While I probably qualify as a film buff, I’m not much of a movie-goer these days, and it’s especially rare for me to take in a blockbuster film on opening weekend. Rarer still when it’s a blockbuster adaptation of a book. Feeling the frenzied anticipation of next weekend’s BIG book release, though, I joined the crowd of cinephiles and wizard-wannabes at a Saturday night screening of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. My hope was that the film would be, like its predecessors, at least moderately entertaining and that (more importantly) it would refresh my memory as to the contents of Harry’s 5th adventure. I’m feeling a rather desperate need to cram for next weekend’s final exam and goodness knows I don’t have time to reread the Rowling canon.

As a refresher course, the film turned out to be a bit disappointing. Many of the book’s sideline plots were, well, sidelined (even more so than in previous films), no doubt in the interest of keeping the film to a reasonable length. There are a couple of benefits to this loss: Harry’s sniveling self-pity, a prominent and at times tiresome feature of this book, is kept to a minimum, and the plot zips along unencumbered by extraneous storylines. It was a bit odd, though, to watch a Harry Potter adventure in which Draco Malfoy appears only in passing and even Snape is given shockingly little screen time. Streamlining the story to this extent may also have been why it had less emotional impact for me than the last film. The death of a major character near the story’s end should have hit home (even though I knew it was coming), but instead I felt this person hadn’t been on screen long enough for me to have developed much attachment to them. What the film ultimately lacked for me was suspense. But the humor and visual effects more than made up for it.

Honestly? I don’t know when I’ve ever said this before, but the images in this movie are SO MUCH cooler (dare I say “better”?) than the images I had in my head while reading the book. The sets (both actual and computer-generated) were so rich with visual detail and so convincingly real that I wanted to laugh out loud with the sheer “completeness” of the scenery. Panoramic views of almost every sight in the film help complete the sense that you could be viewing something that actually exists in the real world. The images of Hogwarts (both inside and out) look good enough to have been stolen from actual castle footage. The Ministry of Magic realistically bustles with activity as wizards walk purposely to and fro beneath a several-stories-high poster of Cornelius Fudge. Rows of prophecies carefully balanced on Department of Mysteries shelves seem to go on forever. Kittens mew plaintively from decorative plates on the walls of Dolores Umbridge’s office, eliciting laughs from the audience each time the appeared. With the exception of the magical creatures who still look digitized (Grawp especially), I was completely taken in by this film’s special effects, and those around me appeared to be as well. The characters in Harry’s world seemed integrally connected to the scenery around them rather than pasted in front of it, making it that much easier to be swept up in their adventures, even for those of us who already knew exactly what those adventures would be.

Frustrated as I am with Warner Brothers at the moment, I must nevertheless admit that I thoroughly enjoyed the movie version of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. It was a unique thrill to see Harry’s world spring so vividly to life, in ways that even my over-active imagination couldn’t have conjured. The richness of the film’s story pales, of course, in comparison to that of the book, but the richness of its imagery certainly gives Harry’s fans plenty to talk about as we await our final opportunity to travel anew through the magical world of Rowling’s creation.

Some of you no doubt felt a pang or two of envy when I shared the news that NPR would be airing "audio postcards" by Mark Peter Hughes as he and his family travel across the country promoting his most recent YA novel, Lemonade Mouth. Your envy might well be replaced by sympathy now, though, as NPR told Mark this week that they won’t be doing the series after all. The producer originally working on the project had to pack off to Alaska and apparently no others were available to take on the task. Talk about a disappointment!

There are a few consolations here, though. 1. ) Mark did make it onto the airvaves in May with a commentary on the act of quitting his job to write full-time, and 2.) The beautiful Hughes brood is continuing their cross-country Lemonade Mouth tour unabated and reportedly with great success. You can track their progress on Mark’s blog, which is replete with entertaining photos of the journey, descriptions of bookstores or booksellers, and funny accounts of Mark learning about things like chaps.

I propose a toast to Mark, who got closer to the NPR dream than most of us ever will, and who’s pursuing the ambitious "cross-country book tour" dream without waiting for a publisher to hand it to him.

