In this companion to Wild About Books, the animals build the kind of zoo they want (think: Giant amusement park with bedrooms). Math and construction skills are important—and so is cooperation. Everyone Counts will be published in September 2019.

Todd Bol, the founder of the Little Free Library movement, has passed away, and far too soon. The Little Free Libraries—75,000 of them worldwide—are a tribute to the power of one good person with one good idea.

My Portland neighborhood is blessed with at least five Little Free Libraries. There is the tiny Tardis that plays the Dr. Who theme when you open the door (apparently one of many such Tardii, a reminder that books are time travelers). There are two little libraries on the main business street of our Multnomah Village neighborhood. Hopeful children check them often, although these boxes frequently offer only religious screeds and adult self-help titles. I try to add picture books whenever I can. ​

For the 30th anniversary of the publication of Roald Dahl's Matilda, Dahl's long-time illustrator Quentin Blake imagined what Matilda might be doing at the age of 30.

“Since, as a small child, Matilda was gifted in several ways," said Blake, "it wasn’t very difficult. I imagined that for each version of our grown-up Matilda one of her extraordinary talents and achievements would have come to the fore and shown her a role in life."

Wood, cardboard, rope, papier-mâché from grocery bags, leftover house paint, an old sheet dyed green.

  Unions have been good to me. At the Los Angeles Public Library, SEIU negotiated to get us librarians’ paid at the same rate as other city employees with masters’ degrees. At the time, librarians' salaries were lower than, say, city planners and employees in other male-dominated professions. When I worked on children’s television, I joined the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. After the show ended and went into reruns, the residuals I earned qualified me for full family medical benefits, thanks to the union. This safety net helped me get started as a freelancer.
 
  When I began getting paid for my writing, I couldn’t wait to join the Authors Guild. It was a matter of pride at first: I was officially part of the literary establishment. Later, the Guild’s legal services advised me on two contracts. With help from their fantastic tech support staff, I used the AG website service to build my first author site. And like any good union, the Authors Guild made it possible for me to be a part of something much bigger than myself, fighting for the rights of all writers to control and to be fairly compensated for their work. The Guild is a legal powerhouse.
 
To any authors who read this: Please, please, join. Dues are on a sliding scale based on income.  

A patas monkey and its preferred tree, the whistling thorn acacia, may have inspired Dr. Seuss's famous character and his Truffula trees.

The New York Times ran a piece about this, but it's definitely worth looking at the source, a paper in the journal Nature, Ecology and Evolution. The authors—three anthropologists (Nathaniel J. Dominy, Sandra Winters ,and James P. Higham) and a Dr. Seuss biographer (Donald E. Pease)--build their case on both scientific and literary detective work. The article is fun, it's convincing, and it will no doubt become a popular resource in middle school and high school classes. For example, the authors' applied facial recognition-type technology to certain monkeys, along with both the Lorax and a character from Dr. Seuss's The Foot Book. Graphics are included. The authors created a timeline of notes and sketches to argue that Dr. Seuss's encounter with African plants and animals played a pivotal role in the development of the book.

The Nature, Ecology and Evolution article could easily be the basis for lessons about artistic creativity, historical sleuthing, scientific method, and academic vocabulary. And we writers may wonder if and how Dr. Seuss missed making an important connection in the story.

​
  The Great Dictionary Caper. ​Oops!

  A mini-jumble of just two adjacent letters went unnoticed by me, by the editors, assistant editors, and proofreaders at Simon and Schuster, and by the folks who gave the book starred reviews at Kirkus, Publishers’ Weekly, and Booklist.
 
  It wasn’t until librarians began reading the book that the error was found (it’s since been corrected in later printings). Did those of us who missed it simply get enough information from the other letters to ignore the misspelling, Ryhming? Perhaps. But the font was large, which should have made the mistake easier to spot, and on top of that, it came right after a double-page spread of anagrams, so we should have been on the lookout for switched letters. I'm guessing that these particular letters in this particular word created a trompe l'oeil, a trick of perception.

Next time, I will pay etxra attention to proofreading the words in a book's art.

​  After hearing his teacher read Imagine That! How Dr. Seuss Wrote ‘The Cat in the Hat,’ a fourth-grader thought up his own, very funny Dr. Seuss-themed writing project.
 
  The book Imagine That! explains how the Dick and Jane readers inspired Dr. Seuss to create something much better. But exactly how awful were The Dick and Jane books? This fourth-grader had never seen one. He decided to write and illustrate his own extremely awful story about Dick, Jane, Sally, and a cat whose name I can't decipher. The story was so boring, he gave up before page two.