Folks, I don’t post a lot of Kickstarter projects here, but this one’s a little different. It’s an idea that’s near and dear to my heart and . . . well, I’ll let the title speak for itself.
Gaiman Kickstarter Video and Colfer Original Fiction Help Launch The Read Quarterly.
The Read Quarterly (TRQ), the magazine launching in January 2016 to discuss the culture of children’s literature, has today revealed its first issue cover and has announced that the magazine will contain an original four-part Eoin Colfer story, Holy Mary, to be published through the first year.
TRQ have also announced details of how to support the first issue of the magazine via Kickstarter and have revealed that Neil Gaiman has been instrumental in setting up that campaign, even recording a video for them to help push the crowd funding.
Sarah Odedina, one of the founders of the magazine, said “We have had such fantastic support since we announced The Read Quarterly. We are excited by the Kickstarter campaign as we feel that its energy suits our magazine so perfectly. Support has already been flooding in from such luminaries as authors including Malorie Blackman and Neil Gaiman, publishers Neal Porter and Louis Baum and bookseller Melissa Cox. We look forward to growing our magazine to reflect the energy and drive that is so characteristic of the children’s literary scene around the world”.
To support the Kickstarter please go to www.kickstarter.com/projects/748565480/the-read-quarterly. Pledges for the project start at £20 and you will receive not only Odedina and Manning’s undying gratitude and the joy of supporting the project from the start, but also exclusive prints, bags and original artwork. From publication, the magazine will be stocked in bookshops and there is also a subscription service from issue two onwards.
If you are interested in stocking the magazine, please contact Kate Manning at [email protected].
Launching in January 2016, The Read Quarterly will be a forum in which global children’s literature can be discussed and debated. Created by children’s literature enthusiasts, each with a wealth of experience in the publishing industry, Sarah Odedina and Kate Manning, this quarterly magazine will provide an environment in which both writers and readers can share their enthusiasm, introduce new ideas and challenge old ones.
For media inquires, please contact:
Kate Manning
[email protected]
07833995777
Here’s your SAT question for the day: “Making fun of The Giving Tree in a parody is to shooting fish in a barrel as . . .” You may put your response in the comments below. I’ve lived long enough to feel that I’ve seen every possible Giving Tree parody man or woman could imagine. The Taking Tree, the video with Sassy Gay Friend, that other video where it shows the boy growing up. Been there, done that. That’s why I really kind of respected The Toast’s take. At first it sounds like it’s going to be more of the same old, same old: If the Boy From the Giving Tree Was Your Boyfriend. But like most pieces on The Toast, it’s much smarter and cleverer than its initial concept. Well played, Meghann Gordon. Well played indeed. Thanks to Cheryl Klein for the link.
- Me stuff. If you find that you haven’t heard enough talkety talk from me, Mr. Tim Podell was recently kind enough to speak to interview me for his remarkable, and longstanding, Good Conversations Radio Podcast. Seven years ago he walked into my library and we talked about where to take his show. Now he has a successful podcast and I my same blog. Seems like only yesterday, eh, Tim?
- This one just sort of sells itself. The headline read, “British Library releases children’s book illustrations into public domain.”
- I don’t know as many literary apps for kids as I might. Pretty much everything on my phone is of the Endless series. Endless Reader. Endless Alphabet. Now I hear they’ve a Spanish one as well: Endless Spanish/Infinito Español. This is a great day for kinderappkind.
- Who doesn’t like a good bookface (as the kids are calling it these days)? Lots of children’s literature was on display in this recent Guardian article about NYPL’s call for pictures ala #bookfacefriday.
I think the Libba Bray one is particularly inspired too.
- With the sheer number of picture books out there, sometimes you want to see a recommendation list that isn’t the same old, same old. So if you want something fun and entirely up-t0-date, step this way and take in the Pink Me post Super Summer Picture Books 2015. Good for what ails ya.
- I missed a lot of Publisher’s Weekly Children’s Bookshelf issues while I was moving to Evanston, so perhaps this piece has already been discussed ad nauseum without me. Just in case it hasn’t, though, The Guardian post Picture Books That Draw the Line Against Pink Stereotypes of Girls is very interesting to me. I should do an American version as a post soon. In any case, many of these I recognize but I don’t think we’ve seen I’m a Girl by Yasmeen Ismail yet. Eh, Bloomsbury? Eh? Eh eh? *bats eyelashes* Eh? Thanks to Kate for the link.
