My friend Junita has posted a loving tribute to cookbooks and the art of learning to cook without the cookbook at her foodie blog, Stack of Cookbooks.

After years of dutifully following recipes, I now realize that what I treasure the most is pulling off a dish with no recipe. When I can cook something by heart.

Do you know someone who cooks everything this way? Who moves around the kitchen like a cyclone, tasting and seasoning, throwing together a salad while they're braising the entree, with not a cookbook in sight? I am so not this person. This improvisational phenom is like a musician who can play a catalog of songs on five different instruments. I can't even play Chopsticks on the piano.

My cookbook-free victories are few and far between. But when the stars align, and I'm able to throw together a tasty dinner with what I have on hand, it's more satisfying than cooking from the most complicated recipe. I love the thrill of a new recipe. But for me, the real joy comes from sharing a simple improvisational meal with friends.

Click through, read the whole post, and you'll come away with Junita's take on Pasta Genovese, a perfectly summery dish that features fresh green beans and potatoes and lots of basil in the pesto, all tossed together with fettucine.

[Stack of Cookbooks: A Culinary Victory]

Here are my three favorites:

Harley Dude

 Sumo Dude
Tramp Stamp

Kevin Guilfoile writes:

...so I fanned the pages, and as I did, a small piece of pink cardboard, attached to a string, fell to the floor.

I picked it up and turned it over, and as I read the words on it, I couldn't believe what I was holding--an almost perfectly conserved press pass to Game 2 of the 1929 "World's Series" at Wrigley Field in Chicago. The Chicago Cubs vs. the Philadelphia A's. 

You should read the whole story at the blog home of The Outfit, a group home for wayward Chicago mystery writers, including Guilfoile, Sean Chercover (who I still need to start reading), Libby Fischer Hellmann, and David Ellis (a neighborhood kid I knew growing up, who's gone on to great things prosecutorial and authorial).

(Via the must-read Daring Fireball.)

“The market is even bigger than we thought,” said Russ Grandinetti, v-p of Kindle content about the size of the e-reader audience. He reiterated statements made by Amazon last week that since the company lowered the price of the Kindle to $189 sales have accelerated.

This feels a bit to me like Dave Bowman's famous last line from 2001, "... and oh my God – it's full of stars!"

Amazon has seemingly discovered the hollow star of the eBook market: get the price low enough and you discover a vast pocket universe of people who wouldn't have bought an eBook reader at twice the price.  But really, if you get it down low enough, you'll discover that even people who wouldn't have paid full price for a paperback screed by Glenn Beck with a blurb from George W. Bush and a metallic-embossed American flag on the cover at the checkout at Wal-mart will buy an ereader.  But then what?

The question is really not just about vast numbers of people buying low-priced ereaders equating to vast numbers of people buying books and buying more books after that.  Because at a super low price, the ereader isn't the same as buying a lot of books.  It's like buying a super-low-priced book cover that you can then put other books into.  You still have to go ahead and buy the books to put on the Kindle (or other gadget).

Will all those super-low-price buyers go nuts with their credit cards and become rabid ebook-edition buyers?  Have we really discovered a magical world full of customers who were just waiting for the GADGET that would enable them to start buying books? A magical world full of customers who seem to have been unaware of the wonder of books when they were merely printed on paper?  

Or have we just found a world of people who will buy the next hot gadget made in China, no matter what it is, so long as it's super-low-priced?  ("Dude - it's like a Nintendo DS for words!!")

It seems more likely that the universe of dedicated readers of books – no matter what the format might be – is a finite one.  There are only so many of us out there.  That's why the book business has been cheering so hard for young fans of JK Rowling and Stephenie Meyer.  THOSE new readers who got hooked on books are the future generation of book readers and we certainly want them to keep on buying and loving books.  But for the rest of us?  Our habits are set in stone.  We're already book buyers or we aren't.

A shiny new Kindle or iPad or Kobo or Nook won't convert a non-book buyer into a rabid book buyer.  It might give us some incremental growth.  But not revolutionary growth.   The market isn't bigger than we thought.  It's exactly the size we were afraid it might be.  eBook readers aren't a panacea for our business.  They're a bandaid.  A shiny new bandaid.

Publishing folks like to point at the music industry and say, "We saw what happened with the death of CDs and the rise of the mp3 and we don't want to make that mistake.  Look how hard we're working to make ebook purchasing friendly and simple.  We're not going to lose business to piracy."

