Hey! Look at us in Wellesley Weston magazine...

Good old Mariah, as mentioned in Wellesley Weston magazine.

http://wellesleywestonmagazine.epubxp.com/issue/78488/103

Mom, it's my first day of kindergarten

From Esme Raji Codell, a bit about classroom discipline

What also comes to mind is a passage from Farmer Boy by Laura Ingalls Wilder, describing a situation in a frontier classroom:

"These big boys came...to thrash the teacher and break up the school.  They boasted that no teacher could finish the winter term at that school, and no teacher ever had. This year the teacher was a slim, pale young man.  His name was Mr. Corse.  He was gentle and patient, and never whipped little boys because they forgot how to spell a word. Almanzo felt sick inside when he thought how the big boys would beat Mr. Corse.  Mr. Corse wasn't big enough to fight them."

The story continues, describing insolence and disruptive behavior in the one-room schoolhouse by the band of boys, led by the teenager "Big Bill," and it is revealed that these boys have caused death to teachers in the past. The other children cannot concentrate on their work, or complete their lessons, in anticipation of the inevitable confrontations. Little Almanzo confides in his father, "I wish I was big enough to fight 'em!"

"'Son, Mr. Corse was hired out to teach the school,'  Father answered.  "The school trustees were fair and above board with him; they told him what he was undertaking.  He undertook it.  It's his job, not yours.'
'But maybe they'll kill him!'  Almanzo said.
'That's his business,' said Father.  'When a man undertakes a job, he has to stick to it till he finishes it.  If Corse is the man I think he is, he'll thank nobody for interfering.' 

....Big Bill tore off his coat, yelling, 'Come on boys!' He rushed up the aisle.  Almanzo felt sick inside; he didn't want to watch it, but he couldn't help it.
Mr. Corse stepped away from his desk.  His hand came from behind the desk lid, and a long, thin, black streak hissed through the air. 
It was a blacksnake ox-whip fifteen feet long.  Mr. Corse held the short handle, loaded with iron, that could kill an ox.  The thin, long lash coiled around Bill's legs, and Mr. Corse jerked.  Bill lurched and almost fell.  Quick as black lightning the lash circled and stuck and coiled again, and again Mr. Corse jerked."

illustration by Garth Williams

In this frontier memoir, Mr. Corse wins the battle and the war, and regains classroom control in a society where the parental attitude was "if the teacher has to thrash you again, I'll give you a thrashing you remember."  The problem of insanely brutal threats to classroom management are not new in the American classroom, nor are the extreme responses of educators. 

From the Horn Book: Reading Along the Gender Continuum

Reading Along the Gender Continuum

August 20, 2012 By Julie C. Luecke Leave a Comment

Having grown up in the Free to Be generation, I’ve tried as a parent to steer clear of limiting gender norms in raising, and reading to, 
my son. We’ve read about boys and girls of all types, and (just as 
Hilary Rappaport describes in her May/June 2012 Horn Book article “On the Rights of Reading and Girls and Boys”), his preferences never seemed to hinge on the gender presented on the covers or through the characters. We’ve loved stories in which characters cross gender boundaries, such as Horace and Morris but Mostly Dolores and The Princess Knight and the classic William’s Doll, as well as stories that seem to ignore gender, such as my son’s one-time favorite, Ten Minutes till Bedtime, complete with discussions about which pronoun we should use for the main character.

