MELISSA GARZANELLI, melissag@mywebtimes.com, 815-431-4049
http://tinyurl.com/2o8uxq
They may be plugged into their iPods, avidly surfing the Web and chatting on their cell phones, but many teens also are tapped into an activity that is decidedly low-tech -- reading.
"A wonderful trend in the book industry is the increase in young readers," said Eileen Fesco, owner of the Book Mouse in Ottawa.
Nationwide, teen readers are the fastest growing segment of book buyers, with teen book sales on the rise even though adult book sales are falling. And teens are borrowing more books as well. The Young Adult Library Services Association is the fastest growing division of the American Library Association.
Locally, book sellers and libraries have seen similar trends. Fesco said book sales figures for adult fiction are neck-and-neck with sales of books for teens and children.
Jessica Parker, Teen Zone coordinator at Reddick Library in Ottawa, said circulation of teen books is steadily increasing and this year's enrollment in the teen summer reading program is at an all-time high. Patti Smith, assistant director at Robert W. Rowe Public Library in Sheridan, said circulation has climbed among teen readers since the library created a young adult section and created programming geared toward that age.
So what's driving the teen book market?
One factor may be that those in the book industry recognize there is a teen book market. Where once teens graduated from the children's section to the adult shelves with little offered in between, books aimed at a variety of teen interests now can be found.
"Teen fiction deals with real topics that teens deal with. The Teen Zone (at the library) is different in that we have to weed out books because topics are constantly changing," said Parker.
More and more authors are writing specifically for teens, bringing with them quality text and diverse subject matter -- but Fesco warns that sometimes the topics of these tales may ruffle parents' feathers.
"We carry books about the death of family members, about sexuality, about teen drug and alcohol abuse, about teen pregnancy, about family dysfunction -- they may come from a family where the mom or the dad is an addict," she said. "(Teens) need these books. Sometimes they don't know where to go and they are trying to understand."
Smith saidwhile topics like suicide and homosexuality may not be what adults would choose for teens, these books often strike a chord with young people as they try to understand the world around them
"You really have to put aside your own ideas about what kids that age should be reading," she said. "We think they are too young, that they shouldn't want to know about these things. But we have to remember that it is 2007 and those things are out there."
Fesco notes one theme always is en vogue for teen girls -- love and romance, though even that theme has taken on a new twist since love stories involving witches and vampires, such as "Twilight" and "New Moon," are popular, emulating the success of such TV shows as "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Charmed."
Girls tend to read more than boys, Smith, Parker and Fesco noted, and as such more books are geared toward female interests. Books about cliques at school -- the latest title in Lisi Harrison's popular Clique series is "It's Not Easy Being Mean" -- and friendships, such as the "Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants" series, are top sellers.
But that doesn't mean boys aren't reading, too, though their interests tend to gravitate toward sports. Books like "Heat" and "Travel Team" are popular and increasingly books about the military and war are creeping onto shelves as the conflict in the Middle East continues.
"They like the vampire books, too, but not the ones about being in love," said Fesco.
Boys -- and girls -- like graphic novels as well. Graphic novels tell their stories in comic book fashion, using illustrations as well as dialogue. Graphic novels are aimed "at two populations we have trouble attracting -- boys and reluctant readers," said Parker. "But I love reading them, too. I had a hard time getting started, but now I'm hooked."
Smith said her library has tapped into these quality teen books to draw young people into the library. Creating a young adult section with books geared specifically for that age and offering programming teens enjoy, like a young adult book discussion group and movie and game days, has helped boost circulation in that department, she said.
"If you get in books that they like, they will come in and grab them," she said.
Parker said libraries are responding to today's teens, hoping to ditch the stodgy image some teens associate with the library by remaining up to date in terms of technology and teen interests. Libraries across the country, already offering online access, also are beginning to purchase MP3 players and video games to be checked out in the same way they lend CDs and DVDs.
The hope, she said, is that while teens are at the library to go online or check out a video game, they also may pick up a book that interests them at one of the displays of popular teen books.
And once they start reading these books, they are often hooked.
"They want to read about kids doing thing, teens doing things, important, life-changing things," said Parker. "They relate to that more than a story about a guy who is 40 years old."
Saturday, July 7, 2007
The greatest story ever sold
KATE TAYLOR
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
July 6, 2007 at 11:59 PM EDT
‘He'll be famous – a legend – I wouldn't be surprised if today were known as Harry Potter day in the future – there will be books written about Harry – every child in our world will know his name!'
And lo, it came to pass. The story of how the magical baby Harry escaped certain death, and saved his people from the evil Voldemort, spread through the nations. And Harry Potter was idolized by millions from Beijing to Brandon. And every child in our world knew his name.
And then, of course, the critics began to carp. The great Harold Bloom decided this wasn't great literature. Christian fundamentalists had to have it explained to them that good always triumphs over evil in a Harry Potter book. Marxist theorists subjected Hogwarts to class analysis. Feminists pointed out that Hermione is a drip. Is it possible, just possible, scholars began to wonder, that kids know Harry's name only because their white, middle-class parents have seized on these nostalgic books to quiet their fears about juvenile illiteracy, cultural diversity and creeping technology?
When first-time author Joanne Rowling produced Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone in 1997, the book about a young wizard at a magical boarding school was an instant success in her native Britain, and was soon imported into Canada. It was published in the United States the following year; the series, now translated into 65 languages, was soon selling tens of millions of copies as readers seized on the next three Harry Potters that appeared annually.
In the new millennium, the combination of a three-year wait for book five (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, published in 2003) and the release of a Hollywood version of the first book in 2001 launched Harry into the stratosphere. With sales outstripping all other contemporary titles, the series began to change the publishing industry, blurring the line between adult and children's fiction. In 2000, The New York Times created a second bestseller list for children's literature because it believed the Potter books were distorting its adult list. In Canada, the series turned tiny Raincoast Books of Vancouver into a Harry Potter marketing machine.
It was in these years that the now-familiar Pavlovian pattern of Harrymania also took hold: Lineups of readers wait outside bookstores on publication day for the release of the newest title at the stroke of midnight; the media breathlessly report on the publishers' elaborate security precautions and the excitement among “the Muggles.”
That's the pattern that will be repeated two weeks from today, when the seventh and final book in the series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, is released at midnight Greenwich Mean Time in London, and then at 12 a.m. in each of North America's time zones. Fans will be discussing the book online by morning – although the last four books are all over 600 pages, children as young as 8 are reported to devour them in a matter of days, if not hours.
