Bibliotherapy: The Right Kind

I love publishers' previews, and the passion that editors bring to their newly-birthed titles.  Two of the picture book titles that I previewed at the Macmillan Spring preview will be added to my wish list.  These books, though different in style, approach social issues in an authentic way, through the story line, rather than through a sermonizing voice.  There are oodles of those kind of character education or "issue" books; they are "functional books," i.e., designed for a therapeutic purpose, and often designated to the shelves of the school guidance counselor.  The alternative is a piece of excellent illustrated literature that happens to deal with a relevant social issue.

Missing Mommy, by debut author/illustrator Rebecca Cobb, deals with a very fragile subject, the death of a child's parent.  The story doesn't force any answers or advice; it articulates the fears and questions that a bereaving young child might have.  Bully, by the brilliant Laura Vaccaro Seeger, is a sparely worded graphic novel (19 words in all) that propel the reader through the story of a bull's turnaround from bully (the eponymous main character) to friend.  Here, the reader even sympathizes with the regretfully tearful bully.  Missing Mommy is just so sad; I may house it on a back shelf  on reserve for the right time.  But Bully will hopefully find its way into every classroom.

 

Book Paintings

Sometimes I wonder whether I am painting pictures of words or whether I’m painting pictures with words.

—Ed Ruscha

Fanned Book

Old Book Today

The highlight of my Saturday Chelsea Gallery walk was the Ed Ruscha show at the Gagosian Gallery on West 24th Street.  Ruscha pays tribute to the printed book in his super-scaled realistic paintings of rare books, painstakingly capturing the marbled endpapers, or the yellow fox marks on a blank page.  I loved the smaller paintings that present text distilled into their rectangular ghosts, footprints of phrases that correlate to the length of the words.  Ruscha also manipulates actual books, using the covers as supports for painting.  In the age of digital reading, these works convey a reverence for the tradition of the printed form.

installation view

Accordion Books

A visit to the sleepy historic conceptual art exhibition "Materializing SixYears" at the Brooklyn Museum afforded me the chance to look at artist Ed Ruscha's 1966 Every Building on the Sunset Strip, an accordion book that recorded in black-and-white photographs, with written labels identifying the housing blocks and businesses.   I was thinking how fun it would be to give kids cameras on a neighborhood walk to discover our school community, and produce a similar book.

Reading Series Out of Order

One of the gifts to librarians that designers/publishers can give is to put the number of the series book on the spine of the book, so that we can tell what order the series should be read. How annoying it is to have to look at front or back matter to find a list, or--even more time consuming--to have to research where a single book fits in a series.  If I can't determine where it fits by examining the book, I turn to the incredible Juvenile Series and Sequels database from Mid-Continent Public Library, where I can search by series title, book title, series subject, or book author.

How can one know if a book in a series can be read as a standalone book, without having read the titles that come before?  My general policy is to read at least the first book in a popular series--but I don't feel compelled to read every single Magic Treehouse book (I get the idea...).  I certainly don't want to give a kid Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban before s/he reads the Chamber of Secrets. 

Some kids want to read the A-Z Mysteries or 39 Clues in order, regardless of whether it makes a difference (and it doesn't).  But I'd love to have a way of knowing which series books must be read in order.  

                           These books have no visible numbers on the jackets.  

Which comes first? Does it matter?                                           

Re-Dressing the Classics

How fortunate for me that the 2012 Kidlitosphere Conference was held here in NYC.  On the agenda for was a pre-conference trip to Penguin publishers, where we heard from the editors of the various imprints, including Viking, Dutton, Putnam's, Philomel, and Razorbill. The icing on the cake was was the presentation by Penguin's art department, where they presented the process of designing the books' jackets.  I hadn't realized that negotiating a final book cover can go through as many as 50 versions, before the team selects the "right" one?

We--librarian/bloggers--were treated to a show-and-tell of classic titles that Penguin has enticingly repackaged.  Printing classic titles is a relatively economical enterprise for publishers, on account of the texts' placement in the public domain.  At a time when such titles are widely available for free in electronic format, the publisher must come up with a design that is so irresistible that one wants to own it in its physical form.  Well, I'd say they have succeeded in making this reader covet some of them.

Here's a taste of the display (below):

Penguin Threads designed by Jillian Tamaki (some of which I featured here back in November 2011), were painstakingly embroidered by hand in prototype.