I had never heard of the Rainbow Magic books (Scholastic) when my son, then five, announced that he wanted to read them; it soon became apparent that they were the new “in” books with his friends at school (kids with names like Emily and Ava and Sophie). So we borrowed Ruby the Red Fairy from the library, and he loved it: the good kids and the bad villains, the magic, the predictable formula, the tidy resolution. We moved on from the Rainbow Fairies to the Weather Fairies, and I told my partner it was his turn to read the next set (there being only so much trite writing I am willing to endure for the sake of crossing gender borders). As our son became an independent reader, we told him that if he wanted to read more Rainbow Magic books, he’d have to read them to himself, and read them he did.
One day when he was getting ready for a playdate, he said he wanted to hide his fairy books so no one would tease him. He didn’t think there was anything wrong with liking them, but he was beginning to recognize that some other kids might. The books were hidden for a while, and then when I started teaching children’s literature and asked if I could bring them in to work to show in my class, he said “sure.” He had moved on, continuing to devour books as he raced through the Littles and Humphrey the hamster, Little Wolf and Ramona, Hank Zipzer and of course the Magic Tree House. There weren’t “girl books” and “boy books.” There were just books.
He switched to a new school in first grade, and since then the books he has brought home from the school library seem to be very gender-typed: Justice League; Big Nate; several iterations of Star Wars. He tells me which kids checked the books out before him, and which ones are waiting to get them next (kids with names like Jack and Connor and Joaquin). He does enjoy these “for boys!”–blazened titles, despite the narrowing focus of the type of reading he is supposed to like. Though part of me mourns this loss, knowing there are many less-obviously-boy-oriented books that would appeal to him too, he is still reading passionately. But how is he being socialized to fit into gender categories? And what if a kid wants (or needs) to fight the categories? How much conviction does a second-grade boy need to carry a book with a pink cover out of the library?
My interest in the presentation of gender in reading materials has shifted over the past three years as I’ve begun to contemplate literary gender roles not just from a parental perspective but also from a professional one, teaching children’s literature to future teachers. Recently, one of my college students wrote a paper referencing The Secret Garden, and as I looked for a copy of the book in the library catalog I saw cover after cover that seemed designed to appeal to a specific category of readers: bookish girls. I do believe that we should work to change society so that we don’t have these gender limitations, and indeed we should not judge books by their covers (even though we know kids do, and will continue to do so). Yet by having images and colors that play into gender norms, aren’t book covers (or the publishers who select them) judging their readers? By putting a sparkly pink cover on a Rainbow Magic fairy book, has it been preordained that only girls need bother picking it up? By highlighting the fairies and jewels and glitter, do we inadvertently approve and promote the idea that boys won’t read about girls?

I have fallen into this trap, too. When I check books out for my class, if I think they might interest my son, I put them in his room until I need them; books I think are too old for him or not to his taste I set on my desk. One day he saw The Doll People on top of my pile and asked about it. Of course I said he could look at it, and in a matter of minutes he was immersed. In a couple of days it was read, as were the others in the series as quickly as we could borrow them. What had influenced me to sort that book into the desk pile? Was it the cover art (dolls, dollhouse, even a heart-shaped lock)? The flourish-filled font? The female authors? The word doll in the title? What if it had said mini-figure instead? The subconscious notions of my adult mind didn’t speak to the real child in my house. The avowed feminist had fallen for the old stereotypical assumptions.


