Fresh Takes: Canadian Publishing 2014

If: A Mind-Bending New Way of Looking at Big Ideas and Numbers

David J. Smith

Sep 19, 2014

Kids Can is expecting David J. Smith’s new picture book, If: A Mind-Bending New Way of Looking at Big Ideas and Numbers, which is all about scale and size, to be a “category killer,” says Lisa Lyons Johnston. It offers readers images for grasping big issues, such as global wealth distribution, explaining that if all the world’s money were represented by 100 coins, the richest 1% would have 40 coins, while the poorest 50%, half of the world’s population, would share just one coin. “There’s really nothing else like this out there. Pretty well every spread is a lesson plan,” says Lyons Johnston. More . . . 

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Diversity North: Canadian Publishing 2014

By Leigh Anne Williams | 

Sep 19, 2014

Calls for more diversity in books this year have echoed north into Canada. While publishers in the country acknowledge that there is still work to be done to produce books that reflect current racial and cultural realities, they also draw attention to their long history of working toward diversity and offer a few examples from their latest books.

Diversity is a real and important issue, says Rick Wilks, director of Annick Press. “When kids are looking at books, [the books] are not that reflective of what you see in the classroom and the societies they live in.” More . . . 

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Max Tell is an award-winning poet and songwriter.

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Charlie and the Chocolate Factory at 50

llustration by Quentin Blake

•  Lucy Mangan 
• The Guardian, Saturday 30 August 2014

In many ways, the most astonishing thing about Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – a bestseller since it was first published 50 years ago, beloved of generations of children, multiply adapted for stage and screen and a furnisher of images and phrases that have entered the cultural lexicon forevermore – is that it ever got written at all.

At the end of the 1950s, Roald Dahl was riding high. He had had a "good" war, as first a flying ace and then an intelligence agent in Washington funnelling information back to MI6, and was leading a glamorous life in the US as a successful writer of dark short stories for adults and the husband of the film star Patricia Neal. By 1957, he had started making up bedtime stories for the first two of the couple's five children, Olivia and Tessa. One of the tales was about a small boy who lived near an enormous chocolate factory – inspired, perhaps, by the one flattened by the eponymous fruit in James and the Giant Peach, his first book for children, which he had just finished and which would be published in 1961. More . . . 

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