And with the film of book five already in theatres by then (it opens Wednesday), this will be another summer of inescapable Potter worship. Nor is there any sign, with two more films to go, and potential new readers arriving in maternity wards every second, that the publication of the final book is going to end the phenomenon.
It's not hard to see why the Harry Potter books are popular. They're fast-paced and humorous, with page-turning plots that are essentially teen-detective stories.
And in an era when parents worry about boys' literacy, and the entertainment industry believes boys won't accept female protagonists, the male hero draws in readers of both sexes. The books have also increasingly crossed over into the adult market, where they are sold with darker, photographic covers, partly because young adults now read them as fantasy titles, and partly because Rowling has held on to her readers as they grow up – only slightly faster than Harry, who has aged seven years in a decade.
What this doesn't explain is why the Potter books are, with the exception of such religious and political tracts as the Bible, Pilgrim's Progress and The Thoughts of Chairman Mao, the bestselling books of all time, with numbers already challenging even J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and Agatha Christie's top titles. Academic critics of the books, some of whom praise their power as popular culture, some of whom condemn their formulaic prose and question their political messages, speculate there are particular social circumstances that have given rise to the mania.
“Perhaps the Harry Potter phenomenon is such because these books offer exactly what we unthinkingly desire…,” writes Suman Gupta, a lecturer in English at Britain's Open University, in Re-reading Harry Potter (2003).
So, what do we unthinkingly desire? In Britain, it might be a world that upholds traditional notions of class. In the United States, where Christian fundamentalists have denounced the books for glorifying witchcraft, perhaps it's a world where men are superior to women. And in kinder, gentler Canada, we might just want a world where people still read books.
Although Rowling, perhaps at the instigation of her copyright lawyers, is always insisting on the books' utter originality, scholars can point to the many precedents for Harry's magical coming-of-age, from British boarding-school fiction to the Bible, by way of Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and Lewis Carroll. Canadians could apply their own Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism to the books, and see in Harry an archetypal hero who, like the Greek hero Perseus, or Christ in the apocryphal Harrowing of Hell, must descend underground to vanquish monsters.
Whether or not they believe the books are well-written Рand many critics, most notably the conservative Bloom, who has denounced Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone as clich̩-ridden escapism Рscholars can place the books in a tradition of children's literature that helps prepare readers for adult life through the safety of a fantasy realm.
“Fairy tales, like all metaphoric literature, are significant psychologically because they enable young readers to gain a certain distance from a conflict they are having. They don't have to identify with the protagonist,” explains Jack Zipes, a professor of German at the University of Minnesota, who is also a specialist in children's literature and author of Sticks and Stones: The Troublesome Success of Children's Literature from Slovenly Peter to Harry Potter. “It enables the child to work through, without any danger, something that is troubling them.”
He is no Harry Potter fan, but Zipes does believe that the character's status as an orphan who magically escapes abusive guardians makes him a Cinderella figure who appeals to contemporary readers shaken by marital breakdown and child abuse.
Whether escaping their problems or working through them, young readers are exploring a world through Harry Potter that is, for all its flying broomsticks and mythical monsters, a pretty conventional one. As outraged fans, parents and even Rowling herself have explained to Harry's Christian critics, the books are traditionally moral.
Some academic critics, however, also note that Harry's is a socially conservative realm. Zipes agrees with feminist critics who have called the books sexist; Gupta thinks they are fundamentally racist.
Evidence of Rowling's sexism is not hard to find. Her magical world is a place where women are cast in secondary roles at best. At worst, they are portrayed as gross stereotypes. Harry's female friend, the bookish Hermione, is a sidekick, and an annoyingly earnest one at that; the sympathetic and generous Mrs. Weasley, mother to Harry's best buddy, Ron, is the clucking mother hen. And Harry's aunt, Mrs. Dursley, is a social-climbing gossip.
Issues of race and class in the books are more complicated. Some argue that the four houses at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry reflect the social structure of Tony Blair's Cool Britannia, with the hated Slytherin representing the aristocracy and the Gryffindor representing the dependable lower-middle class. This is a place where social status is predetermined and immutable.
Purity of blood is a recurring theme in the books: The Slytherin are prejudiced against any witch or wizard of common or Muggles parentage; the term “mudblood” induces instant offence and outrage. Because these attitudes are those of the villains, Rowling is often seen as a liberal: In her book A Guide to the Harry Potter Novels (2002), British journalist Julia Eccleshare, for example, argues that the series is clearly a statement against racism.
Subtler critics argue, however, that this is only a gloss. Gupta notes that Rowling's magical world is essentialist: Harry is the chosen one; it is in his essence to be a wizard, just as it is in the nature of house elves to be slaves (despite Hermione's campaign to free them.) Gupta complains that “...everything significant in the Harry Potter books is innate, inborn, essential, simply manifest and definitively inexplicable in terms of rational principles,” and argues that the books are thus guilty of their own kind of social or racial prejudice.
Gupta also argues that the books are anti-rational – Harry's world operates on magic, after all – and speculates that they may appeal to a society that is both alarmed by racial diversity, and distrustful of science and technology.
Such a political debate may seem rarefied, but it is not entirely lost on parents of Potter fans. Just as feminist defenders of the books will argue they depict a world of gender imbalance as children experience it (rather than as feminists might like to imagine it), so do parents occasionally attribute the books' success to their lack of political correctness.
Indeed, Eccleshare traces Harry's initial success to a reaction against the social-realist school of children's literature of the 1980s and 1990s that had attempted to prepare children for a real world of divorce, danger and diversity with stories about single-parent families, child abuse and gay couples: Refreshingly, Harry does not have two mummies.
Theorists of popular culture are kinder to the books than literary critics, and less skeptical of their success. If Gupta thinks the series might appeal to a fear of science, Peter Appelbaum, a professor of education at Arcadia University near Philadelphia and a specialist in how to teach mathematics, has argued that the books are popular with children because they represent magic the same way children experience technology: as a consumer commodity.
Indeed, part of the charm of the Harry Potter books is the way in which Rowling creates magical equivalents for iPods, cellphones and Nike running shoes: Harry has a much-coveted Nimbus Two Thousand broomstick; his school books feature moving images; and Quidditch, the sport that Hogwarts pupils play on broomsticks, is like a three-dimensional version of a computer game.
If Harry's magic can seem amusingly modern, it is also appropriately dusty, relying as it does on ancient spells, forgotten codes and mouldy books. Kevin McNeilly, a University of British Columbia English professor who uses Harry Potter as a case study in classes on popular culture, argues that images of books and reading are central to the series. He believes the series itself is about literacy.
