ShelfTalker: A Children's Bookseller's Blog

July 2, 2009 | Link This | Email this | Comments (2)

What's it like to spend every day drawing comics in the company of and under the tutelage of other comics pros? Last November my fiancé Gareth Hinds and I got a taste of this life when we spent the better part of a day at the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, Vt. We were there to give a joint lecture (our first!) to CCS students as part of their "Professional Practices" course, at the invitation of CCS Fellow Alec Longstreth. What we quickly discovered was that our hour-and-a-half talk could easily have been twice as long,...Read More

June 26, 2009 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

One of my favorite books to come out this season is Adventures in Cartooning: How to Turn Your Doodles into Comics by James Sturm, Andrew Arnold, and Alexis Frederick-Frost (First Second, March 2009). What I love most about this book is that it is not a dry how-to book. In fact, it hardly reads like a "how-to" book at all, most of the time. (You can read the first several pages of the book on the web site of First Second to see what I mean.) This is the entertaining story of a brave knight who rushes off to rescue a princess from a fire-br...Read More

June 19, 2009 | Link This | Email this | Comments (20)

Here's a random fact I stumbled upon recently: Recycle Bookstore West in Campbell, Calif., has a store cat named Isbn. Yes, Isbn, as in ISBN. How clever is that?? Without a doubt, this is the best name for a bookstore cat that I've come across as yet in my many years of bookstore travels.

The photo of Isbn below is one that appears (along with some very favorable reviews!) on Yelp, but others can also be found in the Flickr accounts of Klara Kim and meowhous.

 ...Read More

June 11, 2009 | Link This | Email this | Comments (4)

Picture a world comprised of book covers, book spines, and people cut from actual book pages. That's the world created by Apt Studio and Asylum Films in the stop-motion video "This Is Where We Live" that they produced for the 25th anniversary of 4th Estate (an imprint of HarperCollins in the U.K.) some seven months ago, though I only just stumbled upon it today, completely by accident! I love the whimsical quality of this short film and am especially taken with the thought of paper birds emerging from paper trees. Beautiful!

If you enjoy this video you might also enjoying taking a peek at the ...Read More

May 30, 2009 | Link This | Email this | Comments (2)

The show so far has felt like a whirlwind, with me having entirely too little time to spend on the trade show floor! With that in mind, I'm focusing this mid-BEA post around a superlative theme -- giving you little soundbites that open larger windows into the wealth of things going on at the show.

The most entertaining thing I've heard so far: I moderated a delightful conversation with Trenton Lee Stewart as part of ABC's "Tea with Children's Authors." My favorite part of the conversation was hearing a few snippets about what Trent was like as a kid -- snippets that shed some light on what things might have influenced his creation of the characters in his Mysterious Benedict Society books. When he was in... second grade, I think it was (?) he entered a class competition to come up with a list of homonyms. He had no idea homonyms other kids...Read More