Yet even more layers of assumptions are inherent in this discussion, identifying children as gender normative, boy or girl. On the rare occasion when titles like 10,000 Dresses or I Am J come out in which main characters identify as transgender, these books are praised—and rightly so—for providing bibliotherapeutic relief for young people who are transgender or questioning whether they may be. But our response to books portraying transgender characters reveals that we are once again falling into old patterns of categorization. Sure, we’ve added another perspective on gender, but we still want to separate people into clear-cut groupings: either you’re transgender, or you’re not. We believe we can embrace transgender children and a male/female dichotomy simply by reassigning these children to the appropriate gender role — swapping Captain Underpants for Babymouse.
The reality, however, is that many children are gender variant (with interests and behaviors persistently outside of typical cultural gender norms) and at different points in their lives might be living or exploring at various places along the gender identity continuum (see, for example, Ruth Padawer’s article “What’s So Bad About a Boy Who Wants to Wear a Dress?” in the August 12, 2012 New York Times Magazine). Assigning labels to these places isn’t as important as having a rich understanding of the ways gender is presented in books; a rich understanding of how kids may be presenting and exploring their gender and gender identity; and the skills to connect the two.
To gain that understanding and those skills, we need to remember not to judge children by the “covers” they present. One child may be presenting as a boy only because no other option is permitted in that family. Another may present as a “girly girl” in a phase of experimentation, but may want to both wear pink and study science. Maybe we have to realize that there can be many paths to the same summit, and some of them might involve a detour through an obsession with Disney Princesses and Barbie (and the narrowed roles they suggest), as was the case for one transgender girl I know.
So I would propose that we modify our language, speaking not of “Girl Books and Boy Books,” but of books across gender. To the advice contained within the section of the same name in Roger Sutton’s essay in A Family of Readers (Candlewick), I would offer a modification (in italics below): “The best thing you can give to a would-be, could-be reader, regardless of gender, gender identity, or gender presentation, is access to a wide variety of reading possibilities among which he or she can find what seems just right, labels be damned.” And yet, peer pressure is a mighty force with which to contend, particularly for gender-variant or transgender children, who are routinely targeted for teasing and bullying. A boy who otherwise aligns with gender stereotypes may be given a pass for reading Ivy + Bean, but one who is already ridiculed for being effeminate may find taking such a risk much more dangerous.
So where do we find good books for the children along the middle of the continuum? What do we suggest to the child who feels like a girl but is called a boy (or vice versa), the kids who are exploring gender, or the ones who want to understand a friend who is exploring gender?
It’s not enough to have content with gender-diverse appeal; packaging matters too. Some authors deftly manage to weave rich characters of diverse genders into their books only to be faced with the loss of potential readers through covers that invite just one segment of the gender spectrum, such as the misleading suggestion of romantic fiction on the cover of Phoebe Stone’s engaging historical mystery, The Romeo and Juliet Code. Occasionally publishers make changes between editions, as happened with Linda Sue Park’s Keeping Score: the paperback edition sports not only a new font and image (a dog and a baseball) on the cover but a new subtitle as well, all significant improvements over the cursive lettering and girl-centric picture on the hardcover.


