Time for Some Experimentation . . .

This past week, I changed the book display that meets the kids when they enter the Children’s Room. For the summer, the theme had been “Curl Up with a Children’s Classic”. Needless to say, the display was a big fat failure. The books on display, books that had helped me define who I was and who I wanted to be when I was a kid, gathered dust over the summer weeks as the kids passed the display for the cart which carried all the titles that had been put on their school reading lists. No one had any interest for Little Women, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, or Black Beauty because none of these books were going to get them a passing grade on their book reports when they got back to school in September.

So last week, I decided to take the book display in a new direction. In the spirit of the upcoming fifth book in the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series the theme for the fall book display is “Can’t wait for The Ugly Truth? Try one of these books while you’re waiting”. When I walked into the library this morning I could see a gaping hole where my display had once stood. There were only four books left, all the others had been checked out. It was awesome. There are so many book in our collection that are just as entertaining as Diary of a Wimpy Kid, but just don’t get the attention they deserve.

Based on the display’s success, I want to conduct an experiment. Next week I plan to sneak in some children’s classics onto the display. I mean, if you like the antics of Greg and Rowley you may just like the adventures of Tom and Huck, right? I wonder if the classics still have the ability to reach kids today and simply need some new PR strategies, or if these stories just come across as too old fashioned. It reminds me of the ‘Ugly Book Contest’ Teri S. Lesesne describes in her book Naked Reading: Uncovering What Tweens Need to Become Lifelong Readers. Lesesne explains how a school librarian friend of hers puts books on display that are great stories, but have awful covers. She asks the kids to design better covers for a book they have chosen to read from the display.

If a book is without a hook worthy of a tween’s attention, whether it be a flashy cover, a graphic novel format, or characters who externally appear to be similar to themselves, there may be no desire to give that book a chance. If the summer display proved one thing, it’s that tweens are not impressed by the status of a book being a classic. Maybe next time, the display will be the same books, but the theme will be an Ugly Book Contest.



Lesesne, T. S. (2006). Naked Reading: Uncovering What Tweens Need to Become Lifelong Readers. Stenhouse Publishers: Portland, Maine. p. 84.

Santa Clara County Library: Zoo-Wee Mama! If you Like Diary of a Wimpy Kid You May Also Like These . . .

Image from New York Magazine