June and July are two of the craziest months of the year at our bookstore. Between teachers rushing in to spend the remaining money on open purchase orders, schools asking us to provide them with their summer reading books, customers stocking up on enough titles to get their kids through several weeks of summer camp, and (this year) a little thing called Harry Potter, we tend to say no to most authors and illustrators looking to do events at our store in June or early July. We’re just too busy to make room in our schedules, and experience shows that at that time of year our customers are too. It’s almost the opposite of the problem we have from mid-July to the end of August, but the result is the same general stance when it comes to booking events. During that stretch we generally host few if any events, because the town of Wellesley is virtually empty, its residents having packed off to Cape Cod, Maine, or other vacation hot spots.

This year, though, we’ve hosted three children’s author events as exceptions to our "no events" rule, all of them great, if not overwhelmingly well-attended. The first featured not an author but a DOG. Catie Copley, the four-legged star of a new David Godine picture book of the same name, came to our store with her handler, Jim Carey, the Director of Concierge at the Fairmont Copley Plaza hotel, where Catie serves as Canine Ambassador. (I’m not making this up.) During her visit to our store, Catie proved to be anything but Eloise-like in her behavior, and Jim delighted our story time crowd with his reading of the book and soft-spoken answers to questions from the 40 or so children and adults in attendance. The lesson I’ve learned from this event: Busy people will make time for furry four-leggers. (Good to know.)

Last week while I was in Missouri our store hosted two children’s author events that I was very sad to miss. The first was with poet Karen Jo Shapiro, who lives in North Carolina but just completed a month-long stay in the Boston area, where she grew up. She’s written two collections of poetry published by Charlesbridge, the newest being I Must Go Down to the Beach Again, which like its predecessor, features clever, entertaining parodies of familiar poems. Karen Jo’s event had a few things working against it:
1.) We wound up having to schedule it for July 5th, when we knew a lot of people might still be elsewhere, post-Independence Day.
2.) Karen Jo writes poetry, which (as much as it PAINS me) is often a harder draw.
3.) She has two legs, not four.
Karen Jo knew we were up against these hurdles, though, and graciously did her darndest to overcome them. She offered us a program that would truly work out to be an "all ages" event, she sent us an audio clip of her reading her poems to be used in our store’s e-newsletter, she offered to contact local camp and day care programs about her appearance, and she made me dreadfully sorry I wasn’t going to meet her in person to thank her for her willingness to go the distance and her understanding that it might not get us that far. In the end, there were only about six people in attendance at Karen Jo’s event, four of them friends of hers. We nevertheless sold about 15 of her books at the event and in the days before and after, which is probably about 15 more than we’d have sold otherwise. The lesson we’ve learned from this event: Post-fireworks poetry is probably poorly timed but perhaps still profitable.

The day after Karen’s event, though, we had enough people back in town to supply author/illustrator Brian Lies with a larger crowd for the appearance of his fabulous Batsmobile and a "batty beach party" to promote his bestselling picture book, Bats at the Beach. Elizabeth Wolfson, my summer intern from Smith College, sent me a message in Missouri telling me how much she liked Karen Jo Shapiro, Brian Lies, and Brian’s wife Laurel. About the latter two she said, "They were such nice people and totally on top of everything. They parked in front of the store and set up out there, with two tables for drawing and making bugmallows, and beach towels for kids to sit on. Brian did two readings, both with about ten kids plus parents and answered lots of questions. I think we sold about 30 copies of Bats at the Beach! It was great." The (selfish) lesson we’ve learned from this event: Don’t schedule fun events like this one for days when I’ll be on vacation!

I skipped town last Thursday and headed off to Missouri, so that Gareth and I could pay a long-overdue visit to my best friend, her husband, and their two year-old son (Silas). The down side of taking off when I did is that I missed meeting two reportedly delightful authors, who did events at our store on Thursday and Friday. (Stay tuned for my events post later this week.) The up side is that I got to spend a few low-key days with some of my favorite people and I can now recite Wong Herbert Yee‘s Fireman Small: Fire Down Below! from memory.

In recent months Silas has adopted a firefighting alter-ego who goes by "Captain Jack," a name Silas appears to have pulled from the pages of At the Firehouse by Anne Rockwell. On our Saturday trip to the wonderful Columbia Public Library I decided I it was high time I introduced Silas (and Captain Jack) to a fellow firefighting little guy, Fireman Small. Alas, the library did not have the Yee’s original book (simply titled Fireman Small) but no matter — Fireman Small: Fire Down Below! was an immediate hit. And a repeat hit. And a repeat hit. And a repeat hit. By the time we departed Monday morning, I think that book might have gone platinum on the Silas chart.

