Fusenews: Fluffy Wuzzy Armored Bears and Fluffy Wuzzy Spidey Wideys

• Today we’re going to begin with some Japanese crepe paper fairy tales , partly because I saw this image of the guy killing the spider and thought to myself, "Awesome.  Big spider.  Awesome."  My apologies to those of you who prefer not to view big hairy spiders first thing on a blog post.  Thanks to Shaken & Stirred for the link.

• Illustrator Matthew Holm got all linky linky about half a month ago with his post on Using Graphic Novels in the Younger Grades .  Anyone looking for some useful information on the subject would do well to check him out.

• Never thought I’d live to see the day but see it I did.  ISBN graffiti .  It’s like Dewey Decimal graffiti but weirder.  Thanks to Bookninja for the link.

• Alison Morris has a post up called Books Loved By Everyone But You .  From the comments I’d have to say that this is one of her more popular posts.  It got me to thinking about the children’s literary equivalents.  For my own part, I’m not a huge fan of Everything on a Waffle , Saffy’s Angel , or The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane which makes me an outcast amongst many of my friends.  But they just don’t make my heart go ah-pitter pat.  Twilight and Harry Potter appear the most on Alison’s list.  It’s always interesting to hear what people prefer to avoid.

• Something caught my eye when I took a gander at J.L. Bell’s recap of the recent Think Future panel hosted by Publishers Weekly regarding YA literature. Said Bell, "While libraries often shelve copies of a title in both adult and young adult (and children’s) sections, George Nicholson, senior agent at Sterling Lord Literistic, ‘pointed out a hard reality that factors into the ‘where do we put this book?’ discussion: chain bookstores will not multi-position a book in the store.’"  This has never occurred to me before.  I’m often baffled by where B&N will shelve books in New York City (Shooting the Moon in YA?  Puh-leeze).  I’m afraid that it never crossed my mind that a book could be in only one place in their store. Obviously this is done so as to cram in as many books as possible, but the result is an odd absolute view of what’s appropriate for one age or another.  This wouldn’t be a huge problem if it weren’t for the fact that people are mighty easy to influence in these matters.  In New York the kids come into the library and act aghast if you tell them something’s fine for them when the All Mighty B&N told them otherwise.  Interesting notions.

• Horn Book is on Facebook .  Scary scary Facebook.  Now if you kids don’t mind I’m ah-gonna grab me a trolley after I polish off this here phosphate and answer my telegrams pronto.  Thanks to Roger for the link.

• And finally the vote for oddest movie tie-in of the week goes to . . . . 

Thanks to Educating Alice for the link.

Filed under: Fusenews