Bartography

I wrote that one-line summary of my day right before going to bed last night, and drifted off mulling over those many good parts and wondering if I’d possibly remember them all in the morning.

Well, I do, and I want to keep on remembering them, so I’m writing them down.

Slept in (by my standards)

Wrote something new and fun

Worked out

Conferenced via Skype about a picture-book-writing workshop I’ll be teaching in June

Met a friend for what turned out to be merely Tex-Mex Lunch (and Terrific Conversation) #1

Signed a fresh crop of copies of Shark Vs. Train at BookPeople

Dropped in to visit a friend and ended up having Tex-Mex Lunch (and Terrific Conversation) #2

Settled into a favorite coffee shop for additional (and highly enjoyable) work on that new-and-fun piece and that upcoming workshop, plus an answer-packed reply to an inquisitive letter from a fan of The Day-Glo Brothers

Did a satisfying volunteer shift for Austin Resource Center for the Homeless alongside workers ranging in age from 2 years old to 60 or so, among them — as delightful as it was unexpected — a children’s librarian

I realize now that there was still more I could include in that list, but I’ve got a new day to get on with.

I’m a slow reader, and I don’t mind saying so.

I spent the better part of a month recently reading Bob Spitz’s biography The Beatles — and I took my sweet time getting around to reading that, too, seeing as how it came out in 2005 and I’d been meaning to get to it ever since.

But as soon as I finished Spitz’s book, Anne Ursu’s Breadcrumbs became available from the Austin Public Library, and I dove right in. (Considering I’d been seventh in line just a couple of days before, I suspect a well-warranted acquisition of several additional copies.) I’m still at it, but before I’d gotten far into that one, Tom Perrotta’s The Leftovers came home with me, where it joined Talking to Girls About Duran Duran and The Gifts of Imperfection on my to-read list.

So, today, while my sons were accumulating around 45 books between them at the Central library, did I really need to add to the pile with Words in the Dust, Water Balloon, A Monster Calls, or One Day and One Amazing Morning on Orange Street?

Nope. Sure didn’t, even though I know I’ll — once again — be pushing the renewal limits to their, um, limits in order to finish them all. Apparently I’m not only a slow reader, but a slow learner, too.

I can’t say that today was an uncommonly beautiful day for January in Central Texas, but it was beautiful, period, and too good a day not to get out and do something new.

For my sons and me, that something was the Lyndon B. Johnson National Historical Park in and near (it’s in two distinct parts) Johnson City. I’d driven past the park many times over the years, but today was the first time I ever made a point of going there. I hadn’t prepared myself or my boys for any sort of LBJ-related outing, contrary to my natural inclination to collect relevant books and whatnot for days and weeks beforehand, so it was especially gratifying to see what they responded and reacted to.

We talked a lot about the sorts of improvements that “big government” brought into the lives of people like those LBJ grew up around, and I lovingly demonstrated “the Johnson treatment” to my 12-year-old. Of all the details from our touring around, Johnson’s nicknaming the small presidential jet landing on his ranch “Air Force One-Half” was a particular favorite.

We didn’t see it all, and we didn’t absorb all that we saw. But we did get to spend a gorgeous day out and about together, listening to One Crazy Summer on the way out and FM dial-surfing on the way home, and accumulating fuel for family conversations for who knows how long into the future.

At this moment, I can hear one of my sons singing down the hall. There’s always something uncommonly beautiful about hearing such a sound, and maybe our outing helped fuel that, too.

Do you know ReaderKidZ? If you do, I bet you’re glad. And if you don’t, well, you should! Because:

We’ve come together to establish a resource for teachers, parents and librarians who work with readers in grades K-5. On a regularly-updated basis, ReaderkidZ will provide new and exciting downloadable tools we hope you’ll use in promoting books to these up-and-coming readers.

On our site, you’ll find valuable downloadable materials in Author-In-Residence, with a new author every few weeks; titles from around the globe in Beyond Boundaries; book recommendations in the Book Room; downloadable teacher resources and more in the Tool Box; links to interesting articles and more in Valuable Links.

What’s more:

This month on ReaderKidZ, some authors we know are giving away copies of their wonderful books. We hope that the people who win them will pass them along to a child somewhere who will curl up in a quiet place at the end of a busy, exciting day, and take one more step on the path to a life of reading.

And today:

Sign up to win a copy of one of the most imaginative, competitive, and off-the-wall delightful picture books of all time – Shark vs. Train – written by award-winning Chris Barton and illustrated by show-stopping Tom Lichtenheld.

So check out ReaderKidZ, enter to win, and have a terrific holiday season!

The Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books has put out its annual Guide Book to Gift Books, which I’d still say is a terrific resource for steering parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles, and other holiday shoppers toward acclaimed new and recent books for young readers even if Can I See Your I.D.? wasn’t so nicely included on page 13.

But it’s the picture books on this year’s list that I’m interested in at the moment, and what I’m most curious about is their word count, thanks to Anita Silvey’s meaty new article in School Library Journal, “Make Way for Stories: There’s a good reason why people are passing up picture books.”

The entire article is worth your time, but here’s where — as a writer who struggles to keep picture book texts anywhere near as short as we’re typically told that they need to be these days — Anita’s words really hit home:

Recently, Sally Anderson, the founder and executive director of the Vermont Center for the Book, summed up in an interview what she most longed for in current picture books: “Books with good stories that you want to read again and again.” I, too, bemoan the lack of picture storybooks. So much of what we see, no matter how clever it is, can be described as a joke book. Some are very good jokes, but once you’ve read the text, you don’t really need to read it hundreds of times. Words have been pared down to a bare minimum; writers sometimes are told to use no more than 500. You can tell a great story with less than 500 words—think of Where the Wild Things Are (338 words) and The Carrot Seed (101 words)—but you may have to be a genius to do so! And there’s probably a limit on the number of stories that can be told well in under 1,000 words. During this time, by the way, informational picture books have retained longer texts. Novels have gotten wordier. But in the picture book arena, the prevailing wisdom is to shackle writers and get them to be as creative as possible with very few words.

…

Even if I take my own reason for loving picture books—they move from what children already know to what they need to learn—I’d have to argue that a basic diet of picture books with an anemic amount of text doesn’t really do the trick. And I suspect that parents, whether they understand this or not, take a look at these short texts and feel the book a bit slight for purchase. Or a librarian conducting a storytime knows that he or she needs a longer text to fill storyhour—rather than just a nice story minute.

I don’t know whether Anita is right, but now I can’t help but wonder if publishers’ emphasis on short picture book texts is the result of parents and other consumers saying they want them — so that a bedtime story doesn’t take all night, or for whatever reason — even as those consumers do something entirely different. Is the industry just asking these consumers what they want, or is it observing their actual behavior?

I’m reminded of the customer-experience work done by my friend Mark Hurst, nicely summed up in this blog post about OXO measuring cups:

But here’s the thing about the research: customers never said they wanted an angled measuring cup. In fact, users weren’t even aware that there was a problem to be solved. [Emphasis his.] Consumers didn’t say, “I wish I could read the markings more easily.” They muddled through without complaint. And yet the innovation came directly from observing customers. How?

Simply by observing the customer experience. The job of any product developer, any innovator, is to identify an unmet need – a pain point – a market opportunity – and the best way of doing that is by observing customers. Which means their actual real-world behavior – what they do, not what they say they do. This reveals the genuine customer experience.

I’d love it if some bookseller would put together two picture book displays this holiday season — one full of Dr. Seuss and Margaret Wise Brown and Robert McCloskey and all the other go-to authors of classics remembered by parents and grandparents, and one full of the picture books recommended this year by the BCCB. And I’d love it if that bookseller would take the time to find out what shoppers were thinking when they decided to buy a classic picture book, or a new winner, or neither of the two.

From my occasional email newsletter, Bartography Express, which got sent out last night (and is available online for the next few weeks):

“Amid the work I did this summer on the sequel to Shark Vs. Train and my next picture book biography, The Amazing Age of John Roy Lynch, I got to take part in three terrific events that fueled me and fired me and reminded me of just how lucky I am to get to spend so much time with other writers and readers and lovers of books.”

Click here to read the rest, and to become a subscriber (and get in the running for a signed-book giveaway), look for the “Join” button at the bottom right.

At the Southampton Children’s Literature Conference earlier this month, librarian/storyteller Connie Rockman and historian Leonard Marcus schooled me on the world of children’s literature archives, museums, and other historical collections.

I knew about some of these already — I got to visit the de Grummond Children’s Literature Collection at Southern Miss this past spring — but others were completely new to me.

Here are the ones we discussed. Are there any you would add to the list?

Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature
The University of Florida
Gainesville, FL
“[C]ontains more than 100,000 volumes published in Great Britain and the United States from the mid-1600s through 2007. Its holdings of more than 800 early American imprints is the second largest such collection in the United States. The product of Ruth Baldwin’s 40-year collection development efforts, this vast assemblage of literature printed primarily for children offers an equally vast territory of topics for the researcher to explore: education and upbringing, family and gender roles, civic values, racial, religious, and moral attitudes, literary style and format, and the arts of illustration and book design.”

de Grummond Children’s Literature Collection
University of Southern Mississippi
Hattiesburg, MS
“The de Grummond Children’s Literature Collection is one of North America’s leading research centers in the field of children’s literature. Although the Collection has many strengths, the main focus is on American and British children’s literature, historical and contemporary. Founded in 1966 by Dr. Lena Y. de Grummond, the Collection holds the original manuscripts and illustrations of more than 1200 authors and illustrators, as well as 120,000+ published books dating from 1530 to the present.”

International Youth Library
Munich, Germany
“The International Youth Library is the largest library for international children’s and youth literature in the world. Ever since it was opened in 1949 by Jella Lepman, it has been continuously expanded to an internationally recognised centre for the world’s children’s and youth literature.”

Kerlan Collection
The University of Minnesota
Minneapolis, MN
“[O]ne of the world’s great children’s literature research collections. The Collection includes books, original manuscripts and illustrations, and many related materials. The materials in the Collection are studied by teachers, librarians, students, authors, illustrators, translators, and critics who come from Minnesota and other states as well as from many foreign countries.”

Mazza Museum
The University of Findlay
Findlay, OH
“The Mazza Museum: International Art from Picture Books is the world’s largest museum devoted to literacy and the art of children’s picture books. Founded in 1982, the Mazza Museum now contains nearly 5,000 original artworks.”

Weston Woods Institute
Weston, CT
“As of this writing, after visiting 210 museums for this “quest,” the unknown and not-even-really-a-real-museum-yet Weston Woods hidden away deep within the Weston woods (seriously) is exactly that: My personal favorite museum in Connecticut.”

If you read just one book on writing (or six, for that matter) this year, you might as well have a terrific time doing it. Having just finished reading aloud James Howe’s entire Tales from the House of Bunnicula series (including the riotous Harry Potter parody Howie Monroe and the Doghouse of Doom, about the writing of a Harry Potter parody — by a dachsund), I can’t imagine a more fun perspective on the trials and tribulations of writing in general and of writing books for young readers in particular.

Outlining? Check. Collaborating with another author? Check. Revising, angling for the Newbony award, and overusing certain similes (see above)? Check, check, check, and then some. The one drawback is that these books seem so effortlessly funny and faux-slapdash that you’ll might wonder whether anyone really needs to do much thinking about how to write, or else be intimidated by the standard they set, or both.

Oh, well. As Howie put it in The Amazing Odorous Adventures of Stinky Dog, “Life is so unfair. Especially when you’re a dog. And a writer.”