But, to judge from the quote I opened with, we've forgotten the lesson the music business learned BEFORE the death of CDs: the death of the LP.  The music business hopped onto CDs with both feet and surfed a happy wave of massive sales as customers started replacing one format of recorded music with another.  But soon enough, even that wave petered out.

This massive acquisition of ebook readers in 2010 may make for a bright and shiny holiday season for ebook retailers.  And it might even contribute to a gloomy holiday season for bookstores that still specialize in the "books printed on paper" category.  But I'll be waiting and watching for statistics that come out in the next months that report on just how many actual paid ebooks are bought by all those owners of new ebook readers.  Then we'll see just how big this market really is.

But the sheer ease-of-use with which you can post stuff on Facebook makes it a simpler path to choose. (Simpler only in terms of how simple it is to share things with my network of "friends" there on Facebook, not necessarily more simple when it comes to global clicky hegemony by our overlords at Facebook et al.)  They've just got those little "Share" buttons all over the web.  Who wouldn't click them?

I've been pondering this for a couple of weeks, reading all those articles about Facebook's privacy settings hell and their 500 million users.  The final straw was this terrific post by Teresa Nielson Hayden on Making Light about posting videos and required cross-linking between YouTube and Gmail and Facebook: 

I said no. I especially and particularly said no to your happy plan to take that crosslinked pair of accounts and propagate god-knows-what information from them to Facebook. For my benefit, you said. So my friends can find me, and see what I’m doing, and I can see what they’re doing. Which is utter codswallop, because it’s really about you and Facebook getting to track who my friends are and what information I share with them, the better to market to us all

So I'm going to try slogging uphill a bit more often and make the conscious choice to put more of those things that I would otherwise share on Facebook up on my3books.com instead.  It's time to work harder at maintaining my corner of the larger Web - I guess I would really rather build my web out in the open instead of contributing more links to a very over-built web inside the box that Facebook has constructed. 

Eggs and Sausage from Jackie Lay on Vimeo.

Found for you by the good people at The Casual Optimist.  Give 'em a click-through to see what else awaits you.

The Program: At 57th Street Books, I have a Kid and Teen Critic review program, where I exchange ARCs and galleys for reviews.  ARCs are hand-selected to match the individual reader based on the participant's age, reading level, history and genre preferences. After reviews are submitted, I use them to help determine stock, displays, and promotions; to gauge interest in genres, authors and various formats; and to communicate with publishers on early feedback.  And the review program helps other shoppers make better decisions, especially when buying books as gifts, by posting the reviews in store, online, and in newsletters.

The Reviewer: Jennifer Glick has been a part of the Teen Critic program for over two years.  I have relied heavily on her opinion in my decision-making and find her reviews concise, reliable, helpful and enjoyable. She has helped me discover books I might not have read, and also helped me weed out others I probably shouldn't devote time towards.

The Idea: While my colleagues may call me a spring chicken, I am no longer a teen.  Therefore, the reviews from the teens in our program are essential to balance adult opinions with those of the intended audience.  For this post, I've paired up with Jen to get a more balanced perspective on three young adult novels about werewolves. Yes, teen werewolves.

The Note: These reviews contain spoilers.  Don't say we didn't warn you!

Liar
by Justine Larbalestier
Bloomsbury | 9781599903057 | 16.99 | Sept 2009

One of my favorite gals in publicity, Deb Shapiro, from Bloomsbury, got me to read this with her teaser campaign that included a chapter sampler, vague, yet enthusiastic little notes of praise, and of course, the early galley. I jumped in with two feet ready to love what she'd sent. But here's why I didn't.

Micah, the main character and narrator of the book, is a compulsive liar.  I found reading from this perspective endlessly frustrating.  As a reader, I was not able to distinguish between actual people, places, things and events and Micah's revisionist accounts. While this was a unique read, it's not something I felt I would recommend or read again. Mostly because, even though we don't really know Micah's story, the one she tells is that of urban werewolves and their bloody, romantic escapades.

While I suspected teens would be interested in the genre, I had no idea how they would take to the “liar's tale” voice.  Luckily, one of my savvy Teen Critics turned in a review to help balance my own opinion.  Here's her perspective: 

When I first picked up Liar it looked like one of the quickly and shoddily written werewolf novels that the recent Twilight obsession has unleashed, but Liar turned out to be a fantastic surprise.

