Fusenews: Hobbits, Flight of the Conchords and Me*

Time to depress some of the author/illustrators out there.  Interesting Fact of the Day: Robert McCloskey was 28 when he won a Caldecott for Make Way for Ducklings.  But if it’s any comfort Peter at Collecting Children’s Books determined that the average age of a winner is 47.5 years.  And having already done all the Newbery winners, he also organizes the winners in order of age with additional fascinating stats.  I don’t even know how one goes about looking this sort of thing up.  The rest of the post It’s Sunday Brunch Time Again bears reading.  Of course.

• Chasing Ray has a great piece up regarding the Jonah Winter/Calef Brown picture book biography of Gertrude Stein called Gertrude is Gertrude is Gertrude.  It’s the kind of blog post where you can watch the preconceptions and gears in the writer’s head change in the course of the posting.  Best of all, it made me want to read the book.  Like . . . right now.  Makes me sad I missed the last S&S librarian preview too.  Oh, and exactly how many book is Jonah Winter putting out this year?  Did he buy a house or something?  Prolific doesn’t even begin to describe him.

• I’d heard mild details about this before but now we have the detail details.  From Cynopsis Kids:

• Awww.  A visual approximation of what Pete’s a Pizza by William Steig looks like if you bring the story to life.  Lots of running is involved, that’s for sure.

• Here is a view of the cover of our most recent Newbery winner, now translated into German.  I assume the Germans have their own word for "graveyard" but maybe printing the word in English gives it a tangy Amero-Brit edge.  Thanks to Neil Gaiman for the link.

• And now for another installment in our regular feature Notable Quotables.  This week, I got quoted in Idealog, a New Zealand publication with the interestingly vague description "Rich With Ideas".  All right then.  They had a piece up called The day of the Gecko, in which they highlighted Gecko Press which publishes "English versions of foreign-sourced children’s books with a focus on strong stories and quality illustration."  It’s a great piece, particularly if you ever wanted to know more about the state of the New Zealand publishing industry (admit it… you did). 

• Huh.  That’s an intriguing opening sentence.  "Monday morning, Melissa Sweet of Rockport, a children’s book illustrator and author, got one of the calls everyone in her field dreams about … only she didn’t actually get it."  The Village Soup describes how Melissa Sweet failed to get "the call".  Sometimes I think the "failed to get" stories are as good as the "got it" stories.  It’s a pretty cool piece.  Thanks to Cynsations for the link.

• I miss the funnies.  In my Sunday talk with resident husband and Sophie Brookover we wandered off onto a tangent about reading the Sunday color comics as kids with our families and what a great experience that was.  I don’t often see color comics here in New York and when I do they’re never the strips I like.  But I’ve always had a fondness for Zits (based partly on the fact that it’s drawn by the original creator and not his son/grandson/great nephew, which is a comic strip pet peeve of mine).  And this Zits was pretty sweet.  Thanks to Bookmoot for the link.

• Think you might want to blog?  Need a spot of advice to help on that desperate path?  MotherReader has come up with two posts on the matter but the second contains everything you need to know.  And I agree about Blogger.  It really has one of the nicest layouts.  Very classy.

• Daily Image:

Life’s too short not to own a robot.  Or at the very least, covet one.

Thanks to bookshelves of doom for the link.

*Note: Neither Flight of the Conchords or Hobbits will not be mentioned in today’s Fusenews.  Just New Zealand.  I was feeling a bit shameless when I wrote that.

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