“The students tend to discover it's about reading, why people have to have books,” McNeilly says, citing books as the characters' main source of knowledge about magic. “The kids in Harry Potter don't have mass media, the telephone, the Internet. Instead they have magic, and they need books.”
He speculates that in the real world, the books are therefore greeted with great enthusiasm by a society worried about literacy. “Amid middle-class North Americans, there must be some kind of anxiety about missing books.… People were ready to read again,” he says.
Indeed, a common testimonial from parents, teachers and librarians is that the Potter books turn kids into readers.
All of these theories tend to suggest that it's parents, rather than children, who are Harry-crazed. Zipes, in particular, sees the books' success as part of adults' homogenization of childhood through mass culture. “Our imaginations have been invaded by the media and by corporations who study the way we think and our desires,” he says. “It's difficult for us to imagine things that have not already been relayed to us by the media.”
McNeilly disagrees, arguing that the image of anesthetized young people buying only the junk that is marketed to them gives neither popular culture nor its fans enough credit. “The books are magical and spellbinding and they take you in, but they also encourage you to be a critical reader and not to be taken in,” he says, noting the instances in the series where reading properly, or not misreading, is critical to solving a mystery. “The books encourage creative response.”
Young people eagerly reinvent and continue the stories both in the massive on-line community of fans and in face-to-face discussions with family and friends.
“It won't be so much fun after the seventh book comes out; there won't be any more plots to discuss,” observes 15-year-old Dylan Tate-Howarth, a Toronto high-school student who has been a fan of the books ever since her father began reading the first volume to her and her twin sister, Sasha, when they were 7. The twins and several friends have written their own epistolary prequel to Harry Potter, and act it out as a fantasy role-playing game that has included staging the wedding of two characters. They enjoy minute discussions of characters' behaviour, and trace their real addiction to the fourth title in the series.
“By that time, our friends had caught up with us. It was getting more popular, and we had people to talk to about it,” Sasha recalls. “ I read the sixth one in less than a day.”
“I took a couple more hours,” Dylan recalls, “and Sasha was like, ‘Finish this so I can discuss it with you.'”
Perhaps the books appeal to middle-class, outwardly liberal parents' secret nostalgia for a less culturally complicated age, one full of white people reading long books. But children like the Tate-Howarth twins have definitely turned the Harry Potter series into a thing of the 21st century. Recurring characters in most children's fiction are either frozen in time or age very slowly, providing material for a target age group that eventually graduates to other reading.
Harry Potter, on the other hand, is growing up with his readers, providing them with a sense of immediacy that vaults the character into their culture. With their midnight purchases followed by marathon reading sessions, young readers then turn the reading experience itself into something more instantaneous than leisurely. Next, they rush to their computers and communicate their reactions not only to the kids down the block, but also to millions of others around the world.
In the media-saturated age of the Internet, it takes only the touch of a button to turn the merely popular into the phenomenal. Like Gupta's Harry-the-chosen-one, the Harry Potter craze is simply manifest. Harry is bigger than Jesus … just because he is.
Related Articles
Where to turn once Harry retires
Potter a magical draw
Fans spoiled only by their own imaginations
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
July 6, 2007 at 11:59 PM EDT
‘He'll be famous – a legend – I wouldn't be surprised if today were known as Harry Potter day in the future – there will be books written about Harry – every child in our world will know his name!'
And lo, it came to pass. The story of how the magical baby Harry escaped certain death, and saved his people from the evil Voldemort, spread through the nations. And Harry Potter was idolized by millions from Beijing to Brandon. And every child in our world knew his name.
And then, of course, the critics began to carp. The great Harold Bloom decided this wasn't great literature. Christian fundamentalists had to have it explained to them that good always triumphs over evil in a Harry Potter book. Marxist theorists subjected Hogwarts to class analysis. Feminists pointed out that Hermione is a drip. Is it possible, just possible, scholars began to wonder, that kids know Harry's name only because their white, middle-class parents have seized on these nostalgic books to quiet their fears about juvenile illiteracy, cultural diversity and creeping technology?
When first-time author Joanne Rowling produced Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone in 1997, the book about a young wizard at a magical boarding school was an instant success in her native Britain, and was soon imported into Canada. It was published in the United States the following year; the series, now translated into 65 languages, was soon selling tens of millions of copies as readers seized on the next three Harry Potters that appeared annually.
In the new millennium, the combination of a three-year wait for book five (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, published in 2003) and the release of a Hollywood version of the first book in 2001 launched Harry into the stratosphere. With sales outstripping all other contemporary titles, the series began to change the publishing industry, blurring the line between adult and children's fiction. In 2000, The New York Times created a second bestseller list for children's literature because it believed the Potter books were distorting its adult list. In Canada, the series turned tiny Raincoast Books of Vancouver into a Harry Potter marketing machine.
It was in these years that the now-familiar Pavlovian pattern of Harrymania also took hold: Lineups of readers wait outside bookstores on publication day for the release of the newest title at the stroke of midnight; the media breathlessly report on the publishers' elaborate security precautions and the excitement among “the Muggles.”
That's the pattern that will be repeated two weeks from today, when the seventh and final book in the series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, is released at midnight Greenwich Mean Time in London, and then at 12 a.m. in each of North America's time zones. Fans will be discussing the book online by morning – although the last four books are all over 600 pages, children as young as 8 are reported to devour them in a matter of days, if not hours.
And with the film of book five already in theatres by then (it opens Wednesday), this will be another summer of inescapable Potter worship. Nor is there any sign, with two more films to go, and potential new readers arriving in maternity wards every second, that the publication of the final book is going to end the phenomenon.
It's not hard to see why the Harry Potter books are popular. They're fast-paced and humorous, with page-turning plots that are essentially teen-detective stories.
And in an era when parents worry about boys' literacy, and the entertainment industry believes boys won't accept female protagonists, the male hero draws in readers of both sexes. The books have also increasingly crossed over into the adult market, where they are sold with darker, photographic covers, partly because young adults now read them as fantasy titles, and partly because Rowling has held on to her readers as they grow up – only slightly faster than Harry, who has aged seven years in a decade.
What this doesn't explain is why the Potter books are, with the exception of such religious and political tracts as the Bible, Pilgrim's Progress and The Thoughts of Chairman Mao, the bestselling books of all time, with numbers already challenging even J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and Agatha Christie's top titles. Academic critics of the books, some of whom praise their power as popular culture, some of whom condemn their formulaic prose and question their political messages, speculate there are particular social circumstances that have given rise to the mania.
