As a reader and frequent book store browser, I devote a degree of judgment towards book covers while downing an uppity-caffeinated beverage. When picking up an unfamiliar title, the presentation of a book is as important as appearing professional for a job interview. The book’s cover art introduces the reader to the story. Elements infused within the design, illustration, or photography heavily contribute towards the overall presentation and appeal. In fact, there are many times when a reader cannot recall the title or author, but is able to conjure a description of its cover. Once in a while, roles reverse and the consumer influences the cover. These titles become branded by the cover art due to momentous success i.e. Eragon, Twilight, Harry Potter. However, most titles receive a new makeover as the book transforms from hardcover to paperback to reprints, thereby creating a high expectation towards packaging. 

Book cover art is a fine art as it attempts to attract its targeted audience. Those of us connected to the bookworld have a high regard for the efforts invested in printing high quality book covers, especially when we are booktalking titles to teens. Attractive and varied covers help us entice readers to expand their reading preferences. For publishers to package two different products with the same illustrations gives the impression of an impetuous company undermining current ethical standards. Whether copyright has been breached is not the immediate issue, rather consumers expect that their personal dollars are purchasing a unique product. To hinder the dystopian possibility that one day there may be several different titles displayed next to each other featuring the same cover art, please voice your opinions in the comments.

The Internet exists to teach us that we are never as obsessed as we think we are. There is always a more fanatical collector or expert on obscure 16mm film reels or paperback young adult novels, to show us we are but mere enthusiasts. On a recommendation from the YALSA listserv, I visited The Dairi Burger to read about the reissue of the execrable teen series Sweet Valley High. Witty and smart readers visit the site and demonstrate a remarkable memory of plots and characters that overwhelms my own. But we all have similar stories. Most of us read compulsively, sometimes under bedsheets with flashlights, and devoured books like cakes then and now. Some of those books were destructive to our impressionable psyches, but when we’re all grown up we hope they form a generational bond, a laugh, a deep roll of the eye or maybe even some critical analysis.
While the SV canon—and it is canonical, though sometimes flexible with fact and reality, with hundreds of titles and series within series—may seem benign and forgettable to most, Francine Pascal’s covert mission of normalizing repulsive, greedy, shallow, and extraordinarily sexist behavior has helped to socially condition most of her vulnerable young readers. At the outset of each book, Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield, our heroic twins are always described in their perfect size six, tanned, sun-streaked blond glory, with eyes the color of the Pacific Ocean, even! What is intended to read variously as virtue, vivaciousness, ambition, magnanimity in the twins is really callowness, condescension, ruthlessness, self-righteousness. And what of the fat or single, LGBT folks, people of color, the poor? If they even exist in this world, they are tragically doomed or soon forgotten and they function as catalysts for the primary characters, eliciting pity and contempt.

This reissue is completely irresponsible and unnecessary. And the only reported edit is that Jessica and Elizabeth are now a perfect size four. I know that none of this is new, that we are all familiar with the evils of media for young people. Most likely children and teens today will not be interested in hoary Sweet Valley when they have young adult books like Gossip Girl, The A List, The Clique. The new offerings are mordantly self aware and cheeky and seem sometimes to have a hint of parody, even while they exist primarily to prop up the most garish and exclusive brands. In the SV books, characters are often kidnapped, raped, beaten, and tragically killed, but maintain a glazed innocence and mostly abstain from drinking, drugs, and sex, except for when it kills them to prevent others from indulging. At least the new naughty YA books aren’t pretenders.

And for illustrative purposes here are some choice quotations:

“There are a dozen fairy-tale princesses, Rose thought, and they’re going to make me a fairy-tale princess too.”

“He responded by turning his face to hers and kissing her hard, his arms crushing her against him, his mouth demanding what his body wanted to take.”

Lila, upon seeing Manuel: “I don’t know how she can date him. He’s so ethnic and working class.”

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Music can also contribute to the success of a party. Stephenie Meyer has already done a lot of the work for us when it comes to selecting music for a vampire themed party. Begin with the playlists that can be found on her site and expand from there with additional music from those bands. The website allmusic.com can help you find other artists. Simply search for an artist and it will give you their influences, followers, and similar acts. Songs such as “Vampires Will Never Hurt You” and “Early Sunsets Over Monroeville” by My Chemical Romance and “Bloodletting (The Vampire Song)” by Concrete Blonde add an appropriately ghoulish atmosphere. Try having teens come up with their own vampy mix to share.