Gender variant girls in many ways have it easier; in my work in the schools, they are comfortable picking up Diary of a Wimpy Kid and adore the Harry Potter books with no reservations. But let’s make sure it stays that way, while opening doors for boys to explore diverse genres. Let’s damn the labels, but let’s actively try to defy them too. There are lots of great examples with titles and cover art that don’t play into the trappings of gender. Books with girls as main characters should appeal to many kids, and titles such as Rules and Out of My Mind (both with goldfish on the covers), When You Reach Me (with its clever display of symbols), and Zebrafish (with a diverse group of kids pictured) are excellent models of inviting potential readers rather that prescribing them. The Judy Moody and Stink books serve as positive examples as well, with their neutral book covers and mix of central characters. The Hunger Games series demonstrates the potential for strong sales with packaging that appeals to all readers. We do want all kids to read more, regardless of how they identify along the gender continuum. And ideally all kids will feel safe to explore gender through their reading, in order (as Roger Sutton put it in his September/October 2007 Horn Book editorial) “to independently and privately assume whatever (not whichever) genders [they] like.” And then maybe, through access to the perspectives these books provide, they can come closer to finding an authentic gender identity and, in the best-case scenario, finding an identity as a reader as well.

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Books with Gender-Diverse Appeal

Anything but Typical (Simon, 2009) by Nora Raleigh Baskin [Intermediate, Middle School]
I Am J (Little, Brown, 2011) by Cris Beam [High School]
The World According to Humphrey (Putnam, 2004) by Betty G. Birney [Primary, Intermediate]
Be Who You Are (AuthorHouse, 2010) by Jennifer Carr; illus. by Ben Rumback [Primary]
Beezus and Ramona (Morrow, 1955) by Beverly Cleary; illus. by Louis Darling [Intermediate]
The Hunger Games (Scholastic, 2008) by Suzanne Collins [Middle School, High School]
Out of My Mind (Atheneum, 2010) by Sharon M. Draper [Intermediate]
Peter H. Reynolds and FableVision Present Zebrafish (Atheneum, 2010) by Sharon Emerson; illus. by Renée Kurilla [Intermediate, Middle School]
10,000 Dresses (Seven Stories, 2008) by Marcus Ewert; illus. by Rex Ray [Primary]
Born to Fly (Delacorte, 2009) by Michael Ferrari [Intermediate]
The Princess Knight (Scholastic, 2004) by Cornelia Funke; illus. by Kerstin Meyer [Preschool, Primary]
Hoot (Knopf, 2002) by Carl Hiaasen (also Flush (2005), Scat (2009), and Chomp (2012)) [Intermediate, Middle School]
Operation Yes (Levine/Scholastic, 2009) by Sara Lewis Holmes [Intermediate, Middle School]
Horace and Morris but Mostly Dolores (Atheneum, 1999) by James Howe; illus. by Amy Walrod [Primary]
Pinky and Rex and the Bully (Atheneum, 1996) by James Howe; illus. by Melissa Sweet [Primary]
Diary of a Wimpy Kid (Amulet/Abrams, 2007) by Jeff Kinney [Intermediate, Middle School]
Rules (Scholastic, 2006) by Cynthia Lord [Intermediate]
The Doll People (Hyperion, 2000) by Ann M. Martin and Laura Godwin; illus. by Brian Selznick [Primary, Intermediate]
Jeremy Fink and the Meaning of Life (Little, Brown, 2006) by Wendy Mass [Intermediate, Middle School]
Judy Moody (Candlewick, 2000) by Megan McDonald; illus. by Peter H. Reynolds [Primary, Intermediate]
Stink (Candlewick, 2005) by Megan McDonald; illus. by Peter H. Reynolds [Primary]
The Littles (Scholastic, 1967) by John Peterson; illus. by Roberta Carter Clark [Primary]
Ten Minutes till Bedtime (Putnam, 1998) by Peggy Rathmann [Preschool]
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (Levine/Scholastic, 1998) by J.K. Rowling; illus. by Mary GrandPré [Intermediate]
Bluefish (Candlewick, 2011) by Pat Schmatz [Middle School]
When You Reach Me (Lamb/Random, 2009) by Rebecca Stead [Intermediate, Middle School]
Little Wolf’s Book of Badness (Carolrhoda/Lerner, 1999) by Ian Whybrow; illus. by Tony Ross [Primary, Intermediate]
Countdown (Scholastic, 2010) by Deborah Wiles [Intermediate]
Parrotfish (Simon, 2007) by Ellen Wittlinger [High School]
Peace Locomotion (Putnam, 2009) by Jacqueline Woodson [Intermediate]
William’s Doll (Harper & Row, 1972) by Charlotte Zolotow; illus. by William Pene du Bois [Preschool, Primary]

Planning on wearing a sunsuit on the first day of school?

Timothy is very excited about starting school—until he meets Claude. Claude sits next to him, and he wears all the right clothes, says all the right things, and garners all the praise from his teacher and classmates. Timothy is feeling down, until he meets a girl who's having the same problem with her seatmate...

"Children will easily relate to this tale, in which humor and realism effectively mesh." —Booklist, starred review