I’d thought I might be able to observe what types of books Silas did and didn’t like and make some profound statement based on these observations, but the fact is that Silas liked every picture book we put in front of him — even the ones that seemed either "beneath" or "beyond" his (two) years. What does this mean? 1.) That Silas is already a genuine book lover, and 2.) That illustrations speak volumes even to those with very limited vocabularies.

As evidence, see Silas grinning as Gareth reads him Baby Loves Peekaboo (a DK board book), then see the two of them surrounded by books we brought back from the library and read in rapid succession. What books appear in the second photo? I’ll list them below.

On the couch:
Waiting for Gregory by Kimberly Willis Holt, illustrated by Gabi Swiatkowska
Silas is expecting a new cousin, so I thought this beautiful book (about a girl wondering when and how her own cousin will arrive) would be a fitting choice.

Red, Red, Red by Valeri Gorbachev
A fun story about a turtle rushing (in relative turtle terms) to see something red. As friends fall in line behind him, they wonder what it could be, until they reach the end of their journey just in time to catch the sunset.

Beside Silas:
New York’s Bravest by Mary Pope Osborne, illustrated by Steve Johnson and Lou Fancher
The subtext and timing of this story are tied to 9/11, making it a rather somber one for older readers. To Silas, though, it was just a cool firefighting story.

Bebop Express by H.L. Panahi, illustrated by Steve Johnson and Lou Fancher
Elizabeth (Silas’s mom) picked this one, because Silas loves anything having to do with music. She had no idea she was choosing a jazzy book by a Wellesley author!  H.L. Panahi is a teacher at the Dana Hall School, alma mater of Margaret Wise Brown and Cynthia Voigt, to name two.

Actual Size by Steve Jenkins
Okay, so maybe the concept of relative size is over the head of any two-year-old. Steve Jenkins’s remarkable cut-paper illustrations can’t help but impress, nevertheless.

Beside Gareth:
Hello, Fire Truck by Marjorie Blain Parker, illustrated by Bob Kolar
Short and sweet with fire trucks aplenty, this Level 1 Scholastic Reader contains just enough text (and just enough trucks) to please a toddler.

Fireman Small: Fire Down Below! by Wong Herbert Yee
Leaks in the fire station roof force Fireman Small to seek shelter at the Pink Hotel, where his night is anything but restful. An action-packed fire-fighting adventure with a smaller-than-average hero, this book is pretty much a two year-old’s dream come true. (Just ask Silas.)

One of my favorite benefits of the book industry’s presence in the online world is the fact that so many of us now have a little window into the process of illustrating a book. With the advent of blogs and the accessibility of web tools, an increasing number of illustrators are offering their fans occasional sneak peeks at the books they’re currently working on, pages from their sketchbooks, examples of the "non-book" work they do, or proof that they’re able to work in more styles than we might otherwise have imagined.

I was reminded of the great benefits of this phenomenon when Matt Tavares sent out a message last week, announcing that his blog now includes illustrations-in-progress for Lady Liberty: A Biography, written by Doreen Rappaport, to be published by Candlewick in May 2008. The illustration Matt shows evolving step-by-step over the course of four days is a such a beautiful one that it leads me to believe this book could well prove to feature his best, most mature work to date. Of course, it’s hard to tell from one illustration, but… if Matt posts a few more blog entries of this sort perhaps we’ll know for sure! In either case his addition of these posts to his blog certainly has me eagerly awaiting the publication of this book.

Matt is, of course, following the example set by other illustrators on their blogs and web sites. Here are just a few of the many folks now doing what he’s doing. Feel free to fill my comments with the names of more!

Alissa Imre Geis is currently working on her snowflake for Roberts Snow 2007 and you can watch her collage process unfold on her blog.

Kelly Murphy is working on a book that features dragons apparently. Back in April she showed the steps of her painting process.

Matt Phelan has a sketch blog that consists mostly of (you guessed it) his sketches.  So does Mo Willems. And check out Oliver Jeffers’ sketchbook.

