His works are almost all about how to bring children and books together, profound life is contained in interesting stories, he never speaks, but you can always learn a lot of vivid knowledge about literature, art, self, life, and even the world, and these can always prompt you to like to read, and then constantly think, understand, and gradually understand yourself and the world.
Weekend Library
Publisher: South Sea Publishing Company
Author: (American) Gary Schmidt
Translator: Wang Liangxiu
Publication date: September 2014
Gary D. Schmidt is a well-known American children's literature writer, whose works are known for their high quality, and often win heavyweight awards. A large part of his work is deeply influenced by his personal academic background, and as a professor writer who teaches literature at a university, his works are almost always aimed at how to bring children and books together, which is very rare and not easy. Of course, if this is bluntly written into the work, there may be no achievements he has today. The beauty of Schmidt is that in his works, the profound life is contained in interesting stories, he never speaks, but you can always learn a lot of vivid knowledge about literature, art, self, life, and even the world, and these can always prompt you to like to read, and then continue to think, realize, and gradually know yourself and the world.
Gary Schmidt
And his works like The Wednesday Wars and Okay For Now fit our selection criteria: fun, rewarding, and worth reading over and over again. In "The War on Wednesday", the teenager reads the "lengthy" and "boring" Shakespeare works in all aspects, and finally reads what belongs to him. By the time of "Weekend Library," the story was a completely new story, a teenager's chemistry with the World-famous illustrated masterpiece of Bird of America by the American painter and naturalist John James Audubon, and the wonderful story that followed.
At the beginning of the Publication of the English edition of The Weekend Library, Schmidt talked about the origins of his creation: "This is a very unique survival novel, a story about how to survive in an unfriendly environment. There are children in life who are not happy at home or at school. It is very important for me to write a novel about such a child. Perhaps this was what moved us in the early days of collecting material on topics, because the publication of "a novel about such a child" was also very important to us, and there were elements of emotion and ideals. The topic was signed smoothly, and then a translator was found to translate, and the final translation fully proved that the translator was fully competent in translating the book.
In the process of editing and publishing this book, we have encountered two major problems: First, the English title of the book is Okay For Now, which is translated as "Temporarily Okay", which is of course a little better than the literal translation of "now is better", but I don't think this title can reflect the essence of the book, and from the perspective of reading habits, such a title is not very much like children's literature. So giving the book an appropriate name has become a difficult problem for everyone to ponder. Fortunately, in the end, the editor-in-chief thought of the name "Weekend Library" and got unanimous approval, and we all felt that it was too much in line with the characteristics of the book: the story took place in the library on the weekend, the opportunity of the story was related to the library, and the changes in the fate of all the characters in it were directly or indirectly related to the library, and finally the title of the book was also amazingly consistent with Schmidt's creative theme.
Another conundrum is the cover. The cover is a visual representation of a book. What kind of cover should such a book be equipped with? A style that is too quiet or too noisy is not suitable. Our designer is a young girl who is very thoughtful and takes design very seriously. Before designing, she specially read through the whole book and captured many interesting details based on a detailed understanding of the contents of the book. The story takes place during the implementation of the "Apollo" moon landing plan, which was in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, a remote town in New York, the future is infinitely glamorous to everyone, but no one knows how to move forward. Therefore, she used different color blocks of paper to collage such a group of buildings, highlighting the sense of age, but not completely realistic, and then scanned and retouched, plus paved with the background of blue sky and white clouds, and also made a silhouette of a bird, and finally formed the current cover, literary and hopeful, and simple and interesting. There are nine species of American birds mentioned in the book, and the choice of The Great Esquimaux Curlew as a silhouette on the roof also has special implications. To know the meaning, of course, the reader needs to open the book to find it.
After solving these two major problems, with the cooperation of all the staff of relevant departments, the book was successfully published. Moreover, "Weekend Library" has been on the Douban new book express before it is on the shelves, which is also an encouragement to us. Good work must have a charm that makes people try their best to perfect it. For this book, we need to do far more work than we have already done, and we very much hope to recommend such high-quality children's literature to all readers. (New Classic Culture Du Yiping)