A few simple activities can tie the whole thing together. You could either make a quiz on general vampire lore or create separate quizzes for individual books, using each book as a prize. The most fun thing for the teens who are into vampires, is to make them a vampire for a day. Your local community theatre might have a volunteer who would be willing to come in and transform them into vampires. We had a staff member give people vampire bites on the neck using eye shadow and liner in shades of red, brown, blue and purple for appropriate bruising around the wound.

In my community, the majority of teens who love vampire stories tend to feel like they are alone in their interests. They are teens on the fringe, sometimes into the Goth and Emo scenes. Celebrating one of their passions can show them that they are not as alone as they think, and give them the chance to be outsiders together.

Opening Photo: be careful / Originally uploaded by girl interrupted. jess

Posted by Sarah Granville

Right now I’m pairing new fiction with older books. Yup, right out there in valuable display space I’m putting elderly books with dated covers and silly titles like Fat, a Love Story (Barbara Wersba, 1987) and Secrets of the Shopping Mall (Richard Peck, 1979). But here’s the trick: Right next to these books I’m displaying hot new titles with similar themes. So, that’s the gimmick – old book, new book. How similar, yet how different! Why not read them both and compare?

For instance, with Fat, a Love Story, I’ve paired last year’s Huge by Sasha Paley. Both books are about weight, dieting, and love. I can’t keep Huge on the shelf, but Fat is really good too and it never moves. Never. The cover is just too…yesterday. (A girl with a bad haircut is eating a piece of cheesecake while a thinner couple drives by in a convertible. Back in the day, it was probably the coolest thing ever. Now? It looks like something your mother probably read.)

For a while now, I’ve been trying to get young patrons to read worthwhile older books, urging them to ignore the dreary decades-old covers in favor of plot, characters etc. But that’s been a doomed effort for the most part, and I’ve seen lots of patrons reject one edition of a book one minute, only to seize the exact same book – with a newer cover – the next.

So, I’m really excited that this “pairing” approach seems to be working. The kids still make fun of the unfashionable covers (that’s half the fun), but they’re taking the old books along with their newer counterparts. Somehow, the association between the two gives the older books credibility and they’re getting some attention again – just in time to avoid the “weed pile.”

Here is a short list of books I’ve paired, but possibilities are endless!

Theme: Social misfits
Freak (2007) by Marcella Pixley
The Seventh Grade Weirdo (1992) by Lee Wardlaw

Theme: Body image
Huge (2007) by Sasha Paley
Fat, A Love Story (1987) by Barbara Wersba

Theme: The mall
It’s a Mall World After All (2006) by Janette Rallison
Secrets of the Shopping Mall (1979) by Richard Peck

Theme: Sexual assault
Safe (2007) by Susan Shaw
Are You in the House Alone? (1976) by Richard Peck

Theme: Boarding school
A Great and Terrible Beauty (2003) by Libby Bray
And Both Were Young (1983) by Madeleine L’Engle

Theme: Future societies
The Declaration (2007) by Gemma Malley
The Vandal (1979) by Ann Schlee

Theme: Survival in the Alaskan wilderness
The Trap (2006) by John Smelcer
Death Walk (1991) by Walt Morey

Theme: Summer camp
Camp Rules (2007) by Jordan Roter
The Goats (1987) by Brock Cole

You can read all the details about the program on an old blog post.  We’re planning a similar event this year, however, we’ve invited a local published poet to come in and “open” the event.  If there was one thing I learned during my experience last year it was that poetry programs are a perfect opportunity to collaborate and network with your local high schools.  It was because of the poetry program that I managed to meet one of the school librarians and also an English teacher who offered her class extra credit for attending the event and extra points if they recited a poem.  If it wasn’t for her class I probably wouldn’t have had so many attend the program.  For some reason I always felt kind of down about that fact, that the only way we managed to get teens to come to our program was to essentially bribe them.  But looking back I realize that it’s all about perspective.  Despite how we got them through the door, they did come, they did have fun and I do believe that they brought something back from the experience. For me that is the very definition of a successful program.  Many of them were very shy in the beginning or acted too cool to read poetry in front of an audience but it only took a few brave souls and one amazing young lady who really knew how to slam to encourage the rest to step up.  Of course, the flavored coffee and chocolates probably helped too.

 Below is the slide presentation I used during the program.  Please feel free to use it, change it, as you like.  I found most of my activities from the IPL Teenspace poetry wiki but unfortuntately it doesn’t seem to be working right now so I can only provide the cached link. I would love to hear some ideas from our readers on various poetry programs, there are so many different ways to share and encourage a love of words and writing with teens.

