Bookmarks: Books as art, Watchmen, and more

• A GTA gallery is about to launch an exhibit in which books are transformed and incorporated into art.
• As the new Watchmen movie starts getting some not-so-great reviews, Canadian graphica expert Jeet Heer schools New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane. (Not that Heer’s a fan of the book or anything.)
• Following the announcement of Canadian Heritage funding policy changes that could be disastrous for litmags, the advocacy continues.
• Surprise, surprise: another Dan Brown movie adaptation is about to come out, and a Catholic group don’t like it. (Love the “Galileo asked for it” aside. Nice.)

Vendor list announced for Ontario school library funding boost

Ontario’s Ministry of Education has released the full list of approved vendors that the province’s school libraries may use when spend ingthis year’s $15-million funding boost. The full list of 72 vendors is below, and includes library wholesalers, Indigo, some indie booksellers, and a handful of publishers.

There is, of course, no guarantee that any given firm on the list will end up selling any books; that’s up to individual school systems. Recently, for example, the Toronto District School Board announced its own plans for spending its share of the money; the board has invited about half of the vendors below to a one-time selling fair.

• A Different Booklist
• A Different Drummer Books
• Another Story Bookshop
• Bacon & Hughes Limited
• Benchmark Education Company
• Blue Heron Books
• BookLore Stores Inc.
• Bryan Prince Bookseller
• CanLit for Kids Books Ltd.
• Rand McNally
• CFORP/Libairie du Centre
• Collected Works Bookstore
• Coloursports Publishing Inc
• Crabtree Publishing Company
• Duncan Systems Specialists Inc.
• Edu Reference Publishers Direct Inc.
• Ella Minnow Children’s Bookstore
• emc notes inc.
• ESL Shop
• Fitzhenry & Whiteside
• Flanker Press Ltd.
• Follett International
• Formac Lorimer Books
• Furby House Books Ltd.
• GoodMinds.com
• Grampa’s Attic & Bookstore
• Green Gables Books
• Greenley’s Bookstore Inc.
• Groundwood Books Ltd.
• Gulliver’s Quality Books and Toys
• Indigo Books & Music Inc.
• Kaleidoscope Kids’ Books
• Kent Bookstore Ltd.
• Le Coin du livre (central) Ltee
• Librairie du Soleil
• Library Services Centre
• London West Resource Centre
• Mabel’s Fables Ltd
• Manticore Books
• McCarney and Associates Inc.
• McGraw-Hill Ryerson Limited
• Millennia Books Limited
• Nelson Education Ltd.
• Nickname Press
• Orca Book Publishers Ltd
• Oxford University Press Canada School Division
• Pembroke Publishers Limited
• Perma-Bound Canada
• Regroupement des editeurs canadiens-francais
• Riverwood Publishers Ltd.
• S&B Books Ltd.
• Saunders Book Company
• Scholastic Canada Ltd. Scholastic Education
• School Book Fairs Limited
• The Beguiling Books
• The Book Keeper
• The Bookstore at Western University of Western Ontario
• The Freckled Lion
• The Gateway to Knowledge Inc.
• The Gravenhurst Book Store
• The LoonsNest Books & Gifts
• The OLAStore
• The Village Bookshop Inc.
• Tinlids Inc.
• United Library Services
• Westerhof Media
• Whitehots Inc. Canadian Library Services
• Wintergreen Learning Materials
• Words Worth Books Limited
• World Book Educational Products of Canada
• Worlds Collide
• YouAreSpecial.com

Kids’ books with the added value of gaming

According to a report by the BBC, Oxford University Press has created a new series of picture books – branded Project X – that attempt to appeal to young boys by mimicking the look of video game imagery.

The books have been tested in 2,000 schools and … are centred around the character of Max and his friends Cat, Ant, and Tiger, who find their watches have the power to make them shrink, opening up a whole new world of adventures. The friends end up snowboarding on spoons, exploring inside a sandcastle, white-water rafting on a pencil, and surfing on lolly sticks.

Sounds a lot like that Mighty-Mites comic that used to run in the back pages of Owl Magazine, no? If memory serves, however, that strip was fairly handsomely illustrated, whereas Project X is “ghastly” looking, according to a number of industry critics.

Charlie Higson, author of the Young Bond books, welcomed the OUP’s attempt to write fiction for boys, but questioned the books’ reliance on computer images. “They look absolutely ghastly,” he said. “They’re trying to look like computer games and they’re trying to get [boys] to interact with them like a computer. The point is that books are different to computers – that’s the whole point. If kids want to play with computers, they’ll play with computers, not read these stories.”