I absolutely, one-hundred-percent, loved Liar.  The best part about the book is that it follows the life of Micah, a teenage pathological liar who is constantly rewriting her own story.  Thus the reader is never sure which chapters are true, and which convey aspects of a life that Micah wishes was her own.  Halfway through the novel Micah reveals that she is a werewolf, who shifts once a month unless she regularly takes her medication.

This novel is my favorite of the three wolf stories because instead of adding a wolf to an ordinary story, Ms. Larbalestier takes a great story about a liar, and then adds another great story about a werewolf. 

Wow! It''s a good thing I'm not the buyer at a reputable bookstore, huh?  Oh, right. I am. Well then, it's a good thing I have teens who review books for me, huh?

> Justine Larbaleister blogs here and tweets here.

***

Shiver
by Maggie Stiefvatar
Scholastic | 9780545123273 | $8.99 | June 2010

My sales rep and other booksellers really talked this one up early on as “the next Twilight, but with werewolves”.  So I knew it would get some attention and thought I'd give it a read after my recent lack of enthusiasm for Larbalestier's Liar. No dice. While I did enjoy this story a little more, it still fell flat and felt too much like werewolf romance. Which is good in a way, because that is exactly what it is.  Why are these girls dying to be vampires or wolves?  What's wrong with them? Why are so many people loving this story and desperate for it's sequel, Linger, due out in July 2010? For answers to these questions, I turn to my Teen Critics.

Jen hadn't read this one just after Liar, like I did.  I asked her to read this as the idea for this post formulated inside my cynical little head.  Here's what she said:

Shiver is a tale of a doomed romance, as Grace falls in love with a werewolf named Sam who has only a few more months to stay human. Although there are some mystery elements to the novel, the primary focus rests upon whether Sam and Grace are able to keep Sam human. 

The werewolf element made this story unique; instead of being simply a story about two teenagers in love they are a human girl and a wolf boy who are fighting against time and nature to stay together.

Jen thought this one was good, but not great.  While she doesn't have anything negative to say, she certainly wasn't raving about it like she did with Liar.  Therefore, I'd say we came out thinking similarly on this one. A sort of meeting in the middle.

> Maggie Stiefvatar blogs here and tweets here.

***

Claire de Lune
by Christine Johnson
Simon Pulse | 9780670011421 | $16.99 | May 2010

After reading two YA werewolf books, I certainly didn't expect to find myself reading a third this summer.  And then, one day, I got a call from a debut author trying to get her foot in the not-so proverbial door of a brick and mortar bookstore.  After a brief discussion on the possibility of hosting her for a book signing, I, with dread, agreed to read the book and then make a decision on whether we could make this work. I grabbed the galley, took it home, and started reading. 

Much to my surprise and pleasure, I truly enjoyed this one. And before I go on, here's what Jen had to say:

Claire de Lune is the most “traditional” werewolf novel out of the three, in the sense that Claire, the main character, is the werewolf, and she is trying to figure out how to be human and a wolf at the same time.  Claire’s life is further complicated when a rogue wolf begins to terrorize her community, inciting a local scientist to hunt the wolves so that he can attempt to cure them.  The novel gets interesting when Claire falls for the scientist’s son, but is unable to tell him about her true identity.

The mystery of the lone wolf makes you want to keep reading, and the hope for an impossible love keeps the reader entertained during slower scenes.  This book is well crafted and a delight to read – female teen readers who enjoy books about real girls with a splash of fantasy will love this book.

 I was happy to see Jen give nods to three things I couldn't agree with more. They are:

1. Craftsmanship
2. Mystery as intrigue
3. Pleasurable reading

Our opinions diverge when Jen calls this one traditional. I can certainly see how you'd find this one more traditional when comparing this book to the two above, but I found this treatment of werewolves more feminist and enjoyable. Secondly, this one was definitely my favorite on the list, while Jen remained swept away by Liar. 

> Christine Johnson blogs here and tweets here.

In Summary:

Liar — Read this one if you're looking for a unique voice that will surprise and challenge you.

Shiver — Read this one if you're looking for a star-crossed romance to satisfy your soul.

Claire de Lune — Read this one if you're looking for a well-crafted, mysterious teen novel for the simple pleasure of reading a good story.

Moreover:  I can't wait until Twilight is no longer the starting off point for discussing YA novels such as these three books. It reminds me of the days when Harry Potter was the reference point for all middle-grade fantasy.  That moment seems to have passed. This, too, shall pass. 

