27th March Ame Dyckman

I am always happy to add a new birthday celebration to the library calendar. Thank you Eric from Happy Birthday Author. I can now add Ame Dyckman. We have three of her books and each of them is very special in its own way and nothing like each other. Each has a different illustrator which makes them appear very different too. If you don't know them borrow them and enjoy what the very best picture books have to offer.

20th May Dan Yaccarino (1965)

It is American author illustrator, Dan Yaccarino's birthday. To be honest I hadn't really noticed his work until I bought his book The Fantastic Undersea Life of Jacques Cousteau for the library. I loved it so much I then went looking for more of his work. And then lately two new books that are just so special and popular with my young audience who love 'robot books' arrived. They are Boy and Bot by Ame Dyckman and Dan and Doug Unplugged  by Dan Yaccarino alone. The illustrations in these two make robots seem so endearing, yet expressive and fun. He has been quoted as saying:

“The images in a picture book are the driving forces that tell the story. The words tell only what the pictures can’t.”  

And this is so true in his books. Look at the final almost textless pages of Boy and Bot to see the power of his pictures at work. Happy birthday Dan Yaccarino and may there be many more picture books for us to enjoy!

PS What a coincidence? Today someone asked to borrow Would I Ever Lie to You? which we don't have so I looked up the author and learned that it was Caralyn Buehner, and now I have just read on Anita Silvey's almanac that today is her birthday too. She was born in 1963. So now I need to research her books some more.

28th April Screen Free Day

Screen Free Day (Week) - what a good idea! This is a day (or week) when you choose to turn off all screens that are part of your everyday life...your mobile, your computer, your iPad, your television, your game console etc.

Sometimes I wish I could manage the library without a computer and then we have a blackout or some problem and I have to write all the loans down and enter them manually later and it is such a chore so I know I don't really want to. However it would be nice not to read email or do research on a computer just for a day, to turn off when you leave work, so here's our chance. Turn off and read a book, or go outside, explore in the dirt, run, stroll on the beach...dream. All of the books above and those here will inspire you to

  If you don't know the Library Dragon books by Carmen Agra Deedy search out the second one Return of the Library Dragon. Every librarian needs this book! Miss Lotty, the book-reading librarian is retiring and she is to be replaced by Mike Krochip and computers. All the books are gone. There are some beautiful one-liners on why the books should be returned and the endpapers have the best 'book' quotes. It  ends with "but our kids need a library where they can UNPLUG, for the love of books." My library hasn't any computers for the children to use except the one used as an inquiry terminal, so when the children are in the library they are unplugged and choose to READ.

“What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.” — HERBERT SIMON, recipient of Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics.

“Children need to experience the real world, not just media world. Make this week the beginning of that experience.” Dr Mike Brody