The new look . . .

. . . of the Horn Book Magazine. I've been getting some complimentary emails but am wondering what you all think, especially since we are still tinkering.

Still to Come, My Pretties

Beavering away here at our Fanfare list, which will be announced FIRST in Notes from the Horn Book, so sign up, you slugs. And we--that is, Lolly, mostly--are finishing up the January issue in glamtaborous full color and new features. Lolly has really knocked herself out working on it and the editorial staff has given her plenty of good stuff to design. Right now I am at the point in my editorial where I have to makes choices between things like " . . . the Horn Book" and " . . . The Horn Book." And how is your day?

Years before I had this job, I remember listening to Anita Silvey worry over writing the HB editorial and while I made all the polite responses, inside I was thinking really, how bad could it be? It's only six times a year. I have apologized to Anita for this, publicly and in my head, many, many times in the last fifteen years.

A few things

I think I neglected to tell you that the new Notes from the Horn Book is out. So, Notes is out! You know, we started Notes as a more parent- and consumer-friendly alternative to the Magazine, so tell your friends, family and patrons about it. Special deal this week: free.

I was sad to hear that Judy Krug, ALA's longtime boss-lady for intellectual freedom, has died. She was quite a force, an irresistible one to be sure, with that unbeatable combination of an iron will and tons of charisma. Years ago I interviewed for a job with her and was completely intimidated.

I'll be in Ohio for the next couple of days for the Media Source board meeting, where I have to do my first Power Point presentation. Just two slides, thank goodness. Has anyone read Edward Tufte's broadside against the medium? Here's an appropriately formatted outline of his points.

Oscar bait?

Color My World

Via Andrew Sullivan, an exhibition of photographs of children by Jeongmee Yoon displaying their obsessions with gendered colors. I see pink-bedecked and -accessorized little girls all the time but are there enough boys who feel similarly about blue to make the comparison meaningful? When I was a lad, the only rule was not-pink.

"The Harry Potter Look"

The post about judging people--I mean, getting to know people--by the books they read on the subway and keep upon their shelves sent me back to the books-by-the-foot mavens, who this month are offering a special for would-be wizards.

Its they're misson!

But I bet their pretty anooying at at dinner partys.

Code Pink

Scanning the multitudes of new books throughout the office, I am struck--again--by the endurance of pink covers on light teen girl fiction. I know this is nothing new; what interests me is the fact that I wrote about this four years ago, and I'm surprised it still works--not the chicklit formula, which is eternal, but that pink remains the go-to color. When does this kind of genre marker stop signaling "Here I am! The kind of book you like!" and start saying "I've got your number"? Do girls who like this sort of thing appreciate the code, or do they roll their eyes and read despite it? There was a story in PW some years ago about two African American women in a bookstore laughing about the omnipresence of the word "Sister" in the titles of books marketed to black women, suggesting that the ploy had run its course. Will pink? Ever?

Someone must have read the book in the meantime

the ARC:




the finished book:




Deirdre Baker has some pertinent thoughts (from "Musings on Diverse Worlds," Horn Book Magazine, January/February 2007):

In some cases, where the politics of inclusivity is not in the foreground of the story, the racial attributes of nonwhite heroes are rendered virtually invisible. Both Ged of Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea series and Eugenides of Megan Whalen Turner's The Thief and sequels are described explicitly as "dark-skinned." Indeed, in conversation Turner has said that the images in her head of the Eddisians were "deeply influenced by the people of the Himalayas." But the brown skins of Ged and of Eugenides are downplayed by the books' current cover art, which shows Ged to be as bronzed as a white surfer (The Tombs of Atuan, 2001 edition) and Eugenides to have a noticeably pink and white complexion (The King of Attolia, 2006). While the texts give nonwhite readers the opportunity to see themselves reflected in these heroes, the cover art is telling them something else.

I'm glad this cover art changed its mind!

Momentoid?

If we decide to go with the flow and think of factoid as describing a true yet trivial thing, I want a word to describe a true, trivial, but oddly compelling experience such as the following, which I share with you here for no other reason than I cannot stop obsessing about it.

The other night we took some friends to see Kiki & Herb's "Year of Magical Drinking" show, itself oddly compelling (Kiki on her upbringing: "if you weren't molested as a child then you must have been ugly") but not what I wanted to tell you about. Before the show we had dinner at Sibling Rivalry, a restaurant whose conceit is that its two chef-brothers create dueling recipes with the same main ingredient. The food was fabulous but the menu made me a little crazy. It listed the dishes on offer in two columns, one for each chef, and headlined each row of two with the featured ingredient, so you'll get, say, two choices starring green tomatoes. At the top of the menu was printed something like "Large plates/Small plates/Entrees/Appetizers" but I could find nowhere on the menu anything to tell me which dish was what, although you could mostly guess from the prices. It bugged the hell out of me that the menu would mention that it listed both appetizers and main courses but would not tell you which was which, so I asked the waiter what was going on. "Are you color-blind?" he asked in return, and upon my affirmative response went off to retrieve a copy of the color-blind menu they apparently keep on hand for so disabled guests. This new menu, marked on the back with a piece of bedraggled masking tape with the words "color-blind menu" penciled upon it, looked very similar to the regular menu, save for the fact that some of the items were printed in italic, a distinction that had been made clear to my dining companions by the strategic use of black and red type on the normal-people menu.

Why, Lord, why? Why, Lord, why? If the appearance of color-blind people in your restaurant is an occurrence frequent enough to require you to print and bind an alternative menu exclusively for their use, you might want to rethink your original design, yes?

It's the little things that haunt us.