Dog Days, indeed...

For those who are fans of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, there's reason to rejoice. Today, the cover art of the anticipated 4th book in the series was released. The new book is titled 'Dog Days,' and has a release date of October 12th. Based on the success of the previous titles, it's a safe assumption this will be a very good selling book.

Check our previous posts on the Wimpy Kids books and check out this picture of our son, Ethan, with Jeff Kinney - the author of the Wimpy Kid series.

Illustrator Brian Biggs at YoYo Joe's today from 1-2

Brian Biggs, who is a wonderful illustrator of childrens books & toys, will be hanging out at YoYo Joe's today from 1-2. He'll sign the books he's illustrated, plus read from one of his books! According to Brian, hanging out in toy stores is his sixth favorite thing to do, come find out what his numbers 1-5 are! Check out his funky illustrations at his website - mrbiggs.com.

Free Library Festival - Philly

Coming up on April 18th & 19th, it's the annual Free Library of Philadelphia Festival. Lots of awesome authors will be in attendance, as well as plenty of other entertainment. Check out the schedule for the Children's Stage - it looks great - legendary childrens musicians Trout Fishing in America, The Jimmies (who are a pretty rocking band for a kids act) and lots of other stuff - including a 'unprecedented inter-city StorySlam spectacular' pitting five Chicagoans (??) vs five Philadelphians in a battle of which city is more storied.

Al Roker loves kids books - who knew?

I admit it, I don't watch the Today show. I actually don't watch any morning tv, so I only knew of Al Roker in that he was a host on the show. I had no idea he was such an advocate of kids books. He has Al's Book Club for Kids, kinda like Oprah's Book Club - but for kids. The website is chock full of interesting stuff - read the first 20 pages of Diary of a Wimpy Kid, see question and answer videos from authors like Kadir Nelson (just won the Silbert Medal for his book "We Are the Ship"), Kate DiCamillo, author of “The Tale of Despereaux,” and Eoin Colfer - author of the “Artemis Fowl” series as well as lots of other stuff.
Al's latest choice? - The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart.

'Wimpy' is the new 'Cool'

Diary of a Wimpy Kid #3, The Last Straw is out!
The latest in the wildly popular series of books about a middle school 'wimp.'

Greg Heffley is a middle school student who 'writes' and 'illustrates' these wildly popular books about his life. I learned about the 'Diary of a Wimpy Kid' series of books while helping out at the Harlan Elementary School Book Fair over the past two years. They were the first books to sell out, and we'd reorder more of them than any other book. Emily, Ethan and I even headed up to the Free Library of Philadelphia last year to see the author of the series - Jeff Kinney. It was really fun, Jeff is a cool dude. The books are perfect for boys and girls from around fourth grade up.

We just got the latest book in the series - 'The Last Straw' and it's available starting today at YoYo Joe's. We also have copies of the December release 'Diary of a Wimpy Kid Do It Yourself Book' in stock. For more information on the books, check out the new website - wimpykid.com

Check out this awesome video of the actual making of 'The Last Straw'

Book reading and signing on Saturday

Our first real event takes place this Saturday. Well, I guess the opening party qualifies as an event, but this is our first official unofficial event. Local author Jamie Kleman will be here at 11 am on Saturday to read from and sign her latest book, "It's Not Mean to be Green."

Special Bonus! A photographer from the Wilmington News Journal will be on hand to take a picture of Jamie reading at the store, so we need as many kids as possible to show up! Your kid could be discovered!

Now this is cool...

I just found this website today. It's from an organization called Jumpstart. Their mission is to highlight the importance of early education. The way they do it is to organize mass readings on the same day around the country of the same book. They attempt to break a world record to get more publicity for early education. Sounds pretty cool, right? Unfortunately, I found this site a couple days too late, as the readings took place on October 2nd.

But, there's one section that's really cool - it features guest readings of this year's book - Corduroy by Don Freeman. The guest readers include, among others, LeVar Burton, Emmylou Harris, the NFL's James Thrash and our favorite early book author Mo Willems. You can read the book online and have the guest reader read along with you. Click here to go to Jumpstart's "Look Who's Reading" page.