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http://www.polldaddy.com/s/38F3D9E7702F9350/

Thank you for your time!

Every day, kids crowd around my desk to talk about Twilight, the novel by Stephanie Meyer about Bella, a teenage girl who moves to Forks, Washington and falls in love with Edward, a vampire who has been seventeen years old for more than a century now.

My screensaver, courtesy of my YA patrons, is a photo of a silver Volvo S60 R, the same kind that Edward drives. I receive emails from teenagers with addresses like “vampiregirl16″ and “edward4ever.” (Immediately, I know which “Edward” they’re talking about and it’s not a kid from town.)

Generally, these are girls around the age of 14, but not always. The kid who printed all the cast photos from the upcoming movie Twilight, based on the book, is a boy. He’s already planning a party at his house on opening night.

What is it about these books? How have they conquered popular culture? (Vampires were cool when I was a teenager too, although we were reading the Anne Rice series about Lestat and Louis.) Personally, I think it’s all about physicality and desire – desire for flesh – desire that is dangerous and must be quelled – desire that can kill.

Here, I’m talking of course of Edward’s desire for blood, but also of Bella’s desire for more ordinary human contact with the gorgeous guy she loves. In Twilight, both are potentially fatal; every time Bella and Edward get a bit too “hot n’ heavy,” they must break apart before Edward becomes too overcome with bloodlust and (literally) devours his girlfriend. The characters both crave and fear intimacy. In short, the book is full of sex without anyone ever actually having any – very much like the imaginations of many young teenagers!

If your patrons haven’t read the Twilight saga yet (there are three titles in the series: Twilight, New Moon, and Eclipse), offer it to them. It will keep them busy for a while. Here’s a short list of other “Forbidden Fruit” fiction for readers who can’t get enough of vampires:

De La Cruz, Melissa: Blue Bloods

Hautman, Pete: Sweetblood

Klause, Annette Curtis: The Silver Kiss

Mead, Richelle: Vampire Academy

Moore, Christopher: You Suck: A love story

Rice, Anne: Interview with a Vampire

Sedgwick, Marcus: My Swordhand is Singing

Schreiber, Ellen: Vampire Kisses (with four sequels)

Vande Velde, Vivian: Companions of the Night

Westerfeld, Scott: Peeps

For more Vampire Fiction recommendations, visit the Teen Lib Wiki page about Vampire Romance Fiction!

Posted by Denise Ryan from Stamford, Connecticut. You can contact denise at niseryan @ hotmail.com

Teen Library Websites: Love them or Hate Them?
I’ve recently spent a lot of time researching library websites in anticipation for our new website for Otis Library in Connecticut. Our site, in trying to be uniform as a whole site, quickly made our teen page less about graphics and more about the information.However, when I first looked around, there were pages that I wanted to emulate (imitation is the sincerest form of flattery). My favorite site was the teen site at the Public library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County of North Carolina. Their Library Loft page is bold, interesting, and chock full of information. The Louisville Free Public Library has a wonderful teen page including, along with many other libraries, booklists. I freely admit to including 2 booklist pages after looking at this page. Teens at the Johnson Country Library’s teen page can change the background theme of their page with several choices including Goth or monkeys. Each library strives to make their page unique and attention grabbing, but according to teens that I’ve spoken with, it may be a lost cause.

1) Do teens really look at library websites?

2) Are they drawn to images/graphics or more information?

3) What do they envision for the library website?

The biggest question of all:

4) Do they even care?

With all the social networking sites (yes, I’m on myspace, facebook, and Shelfari – all under the title YABOOKNERD to make it easy) does it really matter to have a wicked cool teen website? From the teens I talked to, most didn’t really know that we had a website catering to them. Once they did know, they didn’t seem impressed and when asked would be unlikely to use the site, unless they were bored. So in this case – how do we reach out to teens? Does anyone else find the library website a tool of the past?

Posted by Jennifer

Intellectual Property Rights, Creative Commons and…Nine Inch Nails?

Teaching information literacy skills is an important role for YA librarians. Educating teens about such issues as intellectual property rights, digital rights management (DRM) and the law can often come across as preachy. Fortunately, an unlikely partner can help break the ice with teens on this subject: Nine Inch Nails.

