Book Alert: 壁のなかの時計

The Japanese edition of the The House with a Clock in Its Walls (loosely translated as Clock of inside of a wall - ?) will be published later this April.

There, Then, That Izard!

A woman named Donna recently shared this bit of trivia with us after stumbling upon a particular – and most peculiar, at that – name:

I had assumed that Bellairs had invented the name Izard for his villains Isaac and Serena in The House with a Clock in its Walls, but today I ran across the name Izzard in The Guinness Book of Names by Leslie Dunkling (6th edition). It's in the chapter on the history of surnames, under the section "Henry Guppy's 'Peculiar' Names" [118-21]. Here's Dunkling's explanation:

Book Alert: Tower & Pedant

Brad Strickland, writing at the Compleat Bellairs:

In The Many Eyes Of Fans

This article about the way the Internet is affecting the voice of fans comes from the November 13, 2000 issue of The Wall Street Journal. It speaks of John Bellairs as an author who wrote "pioneering Gothic-suspense novels targeted to young-adult readers, but followed cultishly by grown-ups too." Don't have a clue what they mean by that. What next Jonathan Abucejo? The New York Times? Keep up the good work!

Excerpts follow.