65,000 attendees—some in costume— thronged the aisles of New York City's Javits Center last weekend for the 2008 New York Comic-Con.

The panelists agreed that the children’s book market is still in its early stages. "Kids’ book publishers need experience with comics; comics publishers need experience in publishing books for children," said Liesa Abrams of Simon & Schuster’s Aladdin Books. One key difference: "Children’s retailers need prices to be kept low, much lower than you can get away with for the direct market," she said. Randall Jarrell of Oni Press agreed, pointing out that readers could buy a 200-page Captain Underpants chapter book for $4. "That’s a really hard price point for most graphic novel publishers to meet," he said. His solution was to publish Salt Water Taffy, a new graphic novel series by Matthew Loux, on a quarterly basis at $6 for a 96-page graphic novel.   

"It’s been traditionally a regional title," says Audrey Mitnick, Sleeping Bear senior publicist, describing the picture book as a retelling of an American Indian folktale about the origins of Michigan’s huge Sleeping Bear Dunes, located on the state’s northwestern shore.

"Because it’s part of our 10th anniversary celebration, I see this as an opportunity to move the book nationally," Mitnick adds. Wargin and van Frankenhuyzen will celebrate Legend of Sleeping Bear’s reissue on July 5, with a reading and signing at Sleeping Bear Dunes National Park.

While Sleeping Bear Press has published other illustrated story books for young readers since the release of Legend of Sleeping Bear, with such titles as The Happy Prince and Voyageur’s Paddle, the press is best known for its two-tiered alphabet picture books for ages 4–10, including W Is for Wind: A Weather Alphabet, D Is for Drinking Gourd: An African American Alphabet, and Z Is for Zamboni: A Hockey Alphabet. Of the press’s 206 titles currently in print, 98 are alphabet books, which have sold a total of 2.5 million copies.    

Expressing the view of publishers, Elaine McQuade, chair of the PA Children's Book Group and managing director of Scholastic U.K., said, "One of the most encouraging findings from the research we carried out was how positive adults feel about buying books as gifts. But these potential gift buyers, especially if they aren't the parent of the child in question, can find buying the right book difficult and often default to a DVD or a video game instead. They know that children vary enormously in their reading ability but do not understand why publishers don't provide this initial piece of guidance on the book as a starting point in the process of selecting a title, especially when books are often displayed on a table top or shelf away from any retailer guidance."

Booksellers have been mixed in their response. John Newman, chair of the Booksellers Association's Children's Bookselling Group and also an independent bookseller, said, "The Booksellers Association gets regular calls about content so I do see the point in publishers making this clear on the books." However, he also conceded that he thought the move comes from the needs of shops that do not have staff to make recommendations. "Age ranging is good when there is no one there to give advice," he said, "but some independent booksellers worry that it will mean there is less need for their expertise." Former Ottakar's store manager bookseller Trish Beswick was more forceful in her comments: "Advice for individual children is exactly what booksellers are for. Age ranging is being introduced largely, I feel, to suit the supermarkets, not the bookshops." —Julia Eccleshare

Walter Dean Myers.

Myers also has firsthand experience in the military, having served in the Army for three years, after enlisting on his 17th birthday. "When I joined the Army," Myers recalls, "I had a romantic notion of war, having read World War I British poetry and watched films about World War II." That image was soon shattered. His brother’s death in Vietnam caused Myers to reflect further on war and its meaning and led him to write Fallen Angels. "I wanted to dispel the notion of war as either romantic or simplistically heroic," he explains.   

Van Fleet at work.

This month Van Fleet’s Alphabet arrives with a 350,000-copy first printing; he illustrated it in the vein of Tails (published by Harcourt in 2003 while his longtime editor, Paula Wiseman, was working there), which also shares the same squat dimensions (10 3/4" x 7 1/4"). Alphabet employs many of the novelty mechanisms familiar to Van Fleet’s books, as well as something completely new for him: a removable poster featuring 26 pop-ups hidden beneath flaps, one for each letter.

Since 1995, Van Fleet has lived with his wife, Mara (who works as an associate art director at Reader’s Digest), and their two children, Alex, 13,
and Ryan, 7, in Chappaqua, N.Y., where Bookshelf visited him one recent rainy morning.