Give ‘Em Helvetica: Picture Book Type

August 15, 2012 By Leonard S. Marcus 8 Comments

Type — the formal language of the printed word — speaks to us in mysterious ways. It’s not always clear just what type is saying, or how our reading experience is enhanced or undermined, however subtly, by slight variations in point size (the overall dimensions of the type), or the thickness and proportions of an ascender or terminal (particular elements of certain letterforms). But at a minimum, type is one of the major ingredients in the creation of a visual environment that is favorable to reading, and a book designer must always be thinking about how to achieve this result in a given situation. In the case of picture books, there seems to be widespread agreement among design professionals that the best type is most often the one that calls the least attention to itself.
Not long ago, Claire Counihan, director of art and design at Holiday House and a type devotee from her student days at Pratt Institute, was planning a new series of easy readers to be illustrated by a variety of artists. Among Counihan’s first decisions was to select a sans serif type for the entire series. “Older, more accomplished readers,” she explains, “are better served with serif faces, which help the eye travel more swiftly from word to word by making a series of visual connections. But for new readers, word recognition, not speed, is the point. My editor, Grace Maccarone, and I considered the usual suspects: Gill Sans, Helvetica, Futura. In the end we picked Report School because it has a nice high x height (the height of the lowercase letters) and the letterforms are simple, with the a, d, and g, for example, formed from just a circle attached to either an ascender or a descender.”
On Holiday House’s inaugural I Like to Read series list was Paul Meisel’s See Me Run. Counihan continues: “Paul studied graphic design at Yale before turning to illustration, so type is always a big part of our discussions. Because Paul’s text was just eighty words long, we agreed that the initial point size I had chosen should be increased to better counterbalance the art. I kept the leading — the space between lines — the same, however. Too much leading and your eye plunges from line to line! For display, I picked Wild Ketchup, a typeface as bouncy and wacky as the dogs that run through the book.” See Me Run won a 2012 Theodor Seuss Geisel Award Honor.
Martha Rago’s approach to typography is rooted in classic design principles learned in the 1980s under mentors Nanette Stevenson, Atha Tehon, Riki Levinson, and Cynthia Krupat. Rago, executive art director at HarperCollins Children’s Books, believes that a successful book design “brings order and cohesion to the whole work” while also “matching the book’s emotional content.” As the designer of Night Driving, the first picture book illustrated by Peter McCarty, she noted the spare, poetic, and nostalgic tone of both John Coy’s text and McCarty’s pictures as well as the emotional impact of the story they told — a reminiscence of a boy’s nighttime drive in the company of his father. McCarty’s “shaded, tonal black and white images, rendered in grainy, textual graphic, and featuring round, sculptural forms” were, she says, “both warm and refined.” They referenced period cars, clothing, landmarks, and other details suggestive of the 1940s or early 1950s. With this in mind, Rago chose Gill Sans Light for the text, a sans serif font that had been designed by Eric Gill in 1931. “It is a humanist font, with warmth in its round forms, but also with an elegant, no-nonsense quality, especially in its lighter weights. I used fairly open leading to keep it readable and accessible, with a generous negative space around the blocks of text on each page, to face images framed in a margin of white. The display, Umbra, is also from the 1930s, a cut that relates to the forms of Gill Sans but with sharper verticals, and has a shadow effect that echoes the glow of light and shadow through the book’s imagery.”
While harmoniousness and understatement are clearly among the watchwords in picture-book type selection and design, the element of surprise also has a role to play. Lee Wade, vice president and publisher of Schwartz & Wade Books, recalls with delight her decision to set the copyright notice for Velma Gratch & the Way Cool Butterfly in the shape of a butterfly. She admires the boldness with which the great American graphic designer Paul Rand, in the picture book Sparkle and Spin, broke with the typographic scheme of the book to create a dedication page to remember. “The dedication,” Wade says, “appears in black hand-lettering in the top right-hand corner of the first page of the book. And since it is the only hand-lettering in the whole book, and seems to have been drawn with a black felt-tip pen, it looks like a personalized message to each reader — a design surprise for sure!”
The picture book has a long-standing tradition of hand-lettering, motivated (one assumes) by the basic desire cited by Wade to connect with young readers in the most intimate way possible. Examples from the 1920s and 1930s include William Nicholson’s Clever Bill, Wanda Gág’s Millions of Cats, and Jean de Brunhoff’s The Story of Babar (as originally published). More recently, Vera B. Williams’s “More More More” Said the Baby and Chris Raschka’s Yo! Yes? have continued in this vein. David Saylor, vice president and creative director of trade publishing at Scholastic, observes that a combination of hand-lettering and idiosyncratic type decisions that skew in the direction of hand-lettering are among the factors that define the special visual impact of Margaret Wise Brown and Clement Hurd’s Goodnight Moon.
“The design of Goodnight Moon,” Saylor notes, “is not complicated, but you can tell that careful thought went into it. You can see this in the decision to add color to the type on full-color pages; the sizing of the type so as to sit well on the page without competing with the artwork while still holding its own.
“The text font,” he says, is “a solid, very friendly sans serif (Martin Gothic Bold, I believe), not typical of the classic picture books that relied on serif fonts for some sort of authority. And the hand-lettering of the title type adds a nice warmth and almost casual feeling to the book. It all looks effortless — and inevitable.”

Playing Nice Donald Crews has always turned to the same font—Helvetica—for the titles and texts of his now-classic picture books for toddlers and preschoolers. Asked about this, he responds—half in rapture and half in disbelief at being called upon to state the obvious—with a question of his own: “What would we do without Helvetica? Helvetica lets us create simple and beautiful words, phrases, and paragraphs that meld perfectly with the geometric, iconographic imagery in modern design solutions. It conveys the essential information but doesn’t overwhelm the overall page, poster, or book. It plays nice.”