“Perhaps the Harry Potter phenomenon is such because these books offer exactly what we unthinkingly desire…,” writes Suman Gupta, a lecturer in English at Britain's Open University, in Re-reading Harry Potter (2003).
So, what do we unthinkingly desire? In Britain, it might be a world that upholds traditional notions of class. In the United States, where Christian fundamentalists have denounced the books for glorifying witchcraft, perhaps it's a world where men are superior to women. And in kinder, gentler Canada, we might just want a world where people still read books.
Although Rowling, perhaps at the instigation of her copyright lawyers, is always insisting on the books' utter originality, scholars can point to the many precedents for Harry's magical coming-of-age, from British boarding-school fiction to the Bible, by way of Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and Lewis Carroll. Canadians could apply their own Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism to the books, and see in Harry an archetypal hero who, like the Greek hero Perseus, or Christ in the apocryphal Harrowing of Hell, must descend underground to vanquish monsters.
Whether or not they believe the books are well-written Рand many critics, most notably the conservative Bloom, who has denounced Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone as clich̩-ridden escapism Рscholars can place the books in a tradition of children's literature that helps prepare readers for adult life through the safety of a fantasy realm.
“Fairy tales, like all metaphoric literature, are significant psychologically because they enable young readers to gain a certain distance from a conflict they are having. They don't have to identify with the protagonist,” explains Jack Zipes, a professor of German at the University of Minnesota, who is also a specialist in children's literature and author of Sticks and Stones: The Troublesome Success of Children's Literature from Slovenly Peter to Harry Potter. “It enables the child to work through, without any danger, something that is troubling them.”
He is no Harry Potter fan, but Zipes does believe that the character's status as an orphan who magically escapes abusive guardians makes him a Cinderella figure who appeals to contemporary readers shaken by marital breakdown and child abuse.
Whether escaping their problems or working through them, young readers are exploring a world through Harry Potter that is, for all its flying broomsticks and mythical monsters, a pretty conventional one. As outraged fans, parents and even Rowling herself have explained to Harry's Christian critics, the books are traditionally moral.
Some academic critics, however, also note that Harry's is a socially conservative realm. Zipes agrees with feminist critics who have called the books sexist; Gupta thinks they are fundamentally racist.
Evidence of Rowling's sexism is not hard to find. Her magical world is a place where women are cast in secondary roles at best. At worst, they are portrayed as gross stereotypes. Harry's female friend, the bookish Hermione, is a sidekick, and an annoyingly earnest one at that; the sympathetic and generous Mrs. Weasley, mother to Harry's best buddy, Ron, is the clucking mother hen. And Harry's aunt, Mrs. Dursley, is a social-climbing gossip.
Issues of race and class in the books are more complicated. Some argue that the four houses at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry reflect the social structure of Tony Blair's Cool Britannia, with the hated Slytherin representing the aristocracy and the Gryffindor representing the dependable lower-middle class. This is a place where social status is predetermined and immutable.
Purity of blood is a recurring theme in the books: The Slytherin are prejudiced against any witch or wizard of common or Muggles parentage; the term “mudblood” induces instant offence and outrage. Because these attitudes are those of the villains, Rowling is often seen as a liberal: In her book A Guide to the Harry Potter Novels (2002), British journalist Julia Eccleshare, for example, argues that the series is clearly a statement against racism.
Subtler critics argue, however, that this is only a gloss. Gupta notes that Rowling's magical world is essentialist: Harry is the chosen one; it is in his essence to be a wizard, just as it is in the nature of house elves to be slaves (despite Hermione's campaign to free them.) Gupta complains that “...everything significant in the Harry Potter books is innate, inborn, essential, simply manifest and definitively inexplicable in terms of rational principles,” and argues that the books are thus guilty of their own kind of social or racial prejudice.
Gupta also argues that the books are anti-rational – Harry's world operates on magic, after all – and speculates that they may appeal to a society that is both alarmed by racial diversity, and distrustful of science and technology.
Such a political debate may seem rarefied, but it is not entirely lost on parents of Potter fans. Just as feminist defenders of the books will argue they depict a world of gender imbalance as children experience it (rather than as feminists might like to imagine it), so do parents occasionally attribute the books' success to their lack of political correctness.
Indeed, Eccleshare traces Harry's initial success to a reaction against the social-realist school of children's literature of the 1980s and 1990s that had attempted to prepare children for a real world of divorce, danger and diversity with stories about single-parent families, child abuse and gay couples: Refreshingly, Harry does not have two mummies.
Theorists of popular culture are kinder to the books than literary critics, and less skeptical of their success. If Gupta thinks the series might appeal to a fear of science, Peter Appelbaum, a professor of education at Arcadia University near Philadelphia and a specialist in how to teach mathematics, has argued that the books are popular with children because they represent magic the same way children experience technology: as a consumer commodity.
Indeed, part of the charm of the Harry Potter books is the way in which Rowling creates magical equivalents for iPods, cellphones and Nike running shoes: Harry has a much-coveted Nimbus Two Thousand broomstick; his school books feature moving images; and Quidditch, the sport that Hogwarts pupils play on broomsticks, is like a three-dimensional version of a computer game.
If Harry's magic can seem amusingly modern, it is also appropriately dusty, relying as it does on ancient spells, forgotten codes and mouldy books. Kevin McNeilly, a University of British Columbia English professor who uses Harry Potter as a case study in classes on popular culture, argues that images of books and reading are central to the series. He believes the series itself is about literacy.
“The students tend to discover it's about reading, why people have to have books,” McNeilly says, citing books as the characters' main source of knowledge about magic. “The kids in Harry Potter don't have mass media, the telephone, the Internet. Instead they have magic, and they need books.”
He speculates that in the real world, the books are therefore greeted with great enthusiasm by a society worried about literacy. “Amid middle-class North Americans, there must be some kind of anxiety about missing books.… People were ready to read again,” he says.
Indeed, a common testimonial from parents, teachers and librarians is that the Potter books turn kids into readers.
All of these theories tend to suggest that it's parents, rather than children, who are Harry-crazed. Zipes, in particular, sees the books' success as part of adults' homogenization of childhood through mass culture. “Our imaginations have been invaded by the media and by corporations who study the way we think and our desires,” he says. “It's difficult for us to imagine things that have not already been relayed to us by the media.”
McNeilly disagrees, arguing that the image of anesthetized young people buying only the junk that is marketed to them gives neither popular culture nor its fans enough credit. “The books are magical and spellbinding and they take you in, but they also encourage you to be a critical reader and not to be taken in,” he says, noting the instances in the series where reading properly, or not misreading, is critical to solving a mystery. “The books encourage creative response.”