Ask a teen where they got the music on their MP3 player and they’ll likely reply “the internet.” Of course, the real question is: was it obtained legally? While authorized downloads of artists’ music are available through online retailers such as Apple’s iTunes Store or Rhapsody, many people still use file-sharing protocols such as Limewire, KaZaa and BitTorrents for unauthorized downloading (aka theft) of copyrighted materials.

The world seems divided into two camps: those who view all intellectual property as essentially being public domain (as long as they don’t get caught), and those who view all intellectual property as private property posted “no trespassing, authorized persons only”. The former camp says that copyright stifles creative uses of intellectual property such as sampling in music; the latter camp says that owners of intellectual property should have the right to control all its uses.

As in most ideological battles, there is a middle ground. Enter Creative Commons, a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt charitable corporationthat defines the spectrum of possibilities between full copyright — all rights reserved — and the public domain — no rights reserved. Our licenses help you keep your copyright while inviting certain uses of your work — a “some rights reserved” copyright [http://creativecommons.org/about/]

Many teens may be familiar with Creative Commons from its use on Flickr. Flickr allows you to apply Creative Commons licensing to grant other users the right to use your work under certain circumstances.

Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails have given us the opportunity to use their music to educate teens on intellectual property issues. NIN has released their latest album, Ghosts I-IV under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license. This means that you can share it, or remix it and share it under the same license for noncommercial (i.e. free) uses as long as you attribute it to Nine Inch Nails. Nine Inch Nails offers the album for download for only $5, or you can download a partial album for free from the website or via BitTorrent.

The album consists of instrumental tracks which are perfect for remixing and/or adding vocals. One of the programs suggested for Teen Tech Week 2008 (or any other time) involves teens using Splice Music, JamGlue, or Audacity to create their own music. Why not include downloading the free Nine Inch Nails tracks and have the teens make their own remix? How about adding vocals? What about a music video posted to YouTube? The finished product could be uploaded and shared following the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license. The teens will have fun exercising their creativity, and we will get the opportunity to talk with teens about intellectual property rights and Creative Commons licensing.
Posted by Jeff 2.0

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I began thinking of a Dungeons and Dragons (D & D) group at the library in 2005. I had been interested in D & D since high school, but hadn’t ever played. The idea of knowing nothing about this game and running a program terrified me. The thought of learning enough to feel comfortable suggesting it overwhelmed me. I received a D & D starter kit from YALSA and stared at it proudly as it sat on my desk. And gathered dust. My quest was not starting out well.

One evening I entered our meeting room to set up for anime club and there was a group of boys sitting at a table with D & D books. My teen programming senses tingled and I asked them about what they were doing. They were beginning a new campaign so I asked them if they would mind having their campaign be a once a month library program open to any teenager who wanted to come. They agreed! I was getting my D & D group without having to be proficient at it myself! And you can too.
The basic things that any librarian needs to start a D & D group are the core rule books (the Players Handbook, the Dungeon Masters Guide, and the Monster Manual), dice, and one or more teens to be Dungeon Master, or DM. My DM and I have an understanding. If he feels that a player is acting unfairly he will let me know so I can handle it. If he notices that I am continually correcting someone’s behavior, he will punish them by taking away hit points, which is like a player’s life span.

It is so rewarding to see my teens having fun gaming in a social way. During a campaign they will fight for and with each other instead of against each other. D & D is not about who wins. The group of characters is working toward a common goal. They learn each others’ strengths and weaknesses.

Since we are talking about libraries, I will mention books. If your kids are really into the sword and sorcery content of D & D, they will definitely want to read the Dragon Lance and Forgotten Realms series. You can also incorporate aspects of other books into the campaign setting. Right now, the world our D & D group is playing in is based on the Wizard of Oz series. Our DM found out more about the series of books so he had more settings and ideas to draw from. My favorite book is Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, so I’ve already requested a Wonderland campaign setting. If your teens are not interested in fantasy but you still think a role playing game might appeal to them, there are a wealth of role playing games that offer different settings. The great thing is that you can make this work for any group of kids.

Here’s a list of resources on D & D and why role playing is a good thing:

Packer, Alex J., Ph.D. Wise Highs: How to Thrill, Chill, & Get Away From It All Without Alcohol or Other Drugs.

Slavicsek, Bill and Richard Baker. Dungeon Master for Dummies.

Slavicsek, Bill and Richard Baker. Dungeons and Dragons for Dummies.

http://www.religioustolerance.org/ (search “role-playing”)

http://www.theescapist.com/index.htm

http://www.wizards.com/

Posted by Sarah Granville