Blog post tip: Kathleen Jennings is one of my favorite illustrators working today and the late Diana Wynne Jones one of my favorite authors. Lovely to learn that Jennings has designed the cover for an Israeli edition of Jones's Power of Three. Check out Jennings' post for her preliminary sketches—it's always interesting to see how artists work.
Picturing a World
Mousehole Cat
December 23, 2016
One of my Christmas Eve Eve rituals is to read The Mousehole Cat. To my delight I have just found a YouTube video on The Making of The Mousehole Cat Book with interviews of author Antonia Barber, illustrator Nicola Bayley, Read More
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It's in the bag!
December 9, 2016
Emily Arnold McCully, Marvelous Mattie: How Margaret E. Knight Became an Inventor (2006)
Did shoppers have paper bags in 1908? I wondered while working on a scene set in New York City. I found out they did, and I've just discovered that flat-bottomed paper bags of the sort we're all familiar with from grocery stores were invented by a woman, Margaret E. Knight, who patented her process in 1871. Read More
Elsa Beskow
December 11, 2014
Several interests came together for me when I came across Swedish artist, Elsa Beskow (1874–1953)—Jeanette’s future career as an illustrator; my new heroine Mattie’s work in juvenile book publishing; women’s rights; and Scandinavian women artists. As a Christmas present to Read More
House of Arden
October 13, 2014
My new heroine Mattie works for a literary firm that produces juvenile series fiction. I wanted her to be aware of other, better books for children. E. Nesbit seemed perfect: imaginative, popular but literate, unstuffy. What work of hers might Mattie be familiar with in 1908? The House of Arden was published that year in England. What about America?
The expert on the question is Professor James Arthur Bond of California Lutheran University. I e-mailed him out of the blue, and he was generous enough to answer immediately with the information that Ardenwas serialized in The Strand Magazine: An Illustrated Monthly, which was published in London but distributed in the U.S. as well as Britain. Perfect! Read More
The expert on the question is Professor James Arthur Bond of California Lutheran University. I e-mailed him out of the blue, and he was generous enough to answer immediately with the information that Ardenwas serialized in The Strand Magazine: An Illustrated Monthly, which was published in London but distributed in the U.S. as well as Britain. Perfect! Read More
Nancy Drew and a Clue to the Blog
July 17, 2014
Is there an American woman novelist writing today who did not read at least one Nancy Drew mystery as a girl? For many women over a certain age, the Nancy Drew books were favorite reading, as compulsive as Harry Potter.
In my family, they were taken for granted as pleasurable junk, tolerated because my Read More
In my family, they were taken for granted as pleasurable junk, tolerated because my Read More