Penguin Ink (tattoo art style):

Illus.  Robert Ryan

Illus.  Jen Mumford

Clothbound childrens' classics re-outfitted by designer Coralee Bickford Smith:

The last specimens to be unveiled were the soon-to-be reissued children's classics, such as Pippi Longstocking and The Wizard of Oz, decked out in the bold signature chalkboard lettering by designer Dana Tanamachi.  You must wait to see these--

Librarians as Curators?

Having moved from the museum world a decade ago, with a grad degree in art history and certification from a curatorial studies program, my ears perked up when I heard the term "curate" being used at a professional development workshop about a year ago to describe one of the aspects of our work as librarians.  Wow," I thought, "I've actually been curating all these years!"  The term "curation" has been used in the library and technology world to characterize the activity of the selection and organization of online apps, as well as physical collection development (what we choose to buy for our library and how to arrange it).  Well, it seems that the term "curator" is no longer sacrosanct, and this has irked many who want to preserve its conventional meaning, i.e., a professional who is in charge of a museum or exhibit.

Apparently, the term was first bandied about in the fashion blogosphere.  It could be applied to selecting merchandise for a boutique or arranging the shop windows.  I dug up this amusing rant from 2011 on the misuse and abuse of the term in  An Open Letter to Everyone Using the Word 'Curate' Incorrectly on the Internet.

A "real" curator, Anne Pontegnie, from the Brussels Museum 
Courtesy Wiki Commons

Organizing Conference Notes

My friend and fellow library media specialist Debra Truss recently queried the NYC School Librarians List (NYCSLIST) the following:

I have now had the pleasure of working as a librarian for five years and during those five years have attended many wonderful PD [professional development] events for librarians and teachers.  I have learned many valuable skills and gleaned inspiring ideas from colleagues at these events.  All of these are recorded as notes, or on handouts, in folders, etc.  They are starting to really pile up, and I am sure I will only be collecting more as time goes on.  I don't want valuable ideas to be lost in a pile!

So I am wondering, how do all of you organize your PD notes and materials so that you can use them for reference effectively?

This was my reply: 

I have my notes from various workshops and conferences (now mounting up!) in a variety of formats:  "old-school" paper notes shoved into manila folders, or notes filling up the nifty little journals that are handed out at conferences.  Occasionally I peruse these and flag with Post-its or mark up in highlighter anything that seems pertinent at the moment.  I've also scanned many of these into PDFs and saved in Dropbox, where I've created folders (time-consuming).   Then there are the notes that I've typed up in Word or Google Docs (now Drive).  Relevant websites that are mentioned during talks I bookmark in Diigo (useful because you can tag them); and--more recently--apps on the iPad like Penultimate and my current favorite--Notability, which has an audio record feature and ability to organize into folders (but, alas, no tags).

How do you organize your notes?  

Century of the Child @ MoMA

Ellen Key

Century of the Child: Growing by Design, 1900–2000 at  the Museum of Modern Art surveys 20th century design for (and by) children.  

The exhibition takes its name from an eponymous book by Swedish feminist writer and suffragist Ellen Key, who was an early advocate of a child-centered approach to education and parenting.

The show looks at Frederic Froebel's philosophy of the kindergarten in the context of the development of modernism, where "great value was placed on the child's enjoyment of the creative process and intuitive investigation of materials.  The new pedagogy prized authentic expression, the inspiration of the natural world, and the creative potential of every individual, every child."  (from exhibition wall text).  Key believed that homework should be moved back to the school. As far as possible, teaching should be aimed at the pupils, their search for knowledge and in shaping their own opinions. "Our age cries for personality, but it will ask in vain, until we allow them to have their own will, think their own thoughts, work out their own knowledge, form their own judgements; or, to put the matter briefly, until we cease to suppress the raw material of personality in schools, vainly hoping later on in life to revive it again."  In our current educational policy, where play has been sacrificed for "college readiness" the exhibition begs the question: Is the century of the child a relic of times gone?

America's Largest Cookbook Collection

Fun Food Factory by Nanette Newman
c. 1976

   

 Date bait,the younger set's picture cookbook
    Robert H. Loeb, 1962
Weird--wouldn't a pictorial recipe be
designed for the pre-dating set?  

Yesterday I had the privilege of taking a trip through the stacks of the Food & Cookery Collection at Fales Library at NYU.   The collection has approximately 50,000 volumes, 26,000 of which have been catalogued.  I had the privilege of rummaging through the stacks of children's cookbooks on a tour led by the most gracious librarian Marvin Taylor, who oversees this awesome resource and is himself an incredible resource for food and cookery literature.