The path to reaching that nirvana of ultimate design integration is, of course, maddeningly different for each and every book. As the art director for Stephen Savage’s first picture book, Polar Bear Night, Saylor sensed the need for a strong sans serif to match the monumental feel of Savage’s linoleum block illustrations. “I wanted the type to feel definite and confident, the same way the bear cub feels as she ventures out to explore the world.” The font Saylor selected, Neutraface Text Bold, was inspired by letter designs of the twentieth-century American architect Richard Neutra, and it served to accentuate the retro flavor of Savage’s art.
Given the inherent playfulness of the picture book as a genre, it was inevitable that type would one day assume a more kinetic and central role than the supporting one usually assigned to it. Iconoclastic artists of the last century, from French poet Guillaume Apollinaire to American painter Jasper Johns, produced modernist magic by shining a maverick light on the letterforms in a quixotic quest for the message embedded in the medium. And while news of their experiments was slow to reach Children’s Book Land (surprise, surprise), when it finally did make an impression — most notably via the typographic high jinks of The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales, designed by Molly Leach — designers took note of a picture book that had clearly opened up new territory for everyone. As Laurent Linn, art director at Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, observes, type in The Stinky Cheese Man not only harmonized with the art but also became “an integral part of the illustrations.”
It was significant, he says, that Leach selected Bodoni, a classic font, for the body type, rather than a showier or more outlandish choice. “Using a single, well-known font established a solid foundation, which in turn helped to ground the overall design within which the illustrations were quite energetic and zany. But the real creative genius lies in how the type was manipulated and placed to create real emotion and energy and humor. You don’t need to read a word to understand what each particular character means to say.” For a pre-reader, Linn adds, the type becomes almost as big a part of the visual experience as the illustrations.
A picture book Linn himself recently designed shows how design ideas, including those learned from The Stinky Cheese Man, can travel and morph to suit the unique challenges posed by a very different kind of project. For I, Too, Am America, Linn wanted a way to signal poet Langston Hughes’s contrasting vision of the prejudiced time in which he lived and the future that he hoped would bring racial equality. In addition to what became an exhaustive search for a single typeface that felt appropriate for both the historical and contemporary scenes evoked by Hughes and depicted by illustrator Bryan Collier, Linn wished to draw a clear graphic distinction between the two time periods through a contrast in the type presentation.
“For the first [historical] part, I set the type in white, framed boxes within the illustrations. I also placed the art itself in a similar, traditional frame. Then, for the second half of the book, I got rid of the frame around the art and had the illustrations go fully to the paper’s edge, so that we no longer see the book’s world through a frame, but are fully in it. I also eliminated the text boxes. In this part, the text flows freely, curved and floating on pieces of paper that swirl through the air, each incorporated into the art. The type goes from being outside of the action to being a part of the action, just as the reader does.”
And as readers of The Stinky Cheese Man have been doing now for years.

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All Types of Type

Goodnight Moon (Harper & Row, 1947) by Margaret Wise Brown; illus. by Clement Hurd
Night Driving (Holt, 1996) by John Coy; illus. by Peter McCarty
Freight Train (Greenwillow, 1978) by 
Donald Crews
Harbor (Greenwillow, 1982) by Donald Crews
The Story of Babar, the Little Elephant (Random, 1933) by Jean de Brunhoff
Millions of Cats (Coward-McCann, 1928) by Wanda Gág
I, Too, Am America (Simon, 2012) by Langston Hughes; illus. by Bryan Collier
Velma Gratch & the Way Cool Butterfly (Schwartz & Wade/Random, 2007) by Alan Madison; illus. by Kevin Hawkes
See Me Run [I Like to Read] (Holiday, 2011) 
by Paul Meisel
Clever Bill (Doubleday, Page & Co., 1926) by William Nicholson
Sparkle and Spin: A Book About Words (Harcourt, 1957) by Ann Rand; illus. by 
Paul Rand
Yo! Yes? (Orchard, 1993) by Chris Raschka
The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales (Viking Penguin, 1992) by Jon Scieszka; illus. by Lane Smith
Polar Bear Night (Scholastic, 2004) by Lauren Thompson; illus. by Stephen Savage
“More More More” Said the Baby: 
3 Love Stories (Greenwillow, 1990) by 
Vera B. Williams
From the September/October 2012 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

Related Posts

• What's your favorite font?
• American heroes
• From the Editor - August 2012
• Chris Raschka: The Habits of an Artist

Filed Under: Creating Books, Featured Tagged With: HBMSept12, Horn Book Magazine, sight reading

About Leonard S. Marcus
Leonard S. Marcus is the author of Minders of Make-Believe (Houghton), The Annotated Phantom Tollbooth (Knopf), Show Me a Story! (Candlewick) and Listening for Madeleine: A Portrait of Madeleine L’Engle in Many Voices (Farrar).

