Welcome to the TTMD Community

Through the Magic Door™ (TTMD) exists to foster a life-long love of reading in children and to kindle or reignite that love among parents.

We have put together a set of services designed to quickly identify those books most likely to appeal to a particular child. We hope you will find them helpful. There are all sorts of things we are doing differently to make this format work. They depend in part upon the goodwill and participation of what we hope will end up being a relatively tight-knit community of parents, teachers, librarians, and others interested in children's books.

For background on Through the Magic Door™ you can click on About Us.

At this spot on the site we will be periodically posting information that we think might be helpful to members about how to best use the resources available, things we are seeking to improve, announcements about new capabilities, etc.

If you go to the My Account tab in the top right and register as a community member, you will have access to all the capabilities of the site. Included among these are the ability to contribute reviews and tags (i.e. search values) for books, comment in the blogs, participate in the bulletin board discussions, etc. We ask that you register not only so that we can better serve you, but also as a security precaution; by requiring registration we are able to block people that become abusive or inappropriate in their commentary. Your information is held securely and will not be sold or released. No financial information is required to register as a community member. We look forward to your active and on-going participation in a community of people who are interested in all aspects of children's books.

One of the challenges we are seeking to address is to be able to tap into the collective knowledge and opinion of people knowledgeable about good children's books. There is never a substitute for the match between a person deeply knowledgeable about children's literature who also happens to know the likes and dislikes of a particular child. But you don't always have that PDKACL there when you need them. We are in the process of building what we hope is the next best thing and we could use your help.

Once you have registered as a community member and are logged in, you will find at the bottom of every product page (where you are looking at a single book) two places where you can enter information about that particular book.

This is our biggest endeavor, the attempt to capture the knowledge of people well informed about children's books and organize it in a way that makes it easily available to everyone. What the industry captures is good as far as it goes, author, title, when published, format, etc.

But often you are looking for a much finer level of detail. How is it illustrated? What is the writing style? How can it be used to teach life lessons? How is the story structured? and on and on. Right now you may be fortunate enough to know a well informed teacher or librarian or someone else who can answer these questions. But if not . . .

We are creating a database structured to capture this information. You can contribute reviews and tags for any book once you are registered and become part of the team making this vision a reality.

The results of this effort are accessed under the Find a Book Tab. Ultimately, when there is a large population of books reviewed and tagged, you will have the ability to find a very narrow list of candidate books that meet multiple criteria (I want a book about World War II flying that is well illustrated, appropriate for a fourth grader and which has strong themes of leadership and courage). Until we have that large population, be aware that the more criteria you specify the smaller (down to vanishing) the candidate list will be.

Lazarus's Library is a running blog in which we highlight old favorite books that were out of print, but have recently been re-released by their publisher.

Book Discussions is one of several forums located under the Community tab. It is, as you might expect, a place where members of the TTMD community can start a discussion about a specific book or book-related topic and where other community members can respond. So if you want to talk about The Three Musketeers or perhaps about d'Artagnan, just create the topic and enter your thoughts or questions. We hope you will enjoy exchanging ideas with other members of the community.

We have certainly encountered it with our children: how do you know which books the school is expecting them to read this summer and where do you find them quickly and easily? For those schools for which we receive requests, we will create a hot linked summer reading list. We will link to the school's list directly so you can get the information from the horse's mouth, but will also create a list by grade with the school's instructions as to which and how many books need to be read. Also, all the titles will be hotlinked so that all you need to do is click and purchase. To have your school's summer reading list added, simply click the "Contact Us" link at the bottom of the home page and send us an email.

When you want to give a book but can't or don't want to make the selection for them, give a gift certificate instead.

Quick Search is the fastest and most straight-forward way to find anything that is in print. We have all books from all major publishers and distributors and many of the smaller houses as well. While we focus on children's books, you can order basically any book that is in print from the major publishing houses, adult or juvenile. Quick Search examines all the standard information provided by a publisher about their book.

Author - If you know the author of the book enter their full name and search. Occasionally authors either go by, or their names are recorded in, slightly different variations, so it may help to search by the last name only.

Title - If you know the title or part of the title, enter and search. If the search does not return what you expected, try shortening it to the core phrase and you should find it. Be aware that a lot of times books get appended with words that are not actually part of the title. Big Red Barn by Margaret Wise Brown is often referred to informally as The Big Red Barn or A Big Red Barn. If you search either of the latter, you won't find it.

Subject - Publishers assign descriptors as to what the subject of a book might be. This is a useful search when you can't recall the title or author but do know what it was about. If you don't find what you are seeking, try some variants. It is interesting to observe how many different subjects different cataloguers/publishers can assign to a given book.

Keyword - This is a useful search if you only have the dimmest of recollections about the book. You might know that there was an aardvark involved somehow. Keyword searches in both the title, subject and publishers description. You'll get the highest probability of the book being found but unfortunately you will also get the largest number of "false positives" as well, books that meet your criteria but aren't what you are seeking. Try to think of the most unusual but important word associated with the book.

ISBN - This is the easiest and most accurate way to find a book. Basically every book for the past forty years has been assigned a uinique International Standard Book Number (now a thirteen digit number) which makes it easy to find a unique book. The same text may vary by whether it is hardback or paperback, whether it is illustrated or not, and if illustrated there might be multiple editions by different illustrators. Each one has a unique ISBN.