Young people eagerly reinvent and continue the stories both in the massive on-line community of fans and in face-to-face discussions with family and friends.
“It won't be so much fun after the seventh book comes out; there won't be any more plots to discuss,” observes 15-year-old Dylan Tate-Howarth, a Toronto high-school student who has been a fan of the books ever since her father began reading the first volume to her and her twin sister, Sasha, when they were 7. The twins and several friends have written their own epistolary prequel to Harry Potter, and act it out as a fantasy role-playing game that has included staging the wedding of two characters. They enjoy minute discussions of characters' behaviour, and trace their real addiction to the fourth title in the series.
“By that time, our friends had caught up with us. It was getting more popular, and we had people to talk to about it,” Sasha recalls. “ I read the sixth one in less than a day.”
“I took a couple more hours,” Dylan recalls, “and Sasha was like, ‘Finish this so I can discuss it with you.'”
Perhaps the books appeal to middle-class, outwardly liberal parents' secret nostalgia for a less culturally complicated age, one full of white people reading long books. But children like the Tate-Howarth twins have definitely turned the Harry Potter series into a thing of the 21st century. Recurring characters in most children's fiction are either frozen in time or age very slowly, providing material for a target age group that eventually graduates to other reading.
Harry Potter, on the other hand, is growing up with his readers, providing them with a sense of immediacy that vaults the character into their culture. With their midnight purchases followed by marathon reading sessions, young readers then turn the reading experience itself into something more instantaneous than leisurely. Next, they rush to their computers and communicate their reactions not only to the kids down the block, but also to millions of others around the world.
In the media-saturated age of the Internet, it takes only the touch of a button to turn the merely popular into the phenomenal. Like Gupta's Harry-the-chosen-one, the Harry Potter craze is simply manifest. Harry is bigger than Jesus … just because he is.
Related Articles
Where to turn once Harry retires
Potter a magical draw
Fans spoiled only by their own imaginations
Harry Potter 7: wizard of a loss leader
Rebecca Wigod
Vancouver Sun
Saturday, July 07, 2007
The sticker price on Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is $45, but price-conscious Canadians won't pay that much. The last novel in J.K. Rowling's kidult fantasy series -- to be released two weeks from today -- can be ordered from Amazon.ca for $22.50, for $24.30 through Chapters/Indigo or for $25.99 from Costco.
That kind of deep discounting has upset some smaller booksellers around the world. A report out of Australia quoted Bill Concannon, CEO of Mary Ryan's bookstores, as saying: "Bottom-line profit on the book will be zero .... we're sacrificing our margin on the book to keep our customers happy."
And Tim Robinson, manager of the Muswell Hill Bookshop in north London, England, has been quoted as saying: "The price war is ludicrous because we could all be making money on it."
Here in Canada, booksellers are inclined to take the bad with the good. Steve Budnarchuk, co-owner of Audreys Books in Edmonton and a past president of the Canadian Booksellers Association, acknowledges that "we're not going make a lot of money on this, if any, after we pay all our advertising costs and that sort of thing." But he believes that "folks who grumble on the lost margin on this are missing the point.
"If we don't make any money on it, well, that's too bad," he says, "but it's not the first or the last time that's happened in the book business.
"It's incumbent on us to connect with the positives in this as much as possible, to keep our customers as happy with the whole process [of buying Deathly Hallows] as we can and coming back to us, looking for other suggestions.
"I'm just delighted there has been such a strong interest in a series of books that it has got a lot of people turned on to books again."
Customers of Mosaic Books in Kelowna are pre-ordering Deathly Hallows for 30 per cent off. "We do take a little bit of a loss," says staffer Carley Bortolin, "but it's giving [thanks] to our customers who bought the six previous books with us and continue to shop at our store."
Many other booksellers are treating it as a loss leader, too, recognizing, as Bortolin puts it, that "nobody's going to buy it for $45 when they can get it for less."
Budnarchuk points out that small stores don't have to match the deepest discounters. Instead, they can combine reduced prices with Harry Potter parties or other value-added efforts to keep customers loyal.
- - -
A school in Kindersley, Sask., has removed Trouble on Tarragon Island, by Victoria's Nikki Tate, from its library because of a reference to the "saggy breasts" of the main character's grandmother, who poses semi-nude for an activist calendar. The librarian and the principal feel it could prompt readers to tease or harass female students. Tate is outraged. She says the book isn't "racy or inappropriate in any way. You can't just say, 'Doesn't matter; small town.' It does matter when this kind of thing happens."
- - -
Stephen King's alter ego, Richard Bachman, died of "pseudonym cancer" long ago, but an early manuscript of his has just been published as Blaze. Simon & Schuster calls it "one of the best 'lost' novels ever to resurface," a story on a par with The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon.
rwigod@png.canwest.com
© The Vancouver Sun 2007
Vancouver Sun
Saturday, July 07, 2007
The sticker price on Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is $45, but price-conscious Canadians won't pay that much. The last novel in J.K. Rowling's kidult fantasy series -- to be released two weeks from today -- can be ordered from Amazon.ca for $22.50, for $24.30 through Chapters/Indigo or for $25.99 from Costco.
That kind of deep discounting has upset some smaller booksellers around the world. A report out of Australia quoted Bill Concannon, CEO of Mary Ryan's bookstores, as saying: "Bottom-line profit on the book will be zero .... we're sacrificing our margin on the book to keep our customers happy."
And Tim Robinson, manager of the Muswell Hill Bookshop in north London, England, has been quoted as saying: "The price war is ludicrous because we could all be making money on it."
Here in Canada, booksellers are inclined to take the bad with the good. Steve Budnarchuk, co-owner of Audreys Books in Edmonton and a past president of the Canadian Booksellers Association, acknowledges that "we're not going make a lot of money on this, if any, after we pay all our advertising costs and that sort of thing." But he believes that "folks who grumble on the lost margin on this are missing the point.
"If we don't make any money on it, well, that's too bad," he says, "but it's not the first or the last time that's happened in the book business.
"It's incumbent on us to connect with the positives in this as much as possible, to keep our customers as happy with the whole process [of buying Deathly Hallows] as we can and coming back to us, looking for other suggestions.
"I'm just delighted there has been such a strong interest in a series of books that it has got a lot of people turned on to books again."
Customers of Mosaic Books in Kelowna are pre-ordering Deathly Hallows for 30 per cent off. "We do take a little bit of a loss," says staffer Carley Bortolin, "but it's giving [thanks] to our customers who bought the six previous books with us and continue to shop at our store."
