Everyone is a Winner...and Thank You for Your Neil Gaiman Comments!

Françoise Mouly - Photo by Sarah Shatz

The decision from Françoise Mouly:

Thank you to everyone for reading and giving thought to Neil Gaiman's compelling lecture on the importance of reading and libraries for young people (if you missed it, click here!). I so enjoyed reading through your comments and hearing about your favorite quotes and why.  Special congratulations to Helena Juhasz who submitted this post and is winner of the TOON Books New Releases Hardcover Gift Set:

Helena's Favorite Neil Gaiman Quote: "I do not believe that all books will or should migrate onto screens: as Douglas Adams once pointed out to me, over twenty years before the kindle turned up, a physical book is like a shark ... sharks are better at being sharks than anything else is." 

Helena's Reason Why: This quote is spot on!! There's nothing like the tactile experience of reading a dog eared book on the beach, blowing sand out from between the pages, closely inspecting the printed lines and imagining how the artist created the illustrations, delicately propping up the book in the bathtub or curling up with the book while under the covers - or under the stars (with a flashlight). They require no power other than our dedicated attention. Long live the book!

I so share Helena's view and it reminds me of something I said in a recent interview on Design Mom that I'd like to share again with you here. One of the artists I work with, Frank Cammuso, pointed out that he can’t pull out an iPad at bedtime with his three-year old. An iPad is a window on an endless stream of excitement; it’s not a place to focus and prepare for sleep and dreams. But a book is! A book can be read every night and it will always be the same and different. It will be what your Dad read when he was a kid, and what you’ll read to your children. It has some elements that don’t change yet it’s a new adventure every time you reread it, because reading is truly interactive and the reader is half the story. All day long, I spend my days on a computer, making and manipulating images, reading and writing emails, finding information. A computer is a good tool, a means to an end, but spending so much time online makes me very aware of how special and valuable any ‘old media’ is, anything that is printed, frozen, preserved in one form, fossilized. It’s there to be interpreted. Every time you spend time with it, it remains the same yet it becomes something more. Whenever I hear from people who say that Silly Lilly, Benjamin Bear, A Trip to The Bottom of the World, or any of the TOON Books has become their child’s favorite book, read night after night, I feel hopeful for the future. 

More good news...Everyone is a winner!

If you submitted a comment to the TOON's Gaiman Blog Post by November 18th, TOON Books would like to send you a complimentary copy of Liniers' The Big Wet Balloon. In the spirit of Gaiman's lecture, we ask that if you don't have a child at your own home who can enjoy the book, please consider donating it to your local library or to a holiday gift drive for children in need.

Just send me your mailing address to [email protected] by November 25th.  Be sure to also include the username you used to post your comment.