- With his customary verve and panache, Travis Jonker accurately (insofar as I am concerned) pinpoints the books that will probably get some New York Times Best Illustrated love this year. The sole book he neglects to mention, insofar as I am concerned, is my beloved Moletown by Torben Kuhlmann and possibly Mr. Squirrel and the Moon by Sebastian Meschenmoser. Let’s show our German compatriots a little affection!
- One might argue that launching a literary periodical with a concentration on children’s literature in this day and age is as fraught with peril as launching a children’s bookstore (if not more so). Yet I find much to celebrate in this recent announcement about The Read Quarterly and what it hopes to accomplish. You know what? What the heck. I’ll subscribe. Could be good for the little gray cells.
This . . . this looks like a lot of work. Whooboy. A lot of work. But super cool, you bet. Super cool. It’s kids made out of books:
Well, folks, wish me luck. Today I give my presentation to the good people of Hamline University, and we’ll see whether or not they find my talk too short, too long, or too nerve-wracked (the smart money’s riding on the last). The weather, as it happens, is perfectly perfect here. I am, however, a little unnerved when folks continually make eye-contact. Don’t they know that eye-contact is a dangerous habit that can lead to death, disease, and dysentery? Or is that just in NYC? Moving on . . . .
- The other day I was recommended a middle grade novel I had not heard much about called A Tale Dark and Grimm by Adam Gidwitz. The cover did nothing to make my heart pitter-pat any faster (it’s sort of using a faux David Frankland silhouette technique) and the title? Haven’t we done enough fairy tales? But then I saw the blurbs inside. Laura Amy Schlitz? She doesn’t blurb anything. Jack Zipes? One of the best children’s literary academic scholars out there. So I gave it a read, and you should too considering how hard I fell for it. We’ve got ourselves a new amazing debut author, folks. Salon ran a fun article on blurbing as well, that you might enjoy. It’s called Beware of blurbs and makes a lot of sense. Still and all, had I not seen the blurbs (and gotten a personal recommendation from Monica Edinger) I might have missed the book altogether. They do have their uses. Thanks to @neilhimself for the link.
- Says author Philip Womack, “When I started to write children’s books, most people would nod sagely and opine, ‘they’re the hardest audience to write for – very picky, children’. This is a cliché which is almost monstrously wrong. The vast majority of children (and by “children”, I mean anybody in those prepubescent years who has yet to make the leap to Jane Eyre and Great Expectations) have the literary sensibility of a dead snail and will read any old rubbish.” As opposed to adults who are all discerning in their tastes, I suppose. Womack then goes on to equate Stephenie Meyer to J.K. Rowling, which may explain why this article goes by the subtitle how to write a children’s best-seller, and yet the author is, himself, a relative unknown. Ah well. When I say that I just sound like the snarky commentors. Thanks to 100 Scope Notes for the link
- You can take the girl out of Kalamazoo but you can’t take the Kalamazoo out of the girl (Kalamazoo, in this case, being a town and not a dreadful disease with a catchy name). Little did I know that author/artist Mark Crilley was a Fine Arts major at Kalamazoo College. That and other interesting facts about the man come up in his recent spotlight piece at Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast. Later he goes on to say, “For whatever reason, I just don’t seem to show up on people’s radars as an illustrator for hire. The happy exception was Little, Brown’s recent re-issue of
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I Read to NMD:Egg Drop by Mini GreyStay Away From Rat Boy! by Laurie Lears, illus. by Red HansenTrudy by Henry ColeNMD Read to Me:People Magazine: Special Selena Gomez & Demi Lovato Collector's IssueWe Read Together:Grandfather Buffalo by Jim ArnoskyHmmm....what to make of this week's selection. A mixed bag, to say the least. I had such high hopes for Egg Drop--Traction Man is a favorite here.
Ammon Shea recently spent a year of his life reading the OED from start to finish. Over the next few months he will be posting weekly blogs about the insights, gems, and thoughts on language that came from this experience. His book, Reading the OED, has been published by Perigee, so go check it out in your local bookstore. In the post below Ammon looks at modern libraries.
