Annalise became fast friends with me and my school librarian friend Joanne Cimato, who accompanied me on the trip.

I call the fair "vast" because it’s huge, especially in the amount of information it throws at you, much of which is visual (unless you can read in several languages), and much of which is baffling, unless you’re very familiar with the world of rights buying (which I was and am not). I left the fair each day with my eyes aching and my brain overflowing with questions, most of which were answered for me after I’d returned to the States, where I knew more people at whom to direct them. How do rights buyers decide what to buy? Why does Random House in the U.S. not publish more books from Random House in the U.K.? Why did so many of the French books have such incredible illustrations but bizarre story lines? Why? Why? Why?

This is one reason the fair sometimes seemed "intimidating" — I was constantly at risk of information overload! The other, though, was the fact that to a bookseller accustomed to shows like BEA, NEIBA, and even ALA (which I’ve experienced once) exploring the booths at Bologna feels very different, and not necessarily for obvious reasons. It was the modes of interaction within publishers’ booths that I was most surprised by.

At Bologna, no one was trying to market their books to me, or (it seemed) to many other "passersby." In fact, at Bologna relatively few people spoke to me or to Joanne at all, unless we pointedly engaged them in conversation. On the one hand this was nice! It meant we were free to look at books, without interruption, to our hearts’ content. But on the other it was a bit… awkward. Most of the people in the booths at the show were there with the sole intention of doing business, much of it behind closed doors, most of it with people they already knew and with whom they had pre-arranged meetings. Often tables in a publisher’s booth would be crowded with folks having conversations — some of them intense, some of them filled with raucous laughter. Meanwhile we folks wanting to look at books milled about on the booths’ fringes, barely catching anyone’s notice, and occasionally feeling downright intrusive.

This happens sometimes at BEA too, but less frequently than I saw it at Bologna, as there’s almost always a marketing or publicity person in a BEA booth who is there for the sole purpose of talking up books to interested passersby. Interested passersby at BEA are, after all, booksellers and librarians and other book lovers who are making decisions about what to purchase for their stores or collections. In Bologna, booksellers, librarians and assorted other book lovers aren’t the show’s focus, obviously, as we aren’t purchasing publishing rights. In fact, in most cases, we wouldn’t even have the option of purchasing a fraction of the books we saw in Bologna unless they wind up being purchased and published Stateside. Bologna is, first and foremost, a rights convention. But in these days of convenient global communications, most Bologna business has been arranged in advance of the fair. Gone are the days when foreign import books were "discovered" when a publisher just happened to pick up a book in a Bologna booth and think, "I can sell this in the millions!"

This makes the actual books at Bologna, then, seem largely unnecessary — trappings intended to show the world a publisher’s size and style, in a world where the insiders already know those things and outsiders aren’t key to the business at hand. It’s interesting to me that publishers spend tremendous amounts of money to design, rent, and fill their booths with books shipped from distant shores, when they really don’t HAVE to anymore.

To my mind this makes the pavilions at Bologna akin to the opening ceremony of the Olympics. Both are technically unnecessary to the proceedings that follow but important in their message of global unity, their visual representation of a world with a common interest or collective spirit. At the opening ceremony for the Olympics it’s sport and the importance of healthy competition. At Bologna, it’s books and the importance of reading.

And OH the books to be seen and read in Bologna! It’s truly a visual feast. Take a look at any of the Bologna Annuals if you don’t know what I mean. Or better still, hop a flight yourself some year! First, though, I recommend lining up a few publishing contacts who’ll be there to answer your inevitable string of questions. And second, get over yourself, because while you’re adrift in a sea of books and peering over the shoulders of international publishing giants, you will realize just how small you really are. For a few hours, anyway.

If you don’t enjoy that sensation, you needn’t worry. Just pop into a good Bologna restaurant and in no time flat you can make yourself feel PLENTY large again. (Pasta is excellent for that!)

Here’s a photo of me and Joanne in front of the essay that earned me a trip to the fair:

The contest-winning essays and artwork were displayed on a wall as you entered the exhibit halls. I almost fell over when I saw that my words were displayed there for all to see. (SCARY… And not unlike blogging!)

Here’s the illustration that earned Kathryn Hewitt a trip to the fair:

When you’re not looking at books at the fair, you’re looking at illustrations for or from books! The Illustrators’ Cafe features the pieces selected for inclusion in that year’s Bologna Annual. And an enormous billboard, photographed below, allows illustrators from all over the world to tack up samples of their work + contact information. It’s quite a draw, as you can see in the two photos below.