I got a sneak peek of 101 Classic Cookbooks, edited by the Fales Library, with Mr. Taylor at its helm.  The editors compiled cookbook favorites by such notables as Florence Fabricant, Judith Jones (Julia Child's editor), and Alice Waters.  Taylor launches his introduction with a description of his childhood food memory of onions sauteeing in butter in his grandmother's kitchen.  I can't wait to get my hands on this book!

Coming in October 2012

Week 2, Day 5

Focus on Immigration and Food

I'm thrilled to have been selected, along with 24 other educators, to participate in the three-week seminar "Recipe for America: New York, Immigration and American Identity through Food Culture. " The Institute is organized by The New York Public Library and funded through the National Endowment for the Humanities.  We will be looking at the lives of 19th and 20th century immigrants through lectures, readings, pictures, menus, and other resources in the NYPL's collection.  I plan to share resources and ideas with my teacher colleagues teaching immigration.

Sausage factory on the east side ; Habib Assi the Syrian chef ; Where the Polish Jews do their shopping. (1900), NYPL 

What is a “Family” Cookbook?

I have been trying to answer this question.  As the keeper of the CCD cooking collection for New York City, I am in charge of acquiring and maintaining the City’s premiere collection of children’s cookbooks.  Each year, we receive x dollars to augment the collection, to keep it current and growing.  I am considering the genre of so-called “family cookbooks” to round out the collection (the collection also contains literature related to growing food and nutrition).  The fact that this year we will receive an increase in funding for this collection.  That combined with the fact that the production of children’s cookbooks is relatively limited, I am considering what to fill my shopping cart with, while keeping our collection focused and useful for our community.  My own personal children have always happily partook of the food that was prepared for them, be it an improvised dish or prepared from a standard cookbook for our entire family or guests. Why a family cookbook? Our library serves grades prekindergarten through fifth, so our cooking collection is really designed for the students and their families.  So, the question is, what defines a “family” cookbook?  Is it portion size?  Is it “kid-friendly” food (whatever that means)?  

Illustrators' Tributes to Artists

I noticed that there a three interpretations of Goya's famous painting in picture books from our collection. These illustrations were taken from three different titles that are set in museums.

Experimenting with Pixie

Soundtrack for your book?

I am a knitter.  One of the drawbacks of my hobby is that you need both hands and eyes to do it, which gets in the way of reading time.  So I have taken to listening to podcasts like This American Life or even a full-length audio book (which I alternate with reading of the print or e-book when I am hands-free).  While this is more productive than focusing on either task on its own, I admit that the reading experience is compromised. Unlike other forms of entertainment, reading demands that you create the imagery and the sounds, and this is what makes your reading experience unique to you.  When you listen to a reading of a book by someone else, even its author, you are giving up the voice in your head that makes the story or narrative your own, making it a more passive activity.

But just in case "just words on a page" is not enough, there is a new app called Booktrack, which claims to offer a "fully immersive, captivating reading experience" by adding a synchronized soundtrack to your book.  Booktrack allows you to choose ambient sound, sound effects, or music to enhance your reading experience. "It's like having a personal composer arranging a perfect movie-style soundtrack for your book, the company claims in its promotional video, so that "reading [is] a truly sensory experience."  Will this new concept catch on?

Can Books Teach Good Behavior?

Stuart J. Murphy's Percy 

I recently got a request from our principal asking if I had any books about potty talk, to try to counter the numerous incidents and use of foul language in and out of the bathrooms at school.  Periodically I get requests from guidance counselors or teachers for books on other topics being accountable for your own actions, or, more commonly, preparing for a new sibling.  The idea of using books to address social or psychological issues has been referred to as "bibliotherapy."  I have always been suspect of acquiring materials solely for therapy or character education.  , because they tend to be preachy,  emphasizing a didactic message over literary merit. Today, I attended a panel discussion at the New York Public Library, as part of its Children's Literary Salon, called "From Readers to Leaders: Encouraging Ethical Behavior Through Children's Books," which addressed the question of to what extent can a children's book effect the development of ethics and behavior.  Authors Janet Wong and Stuart J. Murphy, moderated by librarian Betsy Bird, suggested that the term "bibliotherapy" implies that something is wrong and needs intervention.  Instead, said Murphy, a book can be character building.  They agreed that reading a book alone cannot heal, but can be a powerful tool for talking things through.  All agreed that foremost, a story has to be engaging and stand up on its own.  Wong has written many poetry and chapter books, including Me and Rolly Maloo, an early chapter book that expores issues of cheating, popularity, and integrity.   Stuart Murphy is known for his story books that teach mathematical concepts, and has also written the "I See I Learn" series of "Percy" stories that focus on social and emotional skills.