Author photo courtesy of Random House
Just posted! It’s our first BiblioFiles webcast in front of a live audience, and our guest is Norton Juster, author of the legendary book, The Phantom Tollbooth.
Milo is a boy who doesn’t know what to do with himself, isn’t interested in much, and doesn’t see the point in anything. But when a mysterious package containing a toy tollbooth arrives in his room, everything changes.
Past the tollbooth are the Lands Beyond, which house places like Dictionopolis, the Valley of Sound, the Doldrums, Digitopolis, and the Mountains of Ignorance. Milo is soon joined by a pair of unusual travel companions, Tock and Humbug, as he attempts to bring Princesses Rhyme and Reason back to settle the warring kingdoms of Words and Numbers.
First published in 1961, The Phantom Tollbooth is wacky, smart, odd, fun, strange, and completely captivating. It is often compared to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in terms of its intelligence, word play, and impact on children’s literature. Now, in over 50 years of publication, The Phantom Tollbooth, with its iconic illustrations by Jules Feiffer, has been analyzed in scholarly papers, quoted in dissertations, included in graduate classes, documented on film, read aloud in elementary school classrooms, passed along through generations of families, and newly discovered by young readers. It is, and will always be, a seminal book in the history of children’s literature.
In addition to The Phantom Tollbooth, Norton Juster has written The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics, Alberic The Wise and Other Journeys, As: A Surfeit of Similies, The Hello, Goodbye Window, Sourpuss and Sweetie Pie, The Odious Ogre, and Neville. In 2011, The Annotated Phantom Tollbooth, with introduction and notes by scholar Leonard Marcus, was released.
Follow this link to the BiblioFiles interview
Just posted! A webcast with Tracey Baptiste, author of The Jumbies.
Very shortly, my library will be hosting a Victorian Tea 
First up is Anna, who is a sophomore at Princeton University. She gamely stepped up to play our maid. Just in case you think we were being snobby and excluding Anna from the group shot that started this post – take heart! Anna’s photo shoot was in the afternoon, when she arrived for her library shift. The rest of the ladies were photographed in the morning. No Victorian class system at work here, no sir.
This is Joani, a junior at Princeton University. You might remember her from some previous posts (here she is as a 
Our very own Miss Marissa will be keeping it real in scores of lace. Have you ever seen someone rock a straw hat so well? No, I think not.
Finally, there’s me. I’ll be playing the matron of the house. Which means I needed a really, really, really big hat. There’s actually an interesting story to the hat. It was designed by Rodney Gordon, who did all the hats for the 1974 film version of The Great Gatsby with Mia Farrow and Robert Redford.
Image originally resides on