Here’s me admiring one of my FAVORITE illustrations o
n
display in the Illustrators’ Cafe. Less than a year later I saw it again — on the pages of the wonderful On My Way to Buy Eggs by Chih-Yuan Chen, published by Kane/Miller.

The beaded bracelet I’m wearing above is one I bought on the streets of Florence (where Joanne and I spent a couple of days before the fair). It matches the rainbow-striped "PACE" (peace) flags we saw everywhere in Italy that year, hung in reaction to the Iraq war, which had just begun. Here’s a powerful poster Joanne and I saw in a Bologna display window one day:

On a happier note, here’s what we saw on the "streets" of Venice (a short trip from Bologna), when we traveled there for half a day with Kathryn and Annalise:

One of the things I enjoy doing most in our store is changing over the largest of our book displays. We have these monstrous tiered tables that are beasts to move (on their teeny tiny casters) but beauties when it comes to having ample display space on which all books are clearly visible.

When I took photos of the tables just over a week ago, they featured books for Women’s History Month (since replaced by National Poetry Month) and Earth Day — two displays that include some really bold and beautiful books, making for eye-catching (and hopefully customer-drawing) displays. I photographed both of them from all four angles, wanting to show off the range of titles we can and do manage to fit on these behemoths. Had I photographed them while the sun was still shining, they’d show up a lot better (our store’s lighting is not the best), but I think you’ll get the idea.

First the Earth Day display, which occupies the larger of our two tiered tables and is immediately visible if you enter through the back doors of our store, which open onto the parking lot behind us. Here’s how that display looks as you enter the store and turn to your left, facing the Board Books, Picture Books, Beginning Readers and First Chapter Books sections of our store.

Here’s a close-up of that side:

You’ll notice that these aren’t just books about nature and "greener" living. I think Earth Day is as good an occasion as any to feature books about world cultures and global social issues, so we include those books on our display.

Walking around now to the right of the table (see, those are the back doors off to your left):

Then around to the back of the table. That’s our Children’s Activities, Non-Fiction, Folk & Fairy Tales and Poetry sections on the wall opposite you. The stairs to our Used Book Cellar are in the back left corner. What you can’t see is that the not-quite-as-big-but-still-large tiered table sporting our Women’s History Month display is actually sitting behind this one. You’ll have to take my word for it!

Again, here’s a close-up:

And finally on around to the last side:

I haven’t counted the number of titles on that table, but I know — it’s a lot. What a luxury!

Now on to the Women’s History Month display, which sits in front of our Children’s Activities, Non-Fiction, Folk & Fairy Tales and Poetry sections. Here’s how it looks as you enter the store (again from the back entrance):

Again, walking around to the right (see the Earth Day display over there?):

 And facing the opposite side:

And coming around again:

Those of you NOT trying to carve out space for ever-changing displays may not understand the fuss about having tables like these, but TRUST ME — a good fixture is an invaluable sales tool. And a rare thing!

Booksellers and librarians, back me up here. Anyone have a favorite fixture? A table or bookcase you couldn’t live with out? If so, tell us about it. Hopefully the fixture-markers of the world will sit up and take note!

Here’s a shirt from SnorgTees.com that’s guaranteed to win points with English teachers. It’s got vowels, it’s got consonants, and… it’s got a ROCKIN’ venn diagram!!

Oh, how the nerd in me pines for this one… If only I didn’t look sickly in goldenrod (or "gold" as American Apparel calls this lovely shade).

Today the world’s cutest two-and-a-half year-old came into the store with his grandmother, looking for a picture book version of The Sword in the Stone. Alas, the only non-Disney edition our manager Deb and I knew of was Hudson Talbott‘s, which is now sadly out of print. "We tried to get that one at the library," the grandmother said, "but unfortunately it had been checked out."

She turned to get the approval of her grandson as she suggested that maybe a different book about knights would do. He agreed, nodding vigorously and adding, "And dragons. Dragons are good too."

Five minutes later the boy and his grandmother are seated at the small table in our children’s section as she reads to him from our knight and dragon selections and he promptly dismisses a few on the grounds that they are "too little for him."

This in itself was pretty cute, but the comment that earned this little guy the "world’s cutest two-and-a-half year-old" title came about this way: His grandmother was reading to him the dedication page of Hush, Little Dragon. The book was written by Boni Ashburn and illustrated by the lovely Kelly Murphy, whose dedication begins, "To a knight in shining armor…"

At these words the boy gasped, asking, "It’s for me???"

