Secret Witness

We were curious when references to Secret Witness began popping up in our inbox recently and it turns out it was because of this book's connections to John's hometown of Marshall.  The subtitle to Blaine Pardoe's book gives us the gist of the plot - "The Untold Story of the 1967 Bombing in Marshall, Michigan" - but not being familiar with the story we dug around a little more and found the synopsis:

Edward Gorey: Therein Illustrated His Honour

Something About the Khaki Mailboxes

Drab, drab! I am the olive-colored mailbox.

"House" at 40 Fan Art: Keep Calm and Find That Clock!

What's What: Fusebox Dwarf

For Christmas Uncle Jonathan created something called the Fuse Box Dwarf, a little man who popped out at you from behind the paint cans in the cellarway and screamed, “Dreeb! Dreeb! I am the Fuse Box Dwarf!” [The House with a Clock in its Walls; 121].

Something About the New Zebedee Waterworks

Spouting water in many pipes.

What Think You of These Page, My Lord?

AdWeek's GalleryCat blog posted a chart mapping page lengths in fantasy series not too long ago:

The chart illustrates the reader’s unofficial maxim: “the books of a fantasy series tend to get fatter.” They also noted: “I actually made this a few years ago, which is why there are a few books missing. Found it crawling through old files on my computer! Unfortunately I don’t have the source, and can’t be bothered to update it.”

We reflected briefly on the word count analysis that a fan presented us a few years ago, and thought we'd do our own page count comparison of the Bellairs series.  Here goes.

BiblioFile: The House with a Clock in its Walls (UK)

A mere five years after The House with a Clock in its Walls was published in the United States it was unleashed in the United Kingdom by Hutchinson and Company, the first of three Bellairs titles so released. This would be the first of six Bellairs titles that would surface "across the pond" between 1978 and 1987.

25 Points About "House"

A. D. Jameson offered readers of his blog 25 points about The House with a Clock in its Walls.  Some are well-known to established readers, others are his observations about plot points.

Alert: La casa nella bruma

We don’t know much more at this point other than it seems artist Alexander Daniloff is at it again for Happy Planet Books. The Italian publishers released the original Lewis Barnavelt trilogy not too long ago with Daniloff providing artwork for La figura nell'ombra (The Figure in the Shadows).  A number of Bellairs titles have been mentioned on their website since then but it is only now they appear to be considered for released.