Behind the Scenes with Lucy Cousins

Animal Adventures tomorrow!

Have you ever held a chinchilla?  Join us on Wednesday August 15, 2012
from 3:00 PM to 4:00 PM in the Wakelin Room for Animal Adventures!

Animal Adventures will bring 8-10 animals to the Library which could include an alligator, large and small snakes, skunks, chinchillas, ferrets, a woodchuck, a bunny, big and small lizards, turtles, frogs and more.  Drop in to meet the animals, hear interesting stories and information about them and get close.  This program is good for families with children of all ages.  Sponsored by the Friends of the Wellesley Free Libraries.

Animal Adventures will bring 8-10 animals to the Library which could include an alligator, large and small snakes, skunks, chinchillas, ferrets, a woodchuck, a bunny, big and small lizards, turtles, frogs and more.  Drop in to meet the animals, hear interesting stories and information about them and get close.  This program is good for families with children of all ages.  Sponsored by the Friends of the Wellesley Free Libraries.

Animal Adventures will bring 8-10 animals to the Library which could include an alligator, large and small snakes, skunks, chinchillas, ferrets, a woodchuck, a bunny, big and small lizards, turtles, frogs and more.  Drop in to meet the animals, hear interesting stories and information about them and get close.  This program is good for families with children of all ages.  Sponsored by the Friends of the Wellesley Free Libraries.

Animal Adventures will bring 8-10 animals to the Library which could include an alligator, large and small snakes, skunks, chinchillas, ferrets, a woodchuck, a bunny, big and small lizards, turtles, frogs and more.  Drop in to meet the animals, hear interesting stories and information about them and get close.  This program is good for families with children of all ages.  Sponsored by the Friends of the Wellesley Free Libraries, no pre-registration required.

 

Animal Adventures will bring 8-10 animals to the Library which could include an alligator, large and small snakes, skunks, chinchillas, ferrets, a woodchuck, a bunny, big and small lizards, turtles, frogs and more.  Drop in to meet the animals, hear interesting stories and information about them and get close.  This program is good for families with children of all ages.  Sponsored by the Friends of the Wellesley Free Libraries.

Ezra Jack Keats exhibit at the Eric Carle Museum

In The East Gallery
The Snowy Day
and the Art of Ezra Jack Keats
June 26 - October 14, 2012



The Snowy Day and the Art of Ezra Jack Keats is the first major exhibition in this country to pay tribute to award-winning author and illustrator Ezra Jack Keats (1916–1983), whose beloved children’s books include Whistle for Willie, Peter’s Chair, and The Snowy Day—the first modern full-color picture book to feature an African-American protagonist. Published in 1962, at the height of the civil rights movement in America, the book went on to become an inspiration for generations of readers, transforming children’s literature forever.
The exhibition, curated by Claudia J. Nahson of The Jewish Museum in New York City, features over 70 original works by the artist, from preliminary sketches and dummies or preparatory books, to final paintings and collages, including examples of Keats’s most introspective but less-known output inspired by Asian art and poetry.

The Snowy Day and The Art of Ezra Jack Keats is organized by The Jewish Museum, New York, from the collection of the de Grummond Children's Literature Collection, The University of Southern Mississippi. The exhibition was funded at The Jewish Museum through a generous grant from the Ezra Jack Keats Foundation. Additional support was provided by the Joseph Alexander Foundation, the Alfred J. Grunebaum Fund, and the Winnick Family Foundation.
thejewishmuseum.org

Exhibition support at The Carle has been generously provided by Penguin Young Readers Group and the Ezra Jack Keats Foundation.