Short Takes

If you want to read author interviews, industry news, and articles about prominent children’s book titles, sign up for Children’s Bookshelf, a free weekly e-newsletter that went live in mid-September. The publication also features awards, best-seller lists, and links to related articles about children’s books. Children’s Bookshelf is the creation of the children’s book editors of Publishers Weekly, a magazine owned by SLJ’s parent company, Reed Business Information. To subscribe, log on to publishersweekly.com. Anyone who wants to keep up-to-date on the world of children’s literature should find the newsletter especially useful.

Fans of children’s literature are celebrating the 50th birthday of Crockett Johnson’s Harold and the Purple Crayon (HarperCollins, 1955), the tale of a toddler whose imagination runs wild as he draws with his oversized purple crayon. All of Johnson’s seven Purple Crayon books, created between 1955 and 1963, remain in print and have sold over two million copies. Check out www.k-state.edu/english/nelp/purple/index.html, a Web site about Johnson and his work, by Philip Nels, a children’s literature scholar. Nels discovered Johnson’s drawings for a book that was never published; this fall, Front Street Books will bring Magic Beach to print, with an appreciation by Maurice Sendak.