Between an exclusive first look at the official movie poster and an interview with actor Brendan Fraser, lately Ink Splot 26 has been focused on the film version of Cornelia Funke's Inkheart, which comes out on January 23rd. But last week marked a major milestone for the trilogy, totally unrelated to the big screen: Inkdeath, the third and final installment of the series is now in stores in the US!
To celebrate, Scholastic invited employees, librarians, booksellers, and members of the press to attend a talk with Cornelia Funke in our auditorium, followed by a launch party in our cafeteria. Of course, I was all over that! Come on, a famous author whose books I love and free food? Duh.
Cornelia's visit was the second in a new series of talks at Scholastic called "Author, Author." They're billed as "intimate dialogues with great children’s authors," and so far, they definitely have not disappointed (the first guest, a few months ago, was Walter Dean Myers).
For Cornelia's talk, the stage was set up to look like a comfy living room — well, if your living room had a giant projection on the wall:
To ask Cornelia the questions, Scholastic paired her with Barry
Cunningham, who is not just Cornelia's editor but also the guy who
first brought Cornelia's books to the United States and Britain. That's
actually how the talk started — with Barry explaining how he first came
to meet Cornelia. And believe it or not, the story involves a young
reader just like you!
What happened was that Barry received a letter from a bilingual girl,
telling him that Cornelia’s books (only published in German at that
time) were even better than Harry Potter! The girl went on to describe
how amazing The Thief Lord
was, and after reading the letter, Barry decided that he just had to
read the book for himself. Can you believe that? If it hadn't been for
that one girl, it's possible that The Thief Lord never would
have been translated into English and that we never would have gotten
to read Cornelia's other incredible books that followed! Just goes to
show you that you should always speak up about what you believe in —
you never know when you might change the course of history!
But anyway, back to the talk . . . After reading The Thief Lord,
Barry knew he wanted to meet Cornelia and bring her book to
English-speaking kids. As Barry put it, "With Cornelia, it's easy to
see that special magic, that bond between author and audience."
So Barry went out to Germany to meet Cornelia at her house, and they
got along right away. (The first thing Cornelia said to him when she
opened the door was that he looked just like Bob Hoskins,
an actor she really liked. What do you think? I don’t really see the
resemblance, but maybe that’s just me . . .) After that initial
meeting, it was only a matter of time before the two of them became
close collaborators and good friends — Barry and Cornelia, that is, not
Bob Hoskins.
After Barry’s introduction, Cornelia joined him on stage — to thunderous applause from the audience, of course.
But before starting on the Q&A, Barry presented this video of Cornelia, filmed at her current home in Los Angeles:
