- D.B. Grady wrote a (worth-checking-out) piece about YA for the Atlantic that included a claim that there were a bazillionty30,000 YA novels published in 2009 as opposed to 3,000 just twelve years earlier, a figure which has now been dissected by several and found, shall we say, almost certainly inaccurate. Oh well. As J.L. Bell says in his post, not that surprising since publishing numbers are hard to come by; I'd agree and add that numbers are also often squishy or at least semi- made-up. The most interesting thing in all of this to me is the great discussion in Roger Sutton's comments with Lerner's Andrew Karre about whether publishers treat their lists as a lottery; Elizabeth Law from Egmont drops by too.
- I haven't poked around historypin yet, but it looks like it could be amazing and a great research resource besides.
- PW's Diane Roback collects some short remembrances of colorful characters from children's publishing from people in the industry. Good reading. (They are all wonderful; I particularly liked this grace note from former SLJ editor Lillian Gerhardt's remembrance of Marjorie Thayer: "At the end of a particularly hard day in her booth at an ALA conference in the early 1970s, Thayer confessed to a startled Marjorie Jones, editorial director of the Junior Library Guild, that though she might seem indestructible, she feared she might be slowing down. "Some evenings, I'm almost too tired to tell the cocktail waitress I want an extra-dry martini straight up with a twist." ")
- Jonah Lehrer explores research on intelligence and whether smart people are getting smarter: "One frequently cited factor is the increasing complexity of entertainment, which might enhance abstract problem solving skills. (As Flynn himself noted, “The very fact that children are better and better at IQ test problems logically entails that they have learned at least that kind of problem-solving skill better, and it must have been learned somewhere.”) This suggests that, because people are now forced to make sense of Lost or the Harry Potter series or World of Warcraft, they’re also better able to handle hard logic puzzles."
- Floating island missing from Secret Garden Party festival.
- Love this post from Zoë Marriott: "You can stuff your Mary Sue where the sun don't shine."
- How many MacArthur geniuses are in publishing?
- A passel of great links from the cinetrix.
- The divine Betsy Bird considers children's fantasy post-Harry Potter.
- When Lauren recommends a book, I take note–especially when it sounds as fabulous as Serious Pleasures.
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Love the comment thread on Sutton’s blog and LOVE that I’ve had the privilege of working with Andrew Karre and Elizabeth Law the both. Brilliant folks.