In the meantime, I will keep encouraging teens to give all of us in the book world feedback.  I will gather their opinions, introduce them to new materials, and filter all of that through to you.  When you visit 57th Street Books, look for the kid and teen reviews and only after that should you ask me what I think about a particular book or genre.

– Angela Sherrill
57th Street Books 

[Editor's Note: As Angela alludes in her post, Claire de Lune author Christine Johnson will be appearing at 57th Street Books in July.  For more information, head on over to the Kids' Books page at the 57th Street Books site.]

I bought an iPad.  Anybody who has worked with me will not be surprised to hear this.  Clinically speaking, I could probably be diagnosed with a near-fatal Stage III case of Apple Fanboy Syndrome.  But this time, I didn't just whip out the personal credit card and order blindly.  I needed to think about this carefully.

My decision couldn't just be based on surface factors like the unibody construction and giant shiny multitouch screen.  It's not about the 10 hour battery life.  It's not about watching movies or tv shows on airplanes.  It's not even about the ease of email-checking from a recumbent position on the sofa.  As so many reviewers and analysts have made clear, it's all about the apps.

From the moment Steve Jobs announced the iPad in January, I was thinking about how to add it to my book rep workflow.  How to use it in my appointments with my bookstore buyers.  And how to use it when I'm not actively selling – when I'm working from home, preparing for the next season.  

I've got some answers now.  I found some apps, and when the iPad arrived on Saturday, April 3, I started putting them into place.  It's been funny to me that I've spent the last few weeks talking to my colleagues about how we can do our jobs just as well with less paper in our lives in order to help our publishers get more printed books out in the world.

It's no big secret to anyone who works in publishing and bookselling that there's a lot of paper involved in the creation and selling of books.  There're manuscripts to be read.  Tip sheets.  Sell sheets.  Sample chapters. Sample page spreads.  The mysterious-to-outsiders blads and F&Gs.  Cover art revisions.  And endless, endless spreadsheets.  All this is before the big rolls of paper hit the printing press and get turned into books. (Or the bits get turned into ebooks.)

Obviously, the first way that the iPad can move smoothly into a publishing pro's life is as a flexible reader for manuscripts and sample chapters.  The not quite built-in iBooks app from Apple does a terrific job of reading .epub formatted files. But getting them on the iPad can be something of a chore.  You need to save them to the computer that syncs with the iPad and then manually install them through iTunes during the syncing process.  A bit of a pain.

There are other ebook readers that function perfectly well on the iPhone and iPod Touch - Stanza has been the best, but it hasn't been updated to take advantage of the massive screen yet.  And there's no official word yet from Stanza's parent company, Lexcycle (and its parent company, Amazon.com), about whether there will ever be an update for iPad.  The ebooks you read on the screen-doubled Stanza app on the iPad are just too fuzzy.  So for the time being, Stanza is out of the running.

Consider a relative newcomer, readMe.  It offers a clean, simple interface, with a slightly more complicated process for getting ebooks on board than Stanza.  You can click on .epub links online in readMe's built-in browser and they download directly.  And it has a terrific interface on the iPad, using the full screen.  But it doesn't cover the full array of file formats that Stanza can handle.  It's a solid at-bat, but no homerun.

For the moment, my recommendation on pre-publication ebook reading is to install both iBooks and readMe and give them a try.  They're both great for actually reading the documents.  And keeping hoping that Stanza will come out with a native iPad version.

When I am working with a bookstore buyer in a sales call, I usually spend the first part of my time at any store carrying in tote bags of sales materials to share with my buyers.  For a publisher of children's books, this can mean multiple totes of F&Gs. (For the uninitiated, F&Gs stands for "folded & gathered" unbound pages of picture books.)  For a publisher of books that involve design or photography or art, we usually receive color copies of sample page spreads or fancy printed "blads". (Again, for the uninitiated, a blad is just a small booklet of sample pages, usually in the exact trim size of the finished book.)

I don't want to sound like I'm complaining about having lots of sales materials to share with my buyers – I'm not, because I know that showing off the incredible sample pages of a book will often make the sale where my sales pitch alongside the catalog page might fall short.

But after the iPad announcement I got to thinking, what if I had an iPad filled with an entire season's worth of blads and F&Gs and sample page spreads?  What if I had PDF versions of all those sales materials instead of all the tote bags?

