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Aw yeah.  I’m breaking out the big guns today.  Cute kids trying to raise library funds.  The catchy song and good cause don’t hurt much either.  Seems a little town called Shutesbury has been having a difficult time raising funds for a new library.  Their old one is, as you can see “wicked small”.  So they’ve set up a lovely fundraising site but they still need help.  It’s a good cause.  If you’re feeling generous you might try to get a headstart on your yearly “giving”.  Thanks to Rich Michelson for the link!

If you feel you haven’t gotten your quota on cute kids, this lot have accents.  British accents.  Can’t get much cuter than that.  It’s a promo for the app for the Barefoot World Atlas.  A rather lovely idea and a nice way to incorporate nonfiction into an app’s layout, don’t you think?

You know, I think we’re finally getting to the point where book trailers have distinctive flavors.  For example, if you had not told me that this next trailer was produced by Chronicle, I think I would have guessed anyway.  Something about their trailers just stand out.  They are, simply put, better than the rest.  See for yourself:

By the way, I’m particularly thrilled to see this book since we haven’t had a really good sign-related picture book since the days of Tana Hoban.

As you may know, Mr. Sharp and Mr. Schu along with their #nerdbery corps are dedicated to systematically reading through all the Newbery winners from the 1920s to today.  Mr. Sharp offers his thoughts on the best and the worst.  Of the 20s I confess to only having read The Trumpeter of Krakow (the actual Newbery Medal for this resides in my library, FYI) and The Dark Frigate.  See how Mr. Sharp ranked them:

This next one’s fun.  Years ago I was enamored of a picture book called The Terrible Plop by Ursula Dubosarsky, illustrated by Andrew Joyner.  That title’s a bit of a misnomer, by the way.  No potty humor here.  In any case, I was pleased to learn that the book had been adapted into a play for the preschool set.  Now it’s coming to the New Victory Theater (just down the street from my library, as it happens) to play from April 26th to May 13th.  Andrew Joyner told me that, “Then it does a week in Pittsburgh and a week in New Jersey.  It’s a fun and energetic show – quite different from the book, almost like a clowning performance (although I think they give a straight reading of The Terrible Plop before the performance starts).  I saw it a couple of years ago with the family and we all had a great time.  It was put together by a local theatre company in Adelaide, South Australia, called Windmill Theatre.”  Interested at all?  After all, it does involve bunny puppets. Here’s the info and here’s the trailer:

Finally, f

I swear that every time my computer goes on the fritz I feel like I’m walking underwater for days on end while it’s in the shop.  I can’t do email effectively, I can’t update Goodreads, I can’t do anything without feeling like it’s all fake until that little laptop is returned to my knees where it belongs.  It’s a sickness, man.  Not healthy in the least.  But now that it’s back I can’t help but be thrilled!  Woot and woo-hoo and other “woo” related forms of cheering. Now on to the news . . .

• First off, I’m pilfering this next link from the always amusing and informative Jennifer Schultz.  Because I am a member of PEN here in New York I’ve been vaguely aware of the efforts to help New Orleans rebuild post-Katrina (the Children’s/Young Adult Book Authors Committee helped move an elementary school library from St. Joseph’s School in Greenwich Village, New York City, to the Martin Luther King Jr. School in New Orleans and have continued to aid that school ever since).  The New Orleans public libraries themselves haven’t been on my radar as much.  Jennifer filled me in on the matter:

“Yesterday’s Times-Picayune (New Orleans’s newspaper) had an excellent article about the rebirth of the New Orleans Public Library system, which was devastated by Hurricane Katrina. Ever since they started to rebuild the libraries, their motto has been “Building Back Better.” The NOPL libraries were okay—they’ve always had strong community programming, but there was a lot of room for improvement—but drastic improvements were never going to be in the city’s finances, until Katrina came and they had no choice but to literally start over with many of their libraries. They didn’t want to just rebuild what they had—they wanted to take this unusual and tragic opportunity to make a strong and community-oriented system for the city. They wanted to make them public transportation-friendly, since many residents rely on it, technologically savvy,  environmentally-friendly—you name it. This is their website: http://nutrias.org/ (The nutria is a pest —they are great at destroying wetlands-and a source of humor in Louisiana-Louisianians can have a dark sense of humor. They had a rather colorful governor  years ago who suggested that folks should hunt and eat the nutrias in order to cut down on their numbers, and they’ve been sort of a joke ever since. Nutria fur is marketed as “guilt free fur,” etc).”

Thank you, Jennifer!  Fantastic info.  I can’t wait for ALA to return and to get to see the city (and it’s libraries!) firsthand.

• There’s a new Diary of a Wimpy Kid book coming out this November.  Kinney says the new book will in
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