Many other booksellers are treating it as a loss leader, too, recognizing, as Bortolin puts it, that "nobody's going to buy it for $45 when they can get it for less."
Budnarchuk points out that small stores don't have to match the deepest discounters. Instead, they can combine reduced prices with Harry Potter parties or other value-added efforts to keep customers loyal.
- - -
A school in Kindersley, Sask., has removed Trouble on Tarragon Island, by Victoria's Nikki Tate, from its library because of a reference to the "saggy breasts" of the main character's grandmother, who poses semi-nude for an activist calendar. The librarian and the principal feel it could prompt readers to tease or harass female students. Tate is outraged. She says the book isn't "racy or inappropriate in any way. You can't just say, 'Doesn't matter; small town.' It does matter when this kind of thing happens."
- - -
Stephen King's alter ego, Richard Bachman, died of "pseudonym cancer" long ago, but an early manuscript of his has just been published as Blaze. Simon & Schuster calls it "one of the best 'lost' novels ever to resurface," a story on a par with The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon.
rwigod@png.canwest.com
© The Vancouver Sun 2007
Friday, July 6, 2007
Book by Victoria children's author sets off a bit of a Prairie fire
Adrian Chamberlain
Times Colonist
Friday, July 06, 2007
Battle of the bazoongas? Or merely a tempest in a D-Cup?
A popular Victoria children's author is crying censorship after a southwestern Saskatchewan school banned her novel, Trouble on Tarragon Island.
At issue is the book's reference to "bazoongas" as a slang word for breasts. The librarian who pulled the novel at Elizabeth School in Kindersley, Sask., also objected to a mention of "saggy" breasts and a description of a bullying incident.
"I certainly view this as censorship," said Nikki Tate, 45, an award-winning writer of novels for young people. "I deliberately stayed away from crude language."
Wayne Parohl, principal of Elizabeth School before retiring a few weeks ago, said he does not view the withholding of the book as censorship. He said librarian Debbie Wagner originally ordered the novel, but subsequently deemed it inappropriate for younger readers at the school, spanning kindergarten to Grade 7.
The book will be handed over to the high school in Kindersley, a western Saskatchewan town with a population of 4,500, said Parohl.
He said a major fuss is being made over a minor incident.
"I suppose if you claim your book is censored, it makes it more salable. I don't know. It must be a slow news day."
Winlaw-based Sono Nis Press published Trouble on Tarragon Island, which has sold almost 3,000 copies since its 2005 release and is nominated for three book awards. Publisher Diane Morriss said she was surprised to receive a phone call from Wagner informing her Tate's book would be pulled.
Other school libraries across North America have carried it without complaint.
The Saskatchewan librarian -- who could not be reached for comment yesterday -- particularly objected to a description of bullying, said Morriss.
"She said they have zero tolerance for that kind of behaviour at the school, and by letting the kids read it, they're giving support to that kind of action. That's censorship to me," said Morriss.
The vice-president for CWILL B.C., a provincial organization for children's book writers and illustrators, said the incident is a tempest in a teapot. However, kc dyer added that she considers the book ban to be censorship and overkill on the librarian's part.
Dyer said Tate -- who's past chairwoman of the Victoria Children's Literature Roundtable and was twice voted Victoria's favourite children's author -- is an excellent writer highly regarded within the writing community. Trouble on Tarragon Island deals with the subject of bullying "using language that's fairly mild compared to what's heard in the schoolyard," she said.
The book is about a girl who is horrified when her grandmother joins Ladies of the Forest, a radical protest group aiming to save old-growth trees.
Their lobbying efforts include posing for semi-nude photos that appear in a calendar. These images attract taunts from schoolboys who use the word "bazoongas."
The heroine, Heather Blake, thinks: "What they say about my grandmother is true. She does have generous bazoongas, and all of Tarragon Island has seen them."
Trouble on Tarragon Island is nominated for a Willow Award, with winners being voted upon by young readers in Saskatchewan. It is also nominated for a Chocolate Lily Award and a Red Cedar Book Award.
© Times Colonist (Victoria) 2007
Times Colonist
Friday, July 06, 2007
Battle of the bazoongas? Or merely a tempest in a D-Cup?
A popular Victoria children's author is crying censorship after a southwestern Saskatchewan school banned her novel, Trouble on Tarragon Island.
At issue is the book's reference to "bazoongas" as a slang word for breasts. The librarian who pulled the novel at Elizabeth School in Kindersley, Sask., also objected to a mention of "saggy" breasts and a description of a bullying incident.
"I certainly view this as censorship," said Nikki Tate, 45, an award-winning writer of novels for young people. "I deliberately stayed away from crude language."
Wayne Parohl, principal of Elizabeth School before retiring a few weeks ago, said he does not view the withholding of the book as censorship. He said librarian Debbie Wagner originally ordered the novel, but subsequently deemed it inappropriate for younger readers at the school, spanning kindergarten to Grade 7.
The book will be handed over to the high school in Kindersley, a western Saskatchewan town with a population of 4,500, said Parohl.
He said a major fuss is being made over a minor incident.
"I suppose if you claim your book is censored, it makes it more salable. I don't know. It must be a slow news day."
Winlaw-based Sono Nis Press published Trouble on Tarragon Island, which has sold almost 3,000 copies since its 2005 release and is nominated for three book awards. Publisher Diane Morriss said she was surprised to receive a phone call from Wagner informing her Tate's book would be pulled.
Other school libraries across North America have carried it without complaint.
The Saskatchewan librarian -- who could not be reached for comment yesterday -- particularly objected to a description of bullying, said Morriss.
"She said they have zero tolerance for that kind of behaviour at the school, and by letting the kids read it, they're giving support to that kind of action. That's censorship to me," said Morriss.
The vice-president for CWILL B.C., a provincial organization for children's book writers and illustrators, said the incident is a tempest in a teapot. However, kc dyer added that she considers the book ban to be censorship and overkill on the librarian's part.
Dyer said Tate -- who's past chairwoman of the Victoria Children's Literature Roundtable and was twice voted Victoria's favourite children's author -- is an excellent writer highly regarded within the writing community. Trouble on Tarragon Island deals with the subject of bullying "using language that's fairly mild compared to what's heard in the schoolyard," she said.
The book is about a girl who is horrified when her grandmother joins Ladies of the Forest, a radical protest group aiming to save old-growth trees.
Their lobbying efforts include posing for semi-nude photos that appear in a calendar. These images attract taunts from schoolboys who use the word "bazoongas."