I spend a good deal of time wandering around in libraries. Some of this time is distinctly productive – I’m looking for something specific. But much of my time is spent simply browsing; engaged in the occasionally vain hopes that I’ll find something of interest, and content in the knowledge that I’ll enjoy myself whether I do or do not.
The inexorable progress of library science, however, seems to not take browsing into consideration much when planning how to improve libraries, and there is an increasing rush to move holdings into ‘offsite storage’, a term that I feel has a decidedly euphemistic ring to it. I’m not particularly interested in having a debate with a horde of tetchy librarians about what is the best way for them to perform an admittedly difficult job, but I had an experience last week that made me think of offsite storage in a new(ish) light.
I pay for a visiting library membership at an Ivy League institution near where I live, and while it is not terribly cheap I certainly consider it money very well spent. Their libraries are beautiful and august things, impeccably maintained, filled with gorgeous books and a staff that is well-informed and helpful. But although they have enormous holdings, they are increasingly moving them to a warehouse in New Jersey. It is not an onerous process to look at something that has been moved offsite – you just fill out a form, and the requested item arrives in a day or two. This is an efficient system for many things, but not for browsing. Browsing does not work in two day intervals. It feels like playing chess by mail, a game that has never appealed to me.
Until recently I’ve not been so upset about this system. But then I found that they didn’t have a periodical I was looking for, and so went up to the library one of the local public colleges to find it, and found that my feelings on offsite storage took a distinct turn towards umbrage.
This library was housed in a huge and unlovely building. My immediate impression upon entering was not good - should an academic institution absolutely have to play music loudly over loudspeakers just outside the library, Iron Man, by Ozzy Osborne and Black Sabbath is an odd choice. My following impressions were in a similar vein – it was filled with students talking loudly on cell phones, there was a blinking fluorescent light in one corridor and a broken fan duct in the next that whined persistently. And there were other delightfully antagonistic touches sprinkled about, such as the two metal triangular shapes protruding from a wall near a water fountain, just high enough to function as seats, which had metal spikes welded onto them, in case anyone had the idea of sitting there.
But all of this was immediately forgotten as soon as I walked down to the basement, where the things I was looking for were kept. The basement stretched on and on, a giant room full of journals, magazines, and periodicals, most of which appeared to have not been looked at for decades. Hundreds of bookshelves covered in dust and groaning under the weight of ignored knowledge. I was suddenly in heaven, albeit a heaven with bad lighting and largely populated with college students talking loudly.
The chances are very great that I will never really need to look through all the issues of The Journal of Calendar Reform or The Transactions of the American Foundrymen’s Association, but I find an indefinable pleasure in coming across them. The run of Crelle’s Journal from the 1820’s to the present is doubly incomprehensible to me, as it is about math and written in German, but it is nonetheless beautiful to look at, with its variegated and marbled covers, and I’m sure that sooner or later someone for whom it is not incomprehensible will come across it there, and be surprised and pleased to find it.
I found the periodical I’d come for, and made copies of it. And I came back to that library the next day and wandered for hours. The volumes are all arranged alphabetically, and I started at A and walked slowly through, looking at every title without taking anything down from the shelves. After an hour of this I had just reached B, so I allowed myself to aimlessly stroll through the stacks, pulling down things whenever they sparked interest. I found lovely illustrations in Aero Magazine from 1937, strange and horrific ways of making recipes with war-time rations in the Journal of Home Economics from 1943, and dozens of other things I’d never thought to look for. I left four hours later, inexplicably happy, covered in dust and bits of knowledge I’ll never understand.
I cannot help but to find it strange that making a physical object inaccessible is now seen as a sign of progress.
The Read Quarterly (TRQ), the magazine launching in January 2016 to discuss the culture of children’s literature, has today revealed its first issue cover and has announced that the magazine will contain an original four-part Eoin Colfer story, Holy Mary, to be published through the first year.
Nice to see Kate Beaton’s books in the Guardian article, and the others look great too.
(And writing Giving Tree parodies is like shooting fish in a barrel, because the original book was so blind to the scenario it was setting up!)
How much do I love bookfaces! They’re the best. Thanks for the shout-out Betsy, hope your move is going smoothly!