Today we celebrate the birthday of one of the most original creators of children’s books, Lothar Meggendorfer, born in Munich in 1847. Meggendorfer did not want the images of a book to lie flat on the page—he thought they should move. Decades before motion pictures or interactive computer graphics, he experimented with paper engineering to [...]
Featured on November 30, 2010
Angelina Ballerina
by Katharine Holabird
Illustrated by Helen Craig
Today we celebrate Measure Your Feet Day. But why? Well, one reason youngsters might measure their feet would be for special shoes, say ballet shoes. Since this also happens to be the birthday of Katharine Holabird, author of Angelina Ballerina, our book of the day features a very special mouse, Angelina, who loves to dance. [...]
Featured on January 31, 2011
On June 15, 1836, Arkansas became the 25th state admitted to the Union. Hence today marks Arkansas Admission Day. Certainly in the last part of the twentieth century, Arkansas has loomed large in American politics: It’s the home state of President Bill Clinton and also the site of the highly contested 1957 attempt to integrate [...]
Featured on June 30, 2012
Today we celebrate Columbus Day. Every now and then a book not only educates you but changes the way you view history. Once you have read it, you cannot see things quite the way you once did. That is how I think about the book of the day, Michael Dorris’s Morning Girl. Published in 1992, [...]
Featured on October 31, 2011
March has been designated Ethical Awareness Month. Really good books that allow children and adults to explore ethical issues are not that easy to come by, although both Wonder and How to Steal a Dog can be used for this purpose. But a 2012 nonfiction book by Jim Murphy, The Giant and How He Humbugged America, [...]
Featured on March 31, 2013
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