You can see a few pages from the series here and judge for yourself.

Banned books

It’s the American Library Association‘s Banned Books Week, and their website features lists of frequently challenged books covering various eras on their website. Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale is 37th on the ALA’s list of the 100 most frequently challenged books of the 1990s.

In honour of Banned Books Week, the Guardian asks whether or not you’ve been exercising your freedom to read, with a quiz about censored books past and present. Here’s one to ponder:

Who was the ALA’s most frequently “challenged” author of 2007?

1. Mark Twain
2. Richard Dawkins
3. Maya Angelou
4. Robert Cormier

Here is a look at some books that have been challenged in Canada, and some of the reasons why. The list includes a number of Canadian authors, including Deborah Ellis, Alice Munro, and Mordecai Richler. And, going local, the Fahrenheit 451 blog for the Pelham Public Library in Fonthill, ON, discusses censorship issues and provides lists of books that have been banned at the library challenged in various locations, including schools and libraries, over the past few years.

Hope for school libraries (in Ontario, anyway)

Heather Reisman can take a bow today. The Indigo CEO appears to have shamed Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty into promising a major funding boost for the province’s cash-starved school library system.

As The Globe and Mail reports, Reisman has commissioned a short documentary on the crisis in school libraries, and after a press screening of the film this week, McGuinty appeared at a Toronto Indigo store and promised $120-million for Ontario school systems: $80-million to buy books, and $40-million to hire new librarians. The Globe story also notes that Indigo will be supplying the books at cost.

No word on where the documentary might be seen online, but according to the story,

The documentary, which profiles Ms. Reisman’s foundation and the trials of two Ontario schools that applied for grants, includes shots of battered books with broken spines and children forced to share aging texts.

There are interviews with students and children’s author Robert Munsch and tearful scenes with school principals describing the need for more and newer reading materials for their students.

Globe columnist Margaret Wente also writes about the issue in today’s paper. And here are some related stories from the Q&Q archives.

• “Indigo directs another $1.5-million to schools” (May 2007)
• “Ontario lieutenant-governor begins a new book drive for First Nations kids” (January 2007)
• “Indigo commits $250,000 for school literacy program” (December 2004)
• “Scenes from a school library” (February 2004)
• “Library coalition takes fight to provinces” (February 2004)
• “The crisis in school libraries” (February 2002)
• “Industry group fights for school libraries” (April 2002)

More discouraging words for would-be writers

Sam Sacks of the New York Press takes a stab at that educational institution we all love to hate: the graduate-level writing workshop. The importance of workshops in contemporary American literature can be seen both in their ubiquity (with almost every American state possessing at least one school that can grant an MFA in writing) and in the increasing “common-sense” notion, held by swelling factions that include publishers, that writing schools are to a life of writing what universities are to careers: a necessary first step.

But assessing the yields of the “best” of America’s writing programs, as collected in an anthology, Best New American Voices 2006, Sacks finds the stories dull and formulaic and suggests that the creative writing education system is at fault. According to Sacks, the notion of creative tutelage has strayed far from the mentor-protégé relationships enjoyed by Stein and Hemingway, Tolstoy and Chekhov, and Flaubert and de Maupassant, to “large, impersonal, ever-shuffling workshops … led by authors of, on average, mediocre ability who throw only a part of their energy into helping their students. The result of all this is as predictable as it was inevitable: writing is taught by rote.” Another related result is a rule-oriented, lowest-common-denominator approach to teaching, whereby all students, even ones with potential, are treated as mediocre for the simple fact that most students are mediocre. The result, argues Sacks, is that programs cater to mediocrity and discourage daring as both irregular and impractical.

Related links:
Click here for the full story from the New York Press

Online books financing real-live schools

The Book Standard has an article about the Acadiana Educational Endowment, a fund that distributes small grants to teachers who can’t afford to finance classroom projects. In 2003, AEE founder Joseph Abraham decided to expand the reach of the program, establishing the online bookstore booksxyz.com, which, as reporter Anna Weinberg writes, “helps fund the mini-grants and also donates 5% of each sale to the U.S. college or school of the buyer’s choosing.”

Related links:
Click here for the full story from The Book Standard

Some good news for a change

Toronto’s cash-strapped schools got some good news yesterday in the form of a pledge from the city to hire 65 more full-time elementary-school librarians. An article in the Toronto Star reports that the city will shell out $4.8-million to fund the new librarians, though many on city council wonder where the money will come from.

Related links:
Read the Toronto Star article