Toon Books, the children’s book line created by Pulitzer Prize winning Art Spiegleman and Francois Mouly will release Little Mouse from Bone creator Jeff Smith.

TOON Books are the first high-quality comics designed for children ages four and up. Each book in the collection is just right for reading to the youngest child but perhaps more remarkable: this is the first collection ever designed to offer newly-emerging readers comics they can read themselves. Each TOON book has been vetted by educators to ensure that the language and the narratives will nurture young minds. Our books feature original stories and characters created by veteran children’s book authors, renowned cartoonists and new talents, all applying their extraordinary skills to fascinate young children with clearly told tales that will welcome them to the magic of reading.

From the press release at ICV2:

Little Mouse, which will street September 7th, tells the story of the title character’s simple pleasures in getting ready to go to the barn. He has to master all the intricacies of getting dressed, from snaps and buttons to Velcro and tail holes.

Dang. It’s creepy.

Thanks to Andrea Ross of Just One More Book for sending along this link to a podcast of this evening’s Neil Gaiman interview about his Newberry Award winning Graveyard Book and the joys of Twitter. Listen to it here.

Brandeis University has decided to sell the 6,000 piece art collection of the Rose Art Museum. Later articles seem to suggest that the museum is going to close but not sell the art. OK.

The University’s budget crises leaves it $10 million in the hole. The museum is known for its collection of American artists such as Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and Roy Lichtenstein.

In The New York Times, an amusing article on the placement of the feet of animals in art. In more than half the pictures studied, the artists got it wrong.

“The researchers found, for example, that a skeleton of a dog at a Finnish museum depicts the right hindleg in a rearward position while the right foreleg is lifted and moving forward. In a proper depiction the hindleg would be forward too, having moved before the foreleg.”

Once upon a time, artists thought horses ran like this:

An excerpt from a new book on the French poet Arthur Rimbaud. He was a louse.

One of the the things I have often heard from others when discussing Rimbaud is the assumption that without his indulging his wilder side, Rimbaud would not have produced great work. With no alternate universe Rimbaud for comparison, we’ll never know.

As it is, the world got a guy who wrote great poetry at 17, and then chucked art at the age of 22. (more…)

Who is the awesome actress who also happens to be a cast member of A Distant Soil? Why, Kacey Camp, of course! Buy your hot, Hot, HOT tickets for Shakespearean wonderment and tell ‘em Kacey sent you!