The heroine, Heather Blake, thinks: "What they say about my grandmother is true. She does have generous bazoongas, and all of Tarragon Island has seen them."
Trouble on Tarragon Island is nominated for a Willow Award, with winners being voted upon by young readers in Saskatchewan. It is also nominated for a Chocolate Lily Award and a Red Cedar Book Award.
© Times Colonist (Victoria) 2007
Thursday, July 5, 2007
Publisher defends Tate novel
'Bazoongas' reference concerns school librarian
James Wood
of The StarPhoenix
Thursday, July 05, 2007
REGINA -- References to bullying, breasts and the word "bazoongas" have made a children's book nominated for a Saskatchewan award too hot to handle for a southwestern Saskatchewan school.
British Columbia-based publishing company Sono Nis Press says that Trouble on Tarragon Island, a novel by author Nikki Tate, has been censored by Elizabeth School, a kindergarten to Grade 7 school in Kindersley.
Publisher Diane Morriss said the school's librarian objected to a scene where the young heroine is teased about her activist grandmother posing semi-nude in a calendar, with taunts about her grandmother's saggy breasts, or "baz-oongas."
She said the librarian was offended and felt it was not appropriate for the book's recommended readers between the ages of eight to 14.
Morriss said she's bewildered by the situation, saying this is the first objection that has been made to the book.
"It's been nominated for three awards . . . Everyone else that's worked on the book, the editors and proofreaders, they're all extremely surprised too and they felt it was an overreaction to the scene in the book," she said in an interview.
"I think they've made something out of nothing on this issue. I really don't get it."
Morriss said the book's language is tame compared to what would likely be used in real life and could have been a catalyst for discussion about issues such as bullying.
Wayne Parohl, who was principal of Elizabeth School before retiring at the end of the school year, doesn't agree with the publishing company calling it censorship, saying it's common practice for books to be vetted by school librarians before they are made available to students.
In this case, the book was screened and was found to be not suitable for addition to Elizabeth School's library because of the language used in the bullying scene in question, he said.
"Do you work from the assumption that everything that is published automatically is guaranteed a spot in a school library until it's removed? And then if something doesn't make it on the shelves you call it censorship?" said Parohl.
He said the book would be appropriate for older students and would be passed along to the high school in Kindersley.
The book has been nominated for a Willow Award, a Saskatchewan book award that is chosen by young readers.
Morriss said Kindersley schoolchildren who want to vote in the contest won't be able to read Trouble on Tarragon Island unless they purchase the book.
Among the Willow Award sponsors are The StarPhoenix, Regina Leader-Post and the provincial government's SaskSmart Initiative.
jwood@sp.canwest.com
© The StarPhoenix (Saskatoon) 2007
James Wood
of The StarPhoenix
Thursday, July 05, 2007
REGINA -- References to bullying, breasts and the word "bazoongas" have made a children's book nominated for a Saskatchewan award too hot to handle for a southwestern Saskatchewan school.
British Columbia-based publishing company Sono Nis Press says that Trouble on Tarragon Island, a novel by author Nikki Tate, has been censored by Elizabeth School, a kindergarten to Grade 7 school in Kindersley.
Publisher Diane Morriss said the school's librarian objected to a scene where the young heroine is teased about her activist grandmother posing semi-nude in a calendar, with taunts about her grandmother's saggy breasts, or "baz-oongas."
She said the librarian was offended and felt it was not appropriate for the book's recommended readers between the ages of eight to 14.
Morriss said she's bewildered by the situation, saying this is the first objection that has been made to the book.
"It's been nominated for three awards . . . Everyone else that's worked on the book, the editors and proofreaders, they're all extremely surprised too and they felt it was an overreaction to the scene in the book," she said in an interview.
"I think they've made something out of nothing on this issue. I really don't get it."
Morriss said the book's language is tame compared to what would likely be used in real life and could have been a catalyst for discussion about issues such as bullying.
Wayne Parohl, who was principal of Elizabeth School before retiring at the end of the school year, doesn't agree with the publishing company calling it censorship, saying it's common practice for books to be vetted by school librarians before they are made available to students.
In this case, the book was screened and was found to be not suitable for addition to Elizabeth School's library because of the language used in the bullying scene in question, he said.
"Do you work from the assumption that everything that is published automatically is guaranteed a spot in a school library until it's removed? And then if something doesn't make it on the shelves you call it censorship?" said Parohl.
He said the book would be appropriate for older students and would be passed along to the high school in Kindersley.
The book has been nominated for a Willow Award, a Saskatchewan book award that is chosen by young readers.
Morriss said Kindersley schoolchildren who want to vote in the contest won't be able to read Trouble on Tarragon Island unless they purchase the book.
Among the Willow Award sponsors are The StarPhoenix, Regina Leader-Post and the provincial government's SaskSmart Initiative.
jwood@sp.canwest.com
© The StarPhoenix (Saskatoon) 2007
Tuesday, July 3, 2007
Timelining (a 2.0 approach)
Joyce Valenza
Timelining (a 2.0 approach) July 3, 2007 xtimeline just launched in beta. I am already planning how to use this tool--a kind of Wikipedia for timelining--for student research in September. The tool allows you to create interactive timelines enhanced with images, videos, music, and Web links. It stores timelines and allows multiple timeliners, or "friends" to collaborate and share collected knowledge.
Read the rest of the blog
Timelining (a 2.0 approach) July 3, 2007 xtimeline just launched in beta. I am already planning how to use this tool--a kind of Wikipedia for timelining--for student research in September. The tool allows you to create interactive timelines enhanced with images, videos, music, and Web links. It stores timelines and allows multiple timeliners, or "friends" to collaborate and share collected knowledge.
Read the rest of the blog
Local publishing house makes splash online
Company uses Web to attract authors, illustrators
www.gumbootbooks.ca
Michael Kane
Vancouver Sun
Tuesday, July 03, 2007
The staff have a blast at innovative Vancouver publisher Gumboot Books. Above is Tsugumi Kibe (from left), Izabela Bzymek, and co-owners Jared Hunt and Crystal Stranaghan.
Once upon a time there was a little girl who delighted in splashing around in the mud wearing brightly coloured gumboots, a frilly pink party dress and a baseball cap over her pigtails. She was almost never without a book in hand.
Fast-forward a couple of decades and Crystal Stranaghan has a double major in English and psychology from Simon Fraser University, has worked as a behavioural therapist with autistic kids, as a pre-school teacher and a fundraiser for a variety of non-profits, and is the author of Then it Rained, a book for four-to nine-year-olds that reminds us all about the joy of running free when the skies open.
