Here’s a short description of Walter’s story:

Walter was born in 1868 and was the son of Lady Emma and Lord Nathan Rothschild. The Rothschilds were a family of bankers and Walter was expected to someday take over the bank. But Walter wasn’t interested in the bank. Instead, he loved every creature that crawled, slithered or flew. He began collecting bugs and butterflies at the age of seven. The family also knew explorers who traveled the world to bring back animals for the London Zoo, and soon Walter started collecting more exotic creatures like kangaroos and kiwis. From there his collection grew and grew, until it threatened to take over the Rothschild estate. Lord Rothschild eventually lost patience with Walter’s hobby and insisted that Walter become a banker, like everyone else in the family. Reluctantly, Walter obeyed, but his dream couldn’t be dimmed.

Eventually Walter created the largest zoological collection gathered by one man and was respected throughout the world for his contribution to science. He wrote 1200 books and scientific papers and named 5000 new species. Animals that now bear the name Rothschild include butterflies, fish, a millipede, a fly, a lizard, a porcupine, a wallaby, a bird of paradise, and even a giraffe. The painfully shy boy who never made a good banker forever changed our understanding of the world’s diversity of creatures.

Lita actually has a strange connection to Walter. Lita’s grandparents, Fran and Frederick Hamerstrom, were ornithologists who cared for birds of prey. One of their scientific mentors was Ernst Mayr, who began his career on an expedition collecting for Walter Rothschild. Later he became curator of Rothschild’s collection of birds, now housed in New York’s American Museum of Natural History.

The picture above is Ernst Mayr with Sario, one of his Malay assistants, in the former Dutch New Guinea in June 1928. The picture below is Lita at Walter Rothschild’s Tring Museum in June 2009.

The House in the Night is such a beautiful book—here’s our new copy with the Caldecott sticker:

I spent most of the night talking with Beth’s husband, Dave, about software and websites and blogs. Dave designed Beth’s new site last summer.

We’re looking forward to Beth’s ALA speech—I’ve heard it may have some reference to the ice storm and 10 day power outage we experienced in Peterborough in December. Lita will be at the ALA conference this summer …

but we’re not sure if she’ll be able to attend the awards ceremony.

In the introduction to the articles they ask, “How can we help children to cope with the divisiveness and contradictions at play in the world today? And how can we help them to feel that they have the power to change things for the better?… At no other time in recent history have these themes been more relevant or their challenges more urgent than they are now. ”

Here are links to the articles:

Books for Thought and Action: A Taste of Jane Addams’ Legacy
by Jo Montie

Learning That War Is Not a Game
by Kathy Beckwith

Finding One Thousand Tracings
by Lita Judge (reprinted with permission)

… and from the PaperTiger archives: Strengthening the Good, Stamping Out the Bad: Children’s Books & Good Causes

They also have a blog here so please take a look.

And a closeup of Mogo—he’s a likable looking warthog, isn’t he?

The scheduled on sale date is July 1st.

Lita’s first book book with Donna Jo—Ugly—is coming out in paperback at about the same time. The cover for Ugly has been redesigned. It used to look like this:

But now will look something like this:

This last image is just a mock-up. I’ll miss the ducklings in the lower left, but I like the blue sky and the new title font!