Monday, September 3, 2012

Judy Bolton in Country Living Magazine

In June, one of the editors of Country Living Magazine contacted me about loaning some of my books for a photo shoot.  It turned out that they were interested in photographing some of the Judy Bolton books that can seen seen on my patterned bindings page for the Judy Bolton series.

Before I knew which books they wanted, I balked because I am very possessive of my dust-jacketed books, since most of my books are in excellent condition and are first printings.  After I learned that they wanted to photograph patterned bindings, I had no problem.  I was okay with loaning out some of those.  You have to actually try in order to succeed in damaging a library edition.  I figured that they would come through the mail okay.

Country Living paid for overnight shipping of the books from me to them, since they needed them immediately.  The books were returned to me in less than one week and arrived in the same condition as I sent them.

Next, I answered a bunch of questions about library editions.  At the time, I knew that I was giving far, far more information than they needed but I wanted to make certain that they understood what the true origin is of a library edition and that they clearly understood that the values tend to be quite low.  As I expected, they used almost none of the information I provided, but I was quite pleased when I saw what did appear in the magazine.  The information they gave was completely factual.  Whew!

The Judy Bolton books were featured as part of a short article in the September 2012 issue called "Judge a Book by Its Cover."  The subtitle of the article is "A purposefully superficial guide to superb-looking vintage series."  The article features an eclectic mix of books selected for having interesting bindings.  My Judy Bolton books were the only ones featured that fall into our area of interest.  Here is a picture of the Judy Bolton section of the article.


Click on the image so that you can read the text.

I am going to place my answers to the questions that I was asked in a separate blog post.  I always love discussing library bindings, so I want to share that information.

Answers to Library Edition Questions

6 comments:

Paula said...

Nice, Jennifer! :)

Jenn Fisher said...

I found this to be an interesting piece--how they focused on the bindings and patterns of the books. Many of us collect for the artwork on the covers--dust jackets or picture covers--as opposed to bindings themselves--I think in series book collecting anyhow, that's a subset of collectors who look for those kinds of things. Thankfully you didn't have a Judy Bolton game to send them ;-) HA!

Jenn:)

Jennifer White said...

One of the editors called the patterned bindings "gorgeous." I was pleased that someone could see them that way since most collectors have no interest in this sort of thing. The editor, of course, was seeing them as something that would fit into a decorating scheme, which they do.

Robert said...

Kudos, Jennifer! Maybe it will inspire more people to check out library bindings.

Amy Sisson said...

Hi Jennifer. What issue was this article in? I was at Barnes & Noble and peeked at both the September and October County Living issues but did not see it.

Jennifer White said...

The article begins on page 43 of the September issue. My books are pictured on page 45. It would have helped tremendously if I had included the correct information in this post. :) I have now edited the post to contain the correct information.