Fusenews: The Case of the Unwitting Albino

• See what a couple sharp-eyed bloggers and an intrepid reporter can do together? According to this article that appeared on SLJ yesterday (and to my mind, the title Little, Brown in Sticky Situation Over ‘Whitewashed’ Book Covers is straight out of a 1930s newsreel) LB&Co. has said of the jackets of the three Mysterious Benedict Society books, “We are adjusting the covers of all three titles immediately as they reprint in order to offer a more faithful rendering as soon as possible.” Woot! Happy times are here again. A tip of the hat to Leila Roy and Travis Jonker for making the call.

• Highlighting interviews with authors or illustrators is tedious work.  Doggone folks like to talk!  Who can keep up?  But Carin Berger is still a relative unknown (in terms of, y’know, the vast scale of the universe) and since I like her work so much I’m recommending to you this interview she conducted over at Aqua Velvet.  The preview of her art on a William S. Burroughs book is just one of the many enticements.

• Over on the English side of the pond, supermarkets are making movies.  Yup.  That’s the word on the street, anyway.  Supermarket behemoth Tesco is going to make films out of works of literature.  Says this article  from The Guardian, "The Jacqueline Wilson title The Worry Website will be filmed in Britain, as will the selected Dick Francis thriller. A screenplay of the revered American children’s author Judy Blume’s 1981 novel, Tiger Eyes, is also in development, as is one of the novels from Pullman’s Sally Lockhart children’s adventure series."  Tiger Eyes ?  Really?  Well, I’ll admit it hasn’t be done before . . . Thanks to Mitali Perkins for the link.

• In other movie news, and from Cynopsis Kids:

"Neil Gaiman (Coraline, The Sandman, Stardust) reports that the movie adaptation of his book The Graveyard Book is not set up at Miramax any longer, per an interview with the author in the LA Times .  The movie was to be written/directed by Neil Jordan (The Crying Game, Interview with the Vampire).  However, Gaiman says that isn’t the end of the movie, ‘But it looks like almost all the pieces are on the table again.  They have a studio, they have a distributor and they are putting stuff together and I’m not allowed to say anything else.’ So … stayed tuned."

• And in your final movie news, I finally convinced my husband to blog another movie for youngsters.  Never Cry Wolf wasn’t based on a work of literature for children, it’s true, but for a lot of folks in my generation it was a touchstone.  Check out his thoughts on the matter.

If there’s only one thing I like more than book jackets it’s foreign book jackets.  Recently Jacket Knack had a truly inspired post when they took the recent Batchelder Award winner (for best translated children’s book), A Faraway Island by Annika Thor and compared its American face to those from Sweden, the Netherlands, Norway, Germany, and France.  Man!  Is that smart or what?

• I think it’s healthy to periodically point your eyeballs at the PaperTigers site where issues of multiculturalism in children’s books are the name of the game.  There’s a rather nice guest post up at the moment by Karen Ruelle and Deborah Durland DeSaix discussing their book The Grand Mosque of Paris: A Story of How Muslims Rescued Jews During the Holocaust (Holiday House, 2009).  It’s one of those books that fell through my To Be Reviewed cracks in 2009 but I enjoyed it very much.

• I don’t think I need remind you to regularly read your Collecting Children’s Books.  With all those essential vitamins and minerals it’s part of a daily breakfast.  Recently someone asked Peter, "How big was the first printing of When You Read Me?"  Along with striving to answer the question, this post also displays what different authors have said about writing for adults vs. writing for kids.

• Author Ellen Potter discusses a heart-wrenching process an author must live with on a regular basis when it comes to seeing the covers of their novels for the very first time over at the Macmillan Kids blog.  Then she reveals the jacket for her latest, The Kneebone Boy, and HOO WEE MAMA  . . . it is taking all my ethical energy not to reprint it here.  That. Is. A. Good. Cover.  Ellen Potter must have sacrificed a particularly large goat to the Cover Gods this time.

• Did you know there was a Twitter tag called #jadedkidsbooks where folks come up with dark versions of classic titles?  They’re generally touch and go (mostly touch), though I do harbor a warm spot for "When Sophie Gets Angry… Really Really Angry… People Die" and "Richard Scarry’s Cougartown".

• Oh, Brown Bear.  Will you never renounce your Marxist ways?  Never mind that the Texas State Board of Education recently excluded Bill Martin Jr. from the state’s third grade social studies curriculum standards because he shares his name with a guy who wrote Ethical Marxism: The Categorical Imperative of Liberation.  I mean, excluding anyone for that reason is awful enough.  What I love is that they pulled him initially because a fellow board member had gone to Borders.com, saw the two books under the same name (all online booksellers merge authors with the same names, y’know), brought it up, and the response was, "’Fine with me. It’s a good enough reason for me to get rid of someone."  Gah!  Thanks to @HUnderdown for the link.

• One of the great joys of my life was reading the bookshelves of doom encapsulations of ten different Nancy Drew mysteries.  And now (oh joy!) she’s going to read the rest of them.  Dare we hope for more summaries?  Only time will tell.

• Daily Image:

It’s what happens when designers get their hands on books.  They start thinking things like, "What if they made dustjackets that acted as bookmarks too?"  The result?

You can see even more children’s titles here.  Thanks to Hi, Miss Julie for the link.

Filed under: Fusenews