She's also the founder of Gumboot Books, an innovative Vancouver publishing house that uses the Internet to attract authors and illustrators from around the world, as well as stretch the limits of traditional marketing.
Rather than pay for conventional promotion, Gumboot invites non-profits, charities and community groups to sign up on its website and receive 10 per cent of every sale they generate. The more buyers the groups send to the Gumboot website, the more books are sold and the more money they raise. Book buyers choose which cause will benefit.
While nobody associated with Gumboot is rolling in the dough, and most have day jobs, Stranaghan says that's in line with the Gumboot credo of going out and actually experiencing life, not sitting around waiting for the perfect conditions.
"Sometimes that means getting a little muddy," said Stranaghan, 28, who pays the bills by serving tables at Steamworks Pub in Gastown. Here she met Jen Loffree, Gumboot's 34-year-old distribution manager, and bartender Nick Gladding, a 26-year-old graphic designer from New Zealand, who dreamed up Gumboot's distinctive logo showing the silhouette of a young girl in red gumboots reading a book under an umbrella. Stranaghan's stepdaughter Mikayla was the model for the logo.
Pub connections led to Vancouver illustrator and animator Izabela Bzymek, 27, and Carrie Loffree, a 37-year-old mom living in Hungary who doubles as a translator and editor.
A friend also referred Stranaghan to North Vancouver's Eleanor Rosenberg, a 26-year-old graphic designer currently living in Germany. Rosenberg did the quirky illustrations for Stranaghan's second children's book, Vernon and the Snake.
Other members of the team include co-owner and accounts manager Jared Hunt, 31, a server at the Fairmont Waterfront; Tsugumi Kibe, 27, a Japanese student interning as a translator; and Rosa Espadaler, 24, an illustrator in Spain.
Stranaghan says Gumboot is free to operate internationally because it is not dependent on government grants. Instead, the Internet holds the operation together. In fact, Stranaghan met Espadaler, the illustrator of Then it Rained, online.
"We both had blogs on the same site -- hers was all artwork and mine was all writing -- and as soon as I saw her artwork, I knew it was what I wanted for my story," Stranaghan said.
"I sent her an e-mail asking if she might be interested in illustrating a book, and she said sure. We didn't know each other at all when we started the project, but her English is great, and we corresponded almost every day by e-mail for the nine months it took to put the book together."
When the book was done, Espadaler flew to Vancouver for the launch party in March.
Editor Chandra Wohleber, 33, who works as resource development coordinator for the United Church, contacted Stranaghan after seeing her first two books in her office in Toronto.
More than 20 titles are posted at gumbootbooks.ca, and Stranaghan says the company is seeking new talent.
"While many publishers focus on experience, we're looking to help people get a start in the industry: fresh voices, talented young people. Generally, doing things a little differently are what we're all about."
mkane@png.canwest.com
© The Vancouver Sun 2007
www.gumbootbooks.ca
Michael Kane
Vancouver Sun
Tuesday, July 03, 2007
The staff have a blast at innovative Vancouver publisher Gumboot Books. Above is Tsugumi Kibe (from left), Izabela Bzymek, and co-owners Jared Hunt and Crystal Stranaghan.
Once upon a time there was a little girl who delighted in splashing around in the mud wearing brightly coloured gumboots, a frilly pink party dress and a baseball cap over her pigtails. She was almost never without a book in hand.
Fast-forward a couple of decades and Crystal Stranaghan has a double major in English and psychology from Simon Fraser University, has worked as a behavioural therapist with autistic kids, as a pre-school teacher and a fundraiser for a variety of non-profits, and is the author of Then it Rained, a book for four-to nine-year-olds that reminds us all about the joy of running free when the skies open.
She's also the founder of Gumboot Books, an innovative Vancouver publishing house that uses the Internet to attract authors and illustrators from around the world, as well as stretch the limits of traditional marketing.
Rather than pay for conventional promotion, Gumboot invites non-profits, charities and community groups to sign up on its website and receive 10 per cent of every sale they generate. The more buyers the groups send to the Gumboot website, the more books are sold and the more money they raise. Book buyers choose which cause will benefit.
While nobody associated with Gumboot is rolling in the dough, and most have day jobs, Stranaghan says that's in line with the Gumboot credo of going out and actually experiencing life, not sitting around waiting for the perfect conditions.
"Sometimes that means getting a little muddy," said Stranaghan, 28, who pays the bills by serving tables at Steamworks Pub in Gastown. Here she met Jen Loffree, Gumboot's 34-year-old distribution manager, and bartender Nick Gladding, a 26-year-old graphic designer from New Zealand, who dreamed up Gumboot's distinctive logo showing the silhouette of a young girl in red gumboots reading a book under an umbrella. Stranaghan's stepdaughter Mikayla was the model for the logo.
Pub connections led to Vancouver illustrator and animator Izabela Bzymek, 27, and Carrie Loffree, a 37-year-old mom living in Hungary who doubles as a translator and editor.
A friend also referred Stranaghan to North Vancouver's Eleanor Rosenberg, a 26-year-old graphic designer currently living in Germany. Rosenberg did the quirky illustrations for Stranaghan's second children's book, Vernon and the Snake.
Other members of the team include co-owner and accounts manager Jared Hunt, 31, a server at the Fairmont Waterfront; Tsugumi Kibe, 27, a Japanese student interning as a translator; and Rosa Espadaler, 24, an illustrator in Spain.
Stranaghan says Gumboot is free to operate internationally because it is not dependent on government grants. Instead, the Internet holds the operation together. In fact, Stranaghan met Espadaler, the illustrator of Then it Rained, online.
"We both had blogs on the same site -- hers was all artwork and mine was all writing -- and as soon as I saw her artwork, I knew it was what I wanted for my story," Stranaghan said.
"I sent her an e-mail asking if she might be interested in illustrating a book, and she said sure. We didn't know each other at all when we started the project, but her English is great, and we corresponded almost every day by e-mail for the nine months it took to put the book together."
When the book was done, Espadaler flew to Vancouver for the launch party in March.
Editor Chandra Wohleber, 33, who works as resource development coordinator for the United Church, contacted Stranaghan after seeing her first two books in her office in Toronto.
More than 20 titles are posted at gumbootbooks.ca, and Stranaghan says the company is seeking new talent.
"While many publishers focus on experience, we're looking to help people get a start in the industry: fresh voices, talented young people. Generally, doing things a little differently are what we're all about."
mkane@png.canwest.com
© The Vancouver Sun 2007
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