Fusenews: Good Hattitude

Sad news was announced on child_lit via Lee Bennett Hopkins recently: "On 1/27/09, just after his 80th birthday, Blair Lent, a Caldecott Award winner died. Blair’s work with cardboard cuts were unique in every way.  It seems hard to believe that in the l960’s artists were still doing color overlays, some of which are much better than what is being produced today with all our technology."  SLJ has a longer story.  You probably know Lent best for his mildly controversial Tikki Tikki Tembo. Boy oh boy he did some beautiful stuff.  The most recent title of his in my library’s collection was The Beastly Feast as penned by Bruce Goldstone.  And following hot on the tails of my last Fusenews, in which I discovered the Mazza Museum for the first time, I learned this fact about Lent’s work: "Most of his art was donated to the Kerlan Collection at the University of Minnesota and the Mazza Museum at the University of Findlay in Ohio."  There you go.

• Names of blogs I wish I had thought up myself: Persnickety Snark. Lord, that’s good. Thanks to bookshelves of doom for the link.

• At the SCBWI Cocktail Party held in Manhattan last Friday I happened to run into Richard Michelson.  You would know him most recently for his magnificent win of the Sydney Taylor Book Award for his title As Good As Anybody: Martin Luther King Jr & Abraham Joshua Heschel’s Amazing March Toward Freedom.  I knew him for his fabulous R. Michelson Gallery in Northampton, MA.  I guess you could say I primarily knew him for the gallery because when he casually mentioned his book I said (I can’t believe I’m confessing this, but it’s true) "Oh. Do you write books?"  He was very nice about it, but let’s be honest.  He JUST won the Sydney Taylor Book Award.  That’s the kind of thing I’m really supposed to know. Never even mind the tons of other books he has penned. So if you want to be a better person than me why don’t you listen to Mr. Michelson talk about his book on the Book of Life podcast?  It’s fun.  It’s timely.  It’s informative.  Thanks to Heidi Estrin for the link.

• Addicted to a good bestseller list?  A bare bones site has come up with an interesting idea.  According to Galleycat, Reading Radar compiles " The New York Times Best Seller list, Amazon Web Services, and a number of other webby tools" to bring you the ultimate top selling books.  It’s interesting.  Sort of an all-in-one site.  I don’t get The Times and I don’t always think to check them online, so for those patrons who want a printout of the top selling picture books, this would be a good place to get one. Thanks to Galleycat for the link. 

• If you live in New York then you know that periodically, and usually on Thursdays, the city will smell like maple syrup.  It’s mildly disconcerting.  Well, at long last our national nightmare is over.  The culprit?  Jersey.  So we weren’t even smelling real maple syrup.  It was just maple syrup smell.  How disappointing.

• Seems odd that for all that the French give the Harry Potter books so-so covers, they then turn around and knight the woman.  Not that she doesn’t deserve it.  For my part, I didn’t know you could become a female knight in France.  Must be the Joan of Arc thing (anyone with actually accurate information, as opposed to speculation, is free to tell me here).  That moves us ever so slightly closer to my goal of creating knighthoods in America.  I have unconventional goals.  Thanks to Bookninja for the link.

• Books I Want: Posy by Linda Newbery and Catherine Rayner.  Purdy.  Thanks to Kids Lit for making me want it so.

• "Contemporary poets have recently swamped the London Word festival site following a challenge to write the Golden Fib. The Fib is a poetic form (six lines, 20 syllables) cooked up by Gregory K Pincus and based on the Fibonacci sequence." So sayeth Shirley Dent at The Guardian blog, giving a shout out to the Gotta Book man.  Way to go, Greg.  Shows that Ms. Dent does her research well. Thanks to Charlotte for the link.

• I totally wasn’t even worried.  Disney drops Narnia after releasing film #2 during a terrible time of year?  Well Fox just picked that puppy up again.  Now let’s see how they do . . .  Thanks to bookshelves of doom for the link.

• Nicely done, Dial.  It’s not every imprint that can brag that our president read their book to kids in a school library. Diane Hutts Aston and Jerry Pinkney were probably a teensy bit psyched when they discovered that Moon Over Star, their book about the moon landing, was the presidential pick.  That’s living the authorial/illustra.. uh.. torial dream, it is.  Thanks to SLJ Extra Helping for the link.

• Daily Image:

I come in to work and I find that someone has turned the wallpaper on the Reference computer into this image, repeated over and over again.

I couldn’t figure out where it came from.  Because I vaguely remembered someone talking about that old Beverly Cleary TV-novelization recently.  Who was it?  The brain was wracked for a while until the perpetrator of the wallpaper switcheroo confessed that it came from none other than this post over at Collecting Children’s Books.  That’s what I get for missing a day or too.  Peter went a bit wild with the hatification.  My favorite was probably the Wally & the Beav shot too (Wally just looks so pissed) but I think Peter should get a standing ovation for this one as well: