Way to Display! The Hunger Games trilogy at Vancouver Kidsbooks

The upcoming visit from author Suzanne Collins (on Nov. 2) to Vancouver Kidsbooks inspired the store to once again go all-out on its exterior, opting for an eye-catching – yet more than a little menacing – “fear the future” theme very much appropriate to Collins’ mega-selling Hunger Games trilogy. (Photo courtesy of Scholastic Canada)

[Know of a great bookstore display? Made one yourself? Take a photo and drop it in our Flickr pool or send it to nwhitlock at quillandquire.com.]

Daily book biz round-up: new Oprah pick coming; money for Ontario textbooks?; and more

Today’s book news:

• Oprah prepares to announce new book club pick, and it’s not Freedom
• Scholastic Book Club takes new marketing approach
• Dalton McGuinty makes vague reference to helping Ontario schools cover cost of textbooks
• Penguin sues sports writer over undelivered bio
• Century 21 scoops up former Barnes & Noble space before corpse is even cold
• EW uncovers shocking Hollywood prejudice: authors not asked to be on Dancing With the Stars
• Delightful literary oddities available on EBay

Daily book biz round-up, May 17

Your Monday links round-up:

• Scholastic issues statement of support for Robert Munsch after he admits to struggles with addiction
• Mount Allison profs continue to protest honorary degree for Indigo’s Heather Reisman
• Cursor admits it will be selling those gorgeous worthwhile dead-tree books after all
• U.K. publishers told they must be “in control” of agreements made with Apple
• Kobo’s Michael Tamblyn offers his Bookcamp 2010 summer wine picks

Robert Munsch’s latest grounded by terrorist threats

After the Christmas Day terrorist threat aboard a Detroit-bound plane, the public has had to deal with longer wait times, intrusive full-body scanners – and now the delay of the latest book from Robert Munsch.

According to the Toronto Star, the Canadian children’s author was planning to release his next book, Temina’s Dolls, at the end of 2010. However, newly heightened airport security and carry-on restrictions seem to have rendered the story inappropriate for the time being. From the Star:

“We were going to do a story on a little girl who smuggles all these dolls onto a plane, but then that thing happened in Detroit,” said Munsch. “Scholastic calls me up in a panic saying, ‘Hold everything, that kid couldn’t smuggle anything onto the plane, she’s lucky to get onto the plane herself.’”

Munsch said he had no problem with the change, and even chuckled about the coincidence of a story of his clashing with a real-life situation. He is now in talks with the publisher on his next project.

The book tells the story of a little girl with 27 dolls, who learns the value of sharing. You can see where the problem lies after reading the book (which you can do, since Munsch posts his unpublished stories online):

“NO!” said Temina, “You may not look in my backpack. My backpack is top secret. Even my mom does not know what is in my backpack.”
“Right,” said the man. “But if I do not look in your backpack, then you do not get on the airplane.”
“Well,” said Temina, “OK.”
So the man unzipped the backpack and all the dolls unscrunched and uncrammed and went flying all over the airport.
“AHHHHHHHHHHH!” yelled the man, “HELP!!!”
All sorts of policemen and soldiers came running and pointed guns at Temina and her dolls.
“IT’S JUST DOLLS,” yelled Temina.
“WE’RE JUST DOLLS,” yelled the dolls.

The Baby-Sitters Club returns

Plenty of young women who grew up in the 1980s and ’90s still fondly remember The Baby-Sitters Club, the book series that motivated many childhood trips to the library.

Ten years after the series ceased publication, Scholastic has announced that author Ann M. Martin will write a prequel to the series, due on April 1. The brand-new book, called The Summer Before, explains what happened to the girls before they met and formed the club. Here’s the description from the publisher:

Before there was the Baby-Sitters Club, there were four girls named Kristy Thomas, Mary Anne Spier, Claudia Kishi, and Stacey McGill. As they start the summer before seventh grade (also before they start the BSC), each of them is on the cusp of a big change. Kristy is still hung up on hoping that her father will return to her family. Mary Anne has to prove to her father that she’s no longer a little girl who needs hundreds of rules. Claudia is navigating her first major crush on a boy. And Stacey is leaving her entire New York City life behind…

In addition, Scholastic will reissue several novels from the original series. From the New York Times:

“This whole generation of girls who had grown up reading The Baby-Sitters Club were now teachers, librarians or mothers,” said David Levithan, editorial director at Scholastic. “And at any opportunity they had, they let us know they wanted them back.”

The reissued books will be slightly revised so that today’s preteen girls will be able to relate to them – dated references to cassette tapes and perms will not make the cut. Other than that, women who grew up reading the BSC can look forward to offering their own daughters better role models than the cast of characters in Gossip Girl.

Bookmarks: why McCarthy won’t autograph, the definitive titles of the Noughties, and more

• James Jones, author of From Here to Eternity, fought to keep a gay subplot in the novel.

• Cormac McCarthy talks about the film version of The Road in the Wall Street Journal and why you won’t find a signed copy of the book

• Remember when Scholastic tried to censor a tween book because one character had two moms? Mobylives reports that parent fanatics are at it again, this time trying to ban the entire Scholastic catalogue

• Dalton Higgins is this month’s writer-in-residence at Open Book Toronto.

• The Telegraph posted their definitive Books of the Noughties. Nothing very surprising – White Teeth, Atonement, Brick Lane -  Dave Eggers’s memoir comes in fourth, right behind good ol’ Dan Brown, Obama’s memoir, and bien sur, Harry Potter at number one. Sigh.

Bookmarks: a small town book tour, inappropriate books for kids, and Walt Whitman selling jeans

Bookish links from across the Web:

• Test your celebrity poet knowledge over at Details and guess which verses have been written by Michael Jackson, Mr. Spock, Jewel, or William Butler Yeats
• Battle of the sexes, poetry edition: Do women write “female” poetry? 
• Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue tour skips San Francisco and Los Angeles and makes stops in Noblesville, Indiana, and Rochester, New York 
• Don’t tell Scholastic: a new blog dedicated to inappropriate books for kids
• Recordings of Walt Whitman reading “Pioneers! O Pioneers!” and “America” are being used in Levi’s Jeans new ad campaign. Controversial use of a dead poet’s work or clever marketing strategy? Slate Magazine discusses
• Kazuo Ishiguro “auditions” characters to narrate his novels. Colum McCann will print out chapters of his incomplete book, staple them together, and take them to Central Park, pretending to be reading someone else’s work. The Wall Street Journal interviews 11 top authors about their writing habits

Scholastic [U.S.] tries to censor kids’ book with same-sex couple characters [UPDATED]

Publishers are often called upon to defend their books against people and organizations (parents, school boards, governments, self-appointed morality squads, etc.) who attempt to ban or suppress them.

In the case of a new tween novel by Colorado author Lauren Myracle, however, it’s another publisher that is doing the censoring:

Don’t expect to see Lauren Myracle’s new book Luv Ya Bunches (Abrams/Amulet, 2009) at Scholastic school book fairs this year. It’s been censored – at least for now – due to its language and homosexual content.

Luv Ya Bunches, about four elementary school girls who have little in common, but bond over the fact that they’re all named after flowers, is the first installment of a four-book series. But Scholastic says the book, released on October 1, failed to meet its vetting process because it contains offensive language and same-sex parents of one of the main characters, Milla.

The company sent a letter to Myracle’s editor asking the author to omit certain words such as “geez,” “crap,” “sucks,” and “God” (as in, “oh my God”) and to alter its plotline to include a heterosexual couple. Myracle agreed to get rid of the offensive language “with the goal – as always – of making the book as available to as many readers as possible,” but the deal breaker was changing Milla’s two moms.

UPDATE: Under pressure, Scholastic U.S. has released a statement saying it will include Myracle’s novel in its middle school book fairs (though presumably not its elementary school fairs), and furthermore, that the company “does not censor books.”

The battle over robot toothbrushes

Two weeks ago we blogged about Scholastic’s controversial misuse of its book clubs, but it would appear that was a mere footnote compared to the uproar generated by the company’s Klutz division, which has published Invasion of the Bristlebots, a book packaged with two tiny toothbrush robots – and which fails to credit wife and husband team Lenore Edman and Windell Oskay for the invention.

A storm of fury has unfurled across the blogosphere, according to Publisher’s Weekly:

A typical one, on blog.makezine.com: “Sad to see something for fun take on evil overtones of corporate thought theft.” Others on the same site acknowledged the possibility of innocence: “Given how stressful publishing is these days, and how shoestring those types of projects can be, I wouldn’t be surprised that they were completely unconscious of the need to attribute.”

The storm even prompted an apology from Pat Murphy, an editor at Klutz:

I wanted to let everyone know that Lenore Edman at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories and I had a good conversation this afternoon.

We spoke about our shared commitment to making science and technology accessible to children. We began a discussion of ways that Klutz could acknowledge the exceptional work that Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories has done in Bristlebot research – starting with this message and continuing with acknowledgment in the next printing of the book and on the Klutz website.

Let this be a lesson: never deny the power of the blog.

Scholastic misusing its book clubs?

This Quillblogger has fond memories of opening Scholastic’s book flyers every month in elementary school, browsing their selection, and paying two weeks’ allowance for the thrill of choosing books without outside interference, and having them delivered directly to his desk. He also remembers skipping past the movie tie-ins, which always took up one of the flyers’ four pages, and later, being surprised by the increasing presence of actual VHS titles.

Sadly, it would appear Scholastic has continued in that direction, to the point where an American watchdog group states that a third of the products on its list are non-book related.

On the surface, this makes good business sense: after all, stickers and posters have higher profit margins, and movie tie-ins sell more copies than conventional books. But Scholastic is in the publishing business, and while such items sell more units in the short term, they don’t breed lifelong readers, the type who might continue purchasing books for themselves and their children once they move past fifth grade. Since Scholastic is unchallenged in the school-based direct sales market, it should be using its power to promote actual books.