Here is the poster promoting my book from yesterday’s Little, Brown Young Reader’s Spring Preview. I’ve included a Box of Boogers to indicate scale. (It occurs to me that some of you may be unfamiliar with the size of a Box of Boogers. A Box of Boogers is the size of a Volkswagen. Meaning the poster my publisher printed for me is the size of a Times Square billboard. It’s nice that they’ve really gotten behind the book.)

No, wait. Seriously. I swiped the Box of Boogers (not to be confused with Box O’Boogers, the famous Irish pugilist) from the desk of my editor. She seemed relieved to get rid of it. It seems LBYR is about to publish a book with the word “Booger” in the title, and the candy just found its way into her office. (There are precedents for books - not even specifically children’s books - with “booger” in the title. I can cite De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Booger-Eater; Dickens’ A Tale of Two Boogers; and, of course, Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Boogervilles.) My editor assured me she had not tried any of the box's contents, but would be interested in hearing back from me after I had.

Even though I didn’t go to Yale (I went to the P.T. Barnum Museum in Bridgeport and the Mark Twain House in Hartford; I couldn't, after all, cram everything into a one week vacation) I was allowed into the Yale Club in Manhattan today to participate in Little, Brown’s Young Readers Spring Preview. We authors sashayed up and down the runway, showing off our wares, flashbulbs popping, and I almost had a dust-jacket malfunction, an inner flap flying loose at one point but I caught it and tucked it back in; nobody noticed and it wasn’t caught on camera, thank God.

Around 2:30 I was given ten minutes to address the assemblage and try to convince them my book What We Found in the Sofa and How It Saved the World is the greatest children’s book since Edward Gorey’s The Deranged Cousins, which turned out to be easy since most of the attendees had never heard of The Deranged Cousins, but things still went off on a possibly unfortunate tangent when I tried to justify the length of my book’s title by explaining that I grew up at a time when there was a fad for long titles and you could go to the movies and see Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb or attend a Broadway play called The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade, or see an off Broadway play called Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Momma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feeling So Sad or even take a flashlight under the covers with you and read Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask, which might have been giving out too much information about myself, and may have been the reason I noticed eyes starting to glaze over so I tried to get back to my prepared speech but discovered I had completely forgotten it, so I waded out into the audience and read the bumps on their heads instead, having been a phrenologist in a previous life.

The meet-and-greet later was easy, since everybody kept their distance.