This was where I spent a lot of time, trying to find an app that would help me handle all those PDFs during a sales call, with a simple interface that any buyer could easily grasp.  My plan was to bring the iPad in to sales calls and turn it over to my buyers while I continued to use the laptop to present my sales pitch and take down the orders.  For a scary couple of days, I thought I might have to learn how to build my own app.

It might seem obvious now to anyone who has looked at the App Store's best-seller list since the iPad went on sale, but when I first started looking around, GoodReader was a dark horse app, not one of the top-selling paid apps. Right away, I knew that this app was going to be a mainstay on my iPad.  And their almost instantaneous release of the iPad-optimized version (with fast updates since the launch) shows they are paying attention to their users' needs.

Unlike the ebook-reading side of my workflow, this part works very smoothly, thanks to GoodReader's beneath-the-scenes programming.  It is one of the first apps designed to take advantage of inter-app data sharing on the iPad.  This means that once you've installed GoodReader, the operating system knows that app can handle any PDFs that might come along – whether you've received it in an email or come across it on the web.  You just tap on the file and a pop-up option allows you to open it in GoodReader.  And you're done.  That PDF is copied to GoodReader.

They've also built in capabilities to log on to popular cloud-based file storage services like Dropbox. The Dropbox service installs a file on your desktop and securely syncs any files you might put inside that folder up to your account in the cloud.  From inside the GoodReader app, you can easily access your Dropbox account and navigate to exactly the right files you want copied to your iPad.  I've already used the combination of Dropbox and GoodReader to move mountains of files to my iPad for next season.  (There is a Dropbox app for iPhone, but they haven't updated it yet for iPad, so it doesn't seem to work as smoothly as GoodReader does.)

ABOVE, an iPad screen grab of a double-page spread from a Fall 2010 Albert Whitman picture book, Smelly Bill: Love Stinks. RIGHT, an iPad screen grab of a full-page sample from a Fall 2010 Quirk Books title, Witch Craft. Click to enlarge.So how does it all work?  Even better than I'd dare to hope back in January.  The screen images are gorgeous, and the processor in the iPad is even more powerful than the iPhone currently has.  PDFs fly open, scroll quickly, and zoom in and out without delay.  So many people have iPhones or similar touchscreen-based smartphones already that I don't expect much trouble in working with my buyers during our appointments.  The interface is quite intuitive.

I haven't started selling the fall season to bookstores yet, but I'm looking forward to having so many samples right at my fingertips to show my buyers.

I've been asking our publishers to send me their sales materials in PDF form for this season and many have been very supportive.  I'm looking forward to our upcoming round of sales conference meetings to show them how great their materials look on the iPad.

I encourage my fellow book sales reps to take a look at these new tools and spend some time thinking about how they might improve their workflow and their time spent with bookstore customers.

For any publisher who wants to find a smart way to cut back on costly printing, cross-country mailings, and antiquated systems for distributing sales materials to your sales and marketing people, step forward and give this method a try.  I'm happy to have a conversation with any publisher about how to put these tools in place.

For an industry that's struggling to define the future of books and ebooks for the general public and worrying about competing file formats, price wars, DRM, and myriad other fears, this kind of clean, internal change should be a no-brainer.  It's not revolutionary, it's simply evolution.  We find ways to do our jobs better and we move forward.

Cross-posted at the Huffington Post.

Among the boxes and mailers that were awaiting my return, I found these three books.  Two of them I've been anticipating all season long, and one was a pleasant surprise. 

The Chicken Thief
by Beatrice Rodriguez
Enchanted Lion Books (Consortium) | 9781592700929 | $14.95 | Apr 2010

I wrote about The Chicken Thief earlier this season, and my joy in it.  Now that the finished edition is here from Enchanted Lion Press, I couldn't be more delighted.  It's a delirious chase story with a chicken's life seemingly hanging in the balance, with the entire adventure told wordlessly. 

***

Office of Blame Accountability
by Geoffrey Cunningham, Carla Repice & The American Public
edited by Gregory Ayres
Loudmouth Press (Consortium) | 9780615289090 | $19.95 | May 2010

A sample OBA blame document1) A document collecting the whiny wisdom of the American people, a chance to individually and collectively point the finger of blame at Someone Else, a protest, an art project.  
2) A hilarious book that brings all of the above together in one place.