If someone hadn’t already done the deed I’d have knighted this kid right then and there, just for making every one of us feel, at that moment, so awed by the power of books.

One of the greatest perks of being a member of the Association of Booksellers for Children is having access to the ABC listserv. From it I learn about what my colleagues are reading and enjoying, what problems they’re trying to solve, what advice they have for their fellow booksellers, what entertaining anecdotes they have to share about their daily encounters with customers, AND what their thoughts are on news matters like that I blogged about earlier this week, about the new law that’s creating headaches for Indiana’s booksellers.

Piggybacking on the Indiana discussion, some booksellers have written to the ABC listserv with other recent accounts of censorship happening in their own states. Luan Stauss of Laurel Book Store in Oakland, California filled us in on the story of a teacher in (again) Indiana who was given a year’s suspension for using the book The Freedom Writers Diary in her classroom after having been told not to do so by school administrators.

Laurel also shared a great story about how one of her customers expressed her own opinion on the story: A woman came into the store and explained that she’d been invited to a one-year-old’s birthday party. Guests attending the party had been asked to bring items for a time capsule to be opened on the child’s 16th birthday. The customer bought a copy of The Freedom Writer’s Diary (purchased from Laurel’s store) to go in the time capsule alongside an article about the aforementioned teacher’s suspension, with the hope that 15 years from now issues like this one will seem "completely ridiculous."

I love the hopeful spin this customer is placing on own time capsule entry, and I also LOVE the idea of hosting a one-year-old’s birthday party with such a forward-thinking theme (both literally and figuratively)! After all, no one-year-old is ever old enough to appreciate the concept of their birthday in the first place, let alone care what type of gifts they receive. Why not, then, create an opportunity that will speak volumes to a kid several years down the road? I can’t imagine opening a more meaningful or interesting gift on your 16th birthday!!

I think it might even beat the letter I got to open on my 22nd birthday — one that I’d written to my "future" self at 11 years of age.

What would YOU put in a 16th birthday time capsule that would be opened 15 years from now? While you think about it, go ahead and shoot your future self an e-mail over at FutureMe.org.

So, I’m not TRYING to keep up a cake theme here, but somehow cake-inspired blog pieces just keep falling into my lap. The most recent one came my way via the time-honored tradition of "channel surfing." Yes, Gareth and I were watching television, which we rarely do, when we stumbled on an episode of "Ace of Cakes" on the Food Network and stopped to appreciate the talents of Duff Goldman, owner of Charm City Cakes in Baltimore, Maryland.

Now I know what you’re thinking… A TV show about cakes? But trust me: these are not your average cakes, and "Ace of Cakes" is actually a really entertaining program. Gareth and I had watched the show once or twice before, and at one point I’d been inspired and curious enough to visit the bakery’s web site, where I went again last night, wondering if they’d posted some new cake photos.

Indeed, they had! And one of them (in the "Fun Stuff" category) was a photo of this cake, which Charm City made for the Los Angeles film premiere of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Yes, that’s the Hogwarts castle in its entirety, plus the castle grounds including the lake and the Forbidden Forest.

HOLY CAKE!!

Here’s the same cake, photographed from a different angle (and obviously at a different time of day):

And here’s a photo of Duff, hard at work, which also gives you a better sense of scale:

A Spellcast interview with Duff reveals what’s beneath that frosted exterior: one part of the cake is chocolate, another yellow cake, one marble, and one strawberry shortcake — very traditional flavors, yes (especially compared to some of the more outrageous flavors Charm City can bake) but surely something to please anyone cake-inclined.

The entire cake "sculpture" took about two weeks to create and decorate. Roughly 80% of what you see is edible and the remaining 20% is food grade PVC pipe, which is used to hold up various elements of the structure.

Obviously I missed the episode of "Ace of Cakes" in which Duff and his staff create this masterpiece, but (of course) someone has posted a clip from it on YouTube, where you can watch the final touches being put on the cake and the star-studded affair that was both the CAKE’s premiere and its demise. The Leaky Cauldron also has a "PotterCast" (Harry Potter podcast) in which they interview Duff and get still more details.

Of course it Harry Potter isn’t your cup of cake, Charm City can bake up almost anything else that’s to your liking, so long as you can afford them. (The prices for their cakes start at $500.) If Baltimore isn’t on your continent, then maybe Zhanna in St. Petersburg, Russia could be of help. The book-lover and explorer in me was particularly drawn to this Zhanna cake: