Several months ago I did a complete double-take when a galley arrived at our store for a novel called How the Solider Repairs the Gramophone by Sasa Stanisic (Grove Press, June 2008). The cover showed a man on a beach, playing the accordion. But the man wasn't/isn't just any man. It's Daniel Handler, a.k.a. Lemony Snicket. I recognized him immediately, but no information on the galley explained how or why his picture came to be on the cover, so I momentarily doubted myself. STILL, I thought, it just HAD to be Daniel Handler, a.k.a. Lemony Snicket. But... what if it wasn't? What if i...Read More

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Time is running out to visit the First Book website, write about the book that got you hooked on reading, and vote for the state that you'd like to see receive 50,000 new books for low-income youth. The voting ends at midnight on September 15th, after which First Book will tally the results and post on their website the name of the winning state as well as a list of the Top 50 books that got readers hooked. This is the second year of First Book's "What Book Got You Hooked?" literacy awareness campaign, and visitors are encouraged (though not required) to make a donation of $10 to support the non-profit's work.

O...Read More

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My nonfiction-work-in-progress is still a long way from seeing the light of day as a finished book, but even since its earliest stages I've intermittently pondered the question of what name I should use once I'm published. My instinct it to just use my first and last names, Alison Morris, and keep it simple. But, here's the catch -- there's already an "Alison Morris" out there who has penned a couple of children's books. One website had even attributed her books to me at one point, until I corrected their (understandable) mistake. The simple solution might be to go the middle initial route, but "Alison L. Morris" doesn't exactly trip off the tongue, and I'm not sure it simplifies things enough. A very embarrassing case in point: just this w...Read More

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Where did you spend your Saturday night? Lucky you if you got to spend it at Pixar's studios, as that's where I'd like to have been! Last Saturday evening the place was home to the Totoro Forest Project, a fundraising exhibit and art auction to benefit the Totoro Forest Foundation, a non-profit has been greatly supported by filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki over the years.

 The motivation for last weekend's fun is explained this way on the Project's official website:

"Hayao Miyazaki has been actively supporting the preserva...Read More

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You can have this entertaining warning printed on a totebag, a t-shirt, or any other fine product at Your Mother Warned You's Café Press shop.

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How do you feel about seeing an author or illustrator's photo alongside their author bio? Do you like it? Hate it? Do you think it somehow helps sales, helps build their audience, gives you a personal connection to them?

I'm generally indifferent on this matter. Seeing the face behind the fiction (or nonfiction) generally doesn't enhance a reading experience for me, nor does it detract from it. From the perspective of working with kids, I think author photos can be truly useful -- they remind kids that, yes, there are real, live people who write these books and illustrate them. (Sometimes that's a useful lesson for adults too.)

From the standpoint of a book industry professional, I like that author photos enable me to recognize people when I see them at conventions. I would think that most authors and illustrators would like them for this r...Read More

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One of my favorite books in my home library is a copy of Jane Eyre I bought in an antique store for a handful of dollars. Published by Random House in 1943, this out-of-print edition was illustrated with engravings by Fritz Eichenberg and features one of the most beautiful and intriguing book covers I've seen, with Eichenberg's etching of Jane and her fellow schoolgirls printed directly onto the book's boards (no dust jacket). I think we'd sell a LOT more copies of Jane Eyre at our store if it boasted this cover!

Eichenberg's...Read More

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My Macmillan rep, Bob Werner, was completely unguarded in the note he sent to me attached to a galley of Masterpiece by Elise Broach (Henry Holt, September 2008). "Drop everything and read this!" it said. "This is the BEST BOOK EVER!!" I couldn't follow Bob's advice to a T, because I was then in the middle of reading The Hunger Games and had other things immediately on tap, but I *did* move Masterpiece up to the almost-top of my to-be-read pile, where (lo and behold) it soon moved into my hands, where I'd actually have liked it to stay a bit longer. ...;Read More

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So, my teenage sidekick, Katrina Van Amsterdam, is an exceedingly busy young woman — hence the reason you haven't seen a review from her in a while. She is now charging forward into her senior year of high school and recently promised me that when she isn't filling out college applications, she'll be writing more reviews of the books she's reading (and she is always reading!) and sending them my way. Here now is her review of a book that (as you'll see) she felt she just had to cheer about.

My Mother the Cheerleader
by ...Read More

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My friend, colleague, and fellow font junkie Elizabeth Wolfson introduced me to this rather entertaining video today, in which a conference of  the world's best known fonts is rather rudely interrupted. Unfortunately, even its beneficial role in this story's outcome does nothing to improve my feelings about Comic Sans. I CAN'T STAND THAT FONT!! I do, however, feel a new fondness for Wingdings.

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Today I received a catalog from Flux whose website describes them as "an imprint dedicated to fiction for teens, where young adult is a point of view, not a reading level." What first jumped out at me was the cover of their catalog, which is pictured at right. (Click on it to see a larger image.) The iconic image of a girl reading a book while perched in a skull's eye socket is... suprisingly un-creepy. And very bold. And quite hip. The color scheme of ...Read More

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Imagine ordering a cake for your daughter's baby shower only to pick it up and find that not one but TWO of the three words you asked to have written on the cake had been misspelled. Such was the case for one of the many people (see photo at right) whose cake disasters are represented on the painfully funny blog my friend Joyce Farnsworth introduced me to last week. Cake Wrecks, as it's called, features professional cakes gone "horribly, hilariously wrong." And a surprising number of them "went wrong" because someone in the bakeshop spelled s...Read More

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