Loudmouth Press' web site explains it all for you:

The Office of Blame Accountability (OBA) is an art project taking place on public sidewalks and main streets across the United States. The OBA has travelled to the Democratic and Republican National Conventions, Ground Zero on the anniversary of 9-11, and Wall Street during the stock market crash.  The ideas that inform OBA stem from isolationism, the growing lack of corporate responsibility, and the increasing economic and social divide between people living in the U.S. ... Since October 2007 the OBA has collected and filed hundreds of blame forms and recorded phone conversations.

You can check out their Facebook fan page to stay apprised of future openings of Office of Blame Accountability locations, and find out about recent developments.

***

McSweeney's Issue 34
by the Editors of McSweeney's
McSweeney's (PGW) | 9781934781678 | $20 | Apr 2010

Less elaborate than the blockbuster Issue 33 (otherwise known as the one-time-only Sunday paper, the San Francisco Panorama), this vinyl-slipcased edition features two separate volumes.  In one, an epic tale of war reporting by writer Nick McDonell from Iraq, where he traveled with the 1st Cavalry Division.  In the other book, features by the usual suspects: John Hodgman, Sarah Vowell, Julie Klausner, T.C. Boyle, Daniel Handler, and a portfolio of self-portraits by writers, actors, artists and directors.

This volume looks to me like it's well worth your time and attention.  You may admire it in slightly more detail on the McSweeney's site.

As Hodgman frequently says, that is all.

The Art of McSweeney's
By McSweeney's
Chronicle Books | 9780811866231 | $45 | March 2010

Longtime fans of McSweeney's fine products know that there is a crew of passionate, book-loving, word-loving insane people working side-by-side with Dave Eggers behind the scenes to make every issue of McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, The Believer, Wholphin, and their stand-alone book projects, come out as magically as they do.  I know some of them in a distant-cousin-who-used-to-live-closer-than-they-do-now sort of way, from back when I was a sales rep for PGW, their distributor to bookstores.

When I was sitting in those sales conference meetings and the folks from McSweeney's would come in and pitch their upcoming products to us, describing in maddeningly vague yet tantalizing detail, you couldn't help but be caught up in it.  Possibly my favorite memory of a McSweeney's sales conference was when they described the then-upcoming Issue #22, it of the three separate volumes of poetry-chains, unused F. Scott Fitzgerald story ideas, and current Oulipo experiments.  It went something like this.  They described how there would be three parts, and "well, we're trying to figure out a way to bind each volume into hardcovers with magnets."  Silence.  Then gasps.  Magnets!

And they did it.  They made a book with magnets.

You can learn about that issue of the Concern and more – pick up this inspirational look back at all the amazing creativity that has come out of McSweeney's, an oral history of sorts, with all the players remembering how their favorite projects came to be.

Naturally it's a beautiful object of a book, with dozens of tiny short stories printed on the book jacket.  No magnets that I'm aware of.

***

Ramayana: Divine Loophole
By Sanjay Patel
Chronicle Books | 9780811871075 | $29.95 | Jan 2010

I first met Sanjay Patel on the Internet.  At the time, I was the above-mentioned PGW sales rep and regular Boing Boing reader.  A Pixar animator, Patel had just put together his own self-published edition of Little India (which eventually became The Little Book of Hindu Deities) and it got a mention on Boing Boing.  I was really interested in how it looked and I ordered a copy from him.  We corresponded briefly about ways to help bring his book to a wider audience, but what happened in the end was that Plume brought out a really charming and beautiful edition of Hindu Deities.

Since then, at least on the book front, there's been silence.  But now, after years of work, Sanjay Patel is back with a wonderfully illustrated retelling of the Ramayana in his own style: Ramayana: Divine Loophole.

Fans of Sita Sings The Blues will definitely find something to love here.

***

Tiny Art Director: A Toddler and Her Vision
By Bill Zeman
Chronicle Books | 9780811872294 | $14.95 | March 2010

Based on the well-loved blog, this book showcases the parallel development of Bill Zeman's talent as on-demand-illustrator (primarily for his in-house client, his daughter) and her growing skill and imperiousness as a demanding art director. 

The Brief: I want you to draw me a dinosaur! Not a scary one! He's taking a bath. The Critique: I don't like him. Job Status: RejectedBeginning when she was two, Zeman's daughter would give him a brief for a new art assignment, typically involving dinosaurs or crocodiles.  After his piece was complete, she would evaluate his work, frequently with withering disdain, and either accept or reject the work.

Capturing all that is enchanting and frustrating about both parenting and working as an illustrator-for-hire, Tiny Art Director is a fun little book (and still ongoing blog!) with a lot to laugh about.