Did you know that the fabulous Polly Dunbar does puppet shows? Can you guess Scott Magoon’s favorite picture books?

For a steady fix of interesting, eclectic illustrations, try Drawn, "a collaborative weblog for illustrators, artists, cartoonists, and anyone who likes to draw." It’s updated daily (often more than daily) and offers plenty of eye candy and oddities.

In honor of the links between yesterday’s Fourth-related festivities and U.S. history, I thought I’d mention a handful of places that are helping to preserve the history of children’s literature.

A few years ago we held a meeting of the New England Independent Children’s Booksellers Advisory Council at the University of Connecticut’s Thomas J. Dodd Research Center where the curators allowed us to handle some of the materials housed in the Northeast Children’s Literature Collection. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven when I was allowed to leaf through the sketchbooks of James Marshall and drawings by Barbara Cooney.

This year our group paid a visit to the Rare Books Department of the Boston Public Library, whose Juvenile Collection houses some gems. I fell in love with M. Boutet de Monvel’s illustrations for his children’s book Jeanne d’Arc and was surprised to learn that the BPL is the repository of the world’s largest Joan of Arc collection. (Quelle surprise!) It’s also home to the Paul and Ethel J. Heins Collection, which "contains 4,500 children’s books used by the former Horn Book Magazine editors in their work as critics, teachers, and reviewers of children’s literature."

Worcester, just a short drive west of Boston, is home to the American Antiquarian Society, which is not only in possession of an impressive collection of American children’s books, but also houses a collection of book salesman’s samples, a searchable directory of 19th Century publishers, catalogs from booksellers and book auctioneers "which include examples from the beginnings of the American wholesale and retail book trades," library catalogs, bookplates and booksellers’ labels and more.

While I don’t often find myself in Southern Mississippi, someday I’d like to travel there long enough to visit the de Grummond Children’s Literature Collection, which is renowned for its collection of 100,000 children’s books (the oldest of which dates back to 1530) and original illustrations and manuscripts from more than 1,200 authors and illustrators. It’d be nice to spend an hour or two looking through the Ezra Jack Keats Archive, studying things like the typescript for The Snowy Day.

Thanks to the Library of Congress, though, none of us has to leave the comforts of home to view the contents of a classic illustrated children’s book. Some of the books in the LOC’s Rare Book and Special Collections division have been digitized, so you can actually view them page-by-page from the chair you’re sitting in at this very moment, without having to relocate said chair to Washington, D.C. If you’ve got time to look through just one, I recommend peeking at the wonderful illusrations in The Baby’s Own Aesop: Being the Fables Condensed in Rhyme, With Portable Morals Pictorially Pointed by Walter Crane.

Want more suggestions? Mapping out your travel route? Take a look at the "Special Collections in Children’s Literature Wikiography" from ALSC.

Last week I received a shipment of galleys in which the three "biggest" titles (in terms of the books’ likely popularity and initial print runs) included no plot synopses, to my great frustration. Many publishers have made this mistake in the past (and perhaps even in this very season), so I’m not mentioning the name of the specific publisher who made me grit my teeth last week. I am, though, asking ALL publishers to please consider the following…

Just as books have to sell themselves to customers, galleys have to sell themselves to booksellers. Given the overwhelming stacks of books I’m drowning in, both at home and in my office, the competition for my time is incredibly steep, and the odds of me reading any one ARC dwindle with the arrival of each new one. Imagine, then, my frustration to find that I don’t know even the basic plot of the forthcoming books by two of my favorite authors! I can assume, based on knowledge of their previous titles, that I will love both, but so what? I’m also assuming I’ll love all the other galleys in my ever-growing pile that I haven’t yet found the time to read. Not knowing what I can expect to find on a book’s pages therefore makes it harder for me to want to place it at the top of my pile. I have to say too, that in the cases of these two galleys, their covers aren’t helping matters — each gives me no indication whatsoever as to what stories the book might have to tell, adding to my bewilderment and frustration.

When this happens, couldn’t I just look up the mystery book in the offending publisher’s catalog and read the plot synopsis there? Of course I could. But doing so would require me to expend valuable time and energy that would be better spent selling publishers’ books rather than trying to unravel their mysteries. And what about the other booksellers, kids and teachers also reading galleys for our store? They don’t have access to catalog information with the ease that I do, so it’s especially important to provide plot synopses for them.

PLEASE, wonderful publishers out there, understand that we booksellers and librarians are even more inundated with reading material than the general public. Just as you need to make your finished books speak to our customers, you need to make your galleys speak to us, as clearly and eloquently as possible.

While meeting with my PGW rep this season, I fell head-over-heels for a new picture book being published by Groundwood Books in August: Pink, written by Nan Gregory and illustrated by Luc Melanson. I love everything about this book, but it’s the writing that especially stands out for me, prompting me to wonder for the umpteenth time why there isn’t a "big" award given specifically for the text of a picture book. If there was, Pink would absolutely be on my list of this year’s nominees.

"Vivi is dizzy with wanting pink." Each schoolday she watches a gaggle of rich girls arrive in shades of rose from head to toe and wishes she could be like them. "Every day at school they parade their glory – from hair bows to tippy toes, every shade of perfect pink." Vivi thinks of them as "the Pinks" and imagine they must go home to warmly colorful houses every day, not to brown apartment buildings like hers, or to a mother and truck-driver father who struggle sometimes to make ends meet.

Believing that the Pinks have all the pink, Vivi complains to her parents who they tell her there’s plenty to go around and point out the shade in her very own cheeks, which to Vivi is no consolation. "Don’t they want to understand? Vivi is wild with wanting."

And here we arrive at my favorite paragraph in the book:

"One dead of winter afternoon, running an errand for her mom, Vivi finds a wonder the Pinks don’t have. It stands in the window of My Little Darling, Gifts for the Fortunate Child, all lit up like crystal – a dainty bride doll in a dress of glistening pink petals, layers and layers, each one glazed with rainbow light."

Vivi desperately wants the rosy doll but hasn’t got the money for it. Rather than sulking or begging her parents for what she knows she can’t afford, she jumps on her mother’s suggestion that she run errands for her neighbors, requesting that they pay her dimes and nickels or whatever they’d like to contribute to her cause.

Wanting to give her daughter some pink in the meantime, Vivi’s mom plans a pink outing complete with a picnic (or "pinknic" as Vivi calls it) of pink-hued foods. As the family lazes under the pink shade of a plum tree, Vivi’s father tells her about a truck he saw once, covered with twinkling lights. "At first I didn’t know what it was, all lit up like fairyland. Ever since, I’ve wanted lights like that for my truck." When Vivi asks why he doesn’t get them he explains that they’re expensive and tells her, simply, "You can’t have everything."

On the return trip Vivi takes her parents past My Little Darling, so they can all admire the perfect doll in the window, but the doll isn’t there. A Pink has beaten them to the punch. Heartbroken, Vivi wilts visibly. She trudges slowly behind her parents as they make their way home. "It’s hard to go fast when your heart is a stone."

Finally home at their apartment building, Vivi’s father sits on the steps and tries to raise her spirits by playing a tune on his harmonica. Soon the music gets under her skin and Vivi is dancing, dancing, allowing her heart to grow lighter and her fingers to wave to the doll she knows she simply can’t have. When her father finishes playing Vivi collapses beside him on the steps and agrees that wanting things makes for good music. He reminds her, again, that you can’t have everything, but Vivi realizes that, at least for that moment, she does. The end.

I love this book. I love that you think Vivi will get the doll in the end, but she doesn’t. I love that the Pinks don’t have a sudden change of heart or change of color. I love that Gregory gives us this story from Vivi’s perspective, even if it’s not in her voice – that it’s not that her parents don’t understand or can’t understand, it’s that, as Vivi sees it, they don’t want to understand. I love Melanson’s warm illustrations, which give the pages a look both airy and contemporary, one feminine but not saccharine. I love the book’s cover design, which is suitably pink enough to attract fans of girly favorites like Fancy Nancy and does indeed offer them a suitable dose of rose. What I love most, though, is that readers will come away from this book with something much warmer than pink – something that will bring a little color to their lives, in the best, least surface of ways.

In the children’s section of our store this morning, I overheard a seafaring father talking with his worried, wizard-loving daughter about how they’ll get their hands on a hot-off-the-presses copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. "We’ll come into some port on July 21st," he reassured her. "I will MAKE SURE we come into some MAJOR port on July 21st!"

I love the image of ships all over the world sailing into port and dropping anchor on the same day for the same bookish purpose, their resident kids scurrying up the gangplank and rushing to the nearest bookstore.

About two years ago I was summoned away from my desk at work by a woman named Kyoko Kondo. She’d stopped in to let me know that the Fiske Elementary School in Wellesley would soon be hosting world-renowned origami master Michael LaFosse whose studio, Origamido, is located in Haverhill, north of Boston.  During our delightful conversation Kyoko suggested that we might want to be sure we had some origami books in stock (in particular books by Michael), as kids might come in asking for them. A few days later she returned with Michael himself, who was every bit as charming as Kyoko and wins extra points for being a former bookseller! I couldn’t help thinking that if the entire origami community was as nice as these two people, I might be in the wrong paper-related industry.

Fast-forward to last Sunday, when Gareth and I took a drive up to Salem, Massachusetts, to see the Joseph Cornell exhibit currently on display at the fabulous Peabody-Essex Museum. I’d been looking forward to seeing this impressive, thoughtfully curated exhibit for months but can’t deny the fact that it was ultimately overshadowed for me by a much smaller one we happened to stumble upon during its opening weekend — "Origami Now!" If you’ve got an art lover or math whiz in your family, I suggest that you pack up the car and make your may to the Peabody-Essex sometime between now and June 8, 2008. (Fortunately you’ve got almost a year!)

As Gareth and I entered the museum and noticed the beautiful origami butterflies suspended from the ceiling in the entry hall, I glanced to a table at my left. Who should be giving kids origami lessons but Michael LaFosse, who turns out to have been the "Origami Now!" exhibition advisor. I filled Gareth in on how I happened to meet him, made a mental note to say hello later and the two of us went immediately to the "Origami Now!" exhibit, which floored me.

Let me just say that I’ve folded my share of sailor hats and paper cranes, but what origami masters can produce today with a single sheet of paper is stuff your average folder can’t begin to approximate. The pieces on display in this exhibit are ART in the truest sense of the word. A formerly dull dollar bill practically breathes in its new pelican form. A paper schooner disappears under the tentacles of a paper giant squid. An entire alligator appears, each scale on its foot-long back a perfect triangular fold. As Gareth and I moved slowly from case to case on the exhibit floor, I would periodically turn around to take in the gaping mouths and pointing fingers of kids and adults alike. All of us were caught under the spell of magical paper creations like Michael LaFosse’s "Wilbur the Piglet," pictured below:

My favorite thing about this exhibit is the fact that it’s accessible for all ages and has an inherently "encouraging" way about it. Unlike elaborate oil paintings or chiseled stone sculptures, these pieces almost beg you to try your hand at imitation. They elicit that "Wow. Maybe I could do that…!" response from admirers young and old. The ages of some of the exhibitors or the number of years they’ve been folding validate these particular longings in younger patrons. The "American Giant Millipede" was folded by Kenneth Baclawski Jr., age 18. Corey Comenitz, the designer and folder of "Pulp Fiction" (a bearded man, seated, reading a book) is a year younger. The tags on many exhibits explain that their creators began doing origami as children. Michael LaFosse is among these — he discovered origami at age five and was designing original models by age eleven.

I also loved the fact that the marriage between math and art is so perfectly evident here. I’d never seen the crease patterns for a finished origami model before and therefore never fully appreciated the complex geometry involved in pieces that often seem too organic to have an origin of predrawn angles, tesselations on a plane. Did you know that origami can be linked directly to contemporary airbag designs, or that architects are looking at origami as they attempt to design buildings that could "bounce back" after collapse? I certainly didn’t.

Gareth and I were getting lunch when I realized that Kyoko Kondo and her husband were right in front of us in line! Over lunch she told us more about the origami community, the activities of Origami USA, and the prevalence of origami in math circles. As it turns out, MIT has its own origami club. Their website even includes photos of their visit to Origamido, which will (unfortunately for us New Englanders) soon be relocating to Hawaii.

Fortunately, you don’t need a local origami studio or this museum exhibit to get you started on the road to mastery. All you really need is an origami book, some paper, a lot of patience, and a little play time. Your local bookstore ought to be able to provide at least one of the above!