Feiwel will oversee Feiwel and Friends, Square Fish, Holt Books for Young Readers, and Priddy Books, with Laura Godwin, publisher of Holt BFYR, reporting to her. Boughton will become publisher of FSG Books for Young Readers, and continue to head Roaring Brook Press. Margaret Ferguson, associate publisher and editorial director of FSG BFYR, will report to Boughton, as will First Second's editorial director Mark Siegel.

As a result of the restructuring, and because several operations such as marketing, publicity and art direction will be centralized, several employees are losing their jobs, including Michael Eisenberg, co-publisher of FSG BFYR; Melanie Kroupa, whose imprint at FSG BFYR is being eliminated in the restructuring; Patrick Collins, art director at Holt BFYR; Jill Davis, executive editor at FSG BFYR; and Jennifer Abbots, associate publicity director at Holt BFYR, among others.  

“We’ve been getting such bad news from the industry,” said Perkins, explaining the genesis of the idea. “Editors are losing jobs; unsolicited manuscripts aren’t getting taken. Blow after blow. I was redoing my mission statement—connecting stories to kids—and realizing how precious our indies are.” She credited literary bloggers Sarah Rettger (marketing coordinator at the American Booksellers Association) and writer A.C. Gaughen with helping her refine her original concept of connecting children’s stories and communities, and encouraging her to begin with a single region of the country.  

Kathy Dawson.

Before joining Harcourt in 2005, Dawson worked for 17 years at G.P. Putnam's Sons Books for Young Readers, another Penguin Young Readers Group unit. Among the books Dawson edited at Putnam: Getting Near to Baby by Audrey Couloumbis, Al Capone Does My Shirts by Gennifer Choldenko and Fat Kid Rules the World by K.L. Going. At Harcourt she edited Graceling by Kristin Cashore and Life as We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer.

The announcement comes on the heels of the September publication of the adult memoir Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World by Vicki Myron (Dewey’s adoptive mother and former director of the library) with Bret Witter. That book quickly became a bestseller for Grand Central (which like Little, Brown, is a division of Hachette Book Group) and has more than 750,000 copies in print.
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In the book, Tillie, an adventurous bantam White Leghorn, hunts for the perfect place to lay her eggs in and around Golson’s Massachusetts property—out in the garden, atop the breakfast table and in the laundry room, among other spots. Readers are prompted to find where the egg is hidden on each page, as Tillie’s fellow hens look on.

Golson’s hens have already spent some time in the public eye, thanks to her Web site The HenCam, which she has operated since 2005. The Web cam on the site offers a peek into the lives of the chickens (and a rabbit) she and her family keep in their hen house at their home outside Boston. The HenCam also features Golson’s blog about her experiences keeping hens, and attracts more than 10,000 unique visitors each month. “A lot of people who work in cubicles watch the HenCam and tell me it saves their sanity,” says Golson.  

Dirk Zimmer, circa 1982. Photo: D. DeStaffan.

How strange to consider someone an intimate and not know of his death for six weeks. It was time for my periodic check-in with children’s book illustrator Dirk Zimmer, a friend of 30 years. I phoned the last number I had for him and received a recording that the number I had dialed was no longer in service. So I e-mailed him: “Mr. Dizi, call me. How’s your life?” While awaiting his reply, I did a quick Web search, curious what books he had recently published—and instead found a link to his obituary of September 26, 2008. At a time when peers bury their parents with business-like regularity,
the loss of a contemporary vibrant in memory
can rift one’s heart.
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