Art for Children is a portal to a company Art.com that produces posters and prints of over 300,000 pictures. They have a couple of pertinent categories which you might find appealing. One is a Book Illustration Gallery with 1,400 prints from children's and young adult books. If your child is taken with a particular character or scene from a favorite book, there's a good chance they will have it here. The second category that might have interesting prints for you is Children's Gallery which are pictures to do with children and children's activities.

Art.com is an entirely separate company from Through the Magic Door but we think that the art from children's books is an important part of a child's early engagement with reading.

There is nothing for a child quite like receiving something in the mail. And imagine having it come on a regular basis. As a child, living overseas, I can still recall the excitement each Monday waiting for The World of Wonder magazine to be delivered. Not only was the magazine itself a great read, but somehow the receipt of mail is one of the first tokens of a child's admission into the world of adults.

Beyond this though, we are also focusing on the fact that we are a highly mobile and dispersed world. In the US, in any given year one out of six people move residence, half of them out of the county in which they currently live into another county, state or country. We often cannot be with those that we hold dear. We want to make it easy for an adult to send books on a routine basis to those that they may not be able to visit. We hope that it is a gift that makes the child feel special, think of the giver and enjoy in its own right all in one go.

We have created the ability for a child or an adult to create a wishlist of books they would like to receive. For a child that is a particualrly voracious reader with a high turnover of books consumed, this is a way to make sure that the gift you give is not already tidily tucked away on one of their book shelves (or more likely stowed beneath their bed or in the corner of the room for easy access).

To Create a Wishlist

When you have registered or logged in under the My Account tab, their is a button View My Wishlists. If you click on that, it takes you to a screen where you can modify your existing lists or create new wishlists. Their is no limit to the number of wishlists you can create. You have the choice of making the wishlist open to anyone or you can create an access code for security. In the latter case, only those with whom you share the access code can view your wishlist. From the site you can directly e-mail the wishlist to whomever you want to have aware of your bookish desires.

Finding Someone's Wishlist

On the homepage, you can search for someones wishlist by their name or where they live. Once you have found their list(s) just double click on it and, if it is publicly available, you will be able to view the list. If it is access code protected, then you will need to obtain that from the creator of the list.

Every day we will be posting a new quote. It will usually be from, about or having to do with children's books, reading, books, libraries, books, learning, or books. If you have a favorite quote you would like to share, send it to us and we will add it to the list of candidates. Try running your cursor over the quote.

Here is where we will both welcome newcomers but also post information about the site, changes to the site , how to make the most use of the site etc.

Please note that Welcome to theTTMD Community is in the form of a blog and so you are able to post comments (at the bottom of each post is a comments hypertext in orange). Just click on it.

Pigeon Post is a weekly essay on some topical theme, usually incorporating references to pertinent books. For example, a few weeks before Halloween there might be an essay on scary stories, how to present them to different ages of children, what authors are good at scaring without terrifying, etc.

In blog format, you can also comment on the essay, suggest additional titles, or post your thoughts on the topic.

One of the things we are strongly attempting to achieve is to revivify great books from authors of the past that may have fallen below the radar screen. There is enough of a demand out there that publishers keep them in print but they may not be well known or perhaps it is that they are known for only one title when there are others of theirs still in print.

This weekly essay will focus on an account of the life and times of an author (or illustrator) whom we think deserves greater attention.

I guess it is worth highlighting that we are not focusing only on those that have shuffled off the mortal coil. Any author or illustrator that has been producing wonderful books for a good while but whom may not be broadly known, is a candidate.

Thing-Finder is a blog by Charles Bayless capturing quotes, observations, links to essays, and anything else that catches his magpie eye.

Book Lists are, not to put too fine a point on it, lists of books. We post a topic seeking the community's input as to good candidate titles (at three levels: picture books, independent readers and young adults). As nominations are aggregated (members can use the comment hypertext to create a responding post with their nominations) and we see some consensus around candidate titles, we will add them to the list. If there is a topic for which you would like to see a book list created, just drop us an e-mail and we will add it to the list.

Also included here are Series. For major series such as the Hardy Boys, we will create a post that describes the series, whether it needs to be read in sequence or not, list the books in the series in their order of appearance, which ones are in print, etc.

Resources is where we are attempting to warehouse as much of the stuff on the web that is pertinent to children's books as is deemed useful by the TTMD community. Our initial categories are:

Articles
Associations
Authors/Illustrators
Awards
Blogs
Book Lists
E-texts
Folktales
Journals
Lesson Plans
Literacy
Summer Reading Lists
Series
Storytelling
Teaching Resources

While we have populated these with a number of resources we have already uncovered, this is very much a community treaure chest. Let us know what you have found out there in the terra icognita of the web, bring it back and we will post it for everyone to share.

The community tab is where we have hosted a series of forums where any member of the community can start a conversation and look for information, opinons and experiences from other community members. The boards are lightly moderated for language and content but our hope is that there will be a natural equilibrium around gracious conversation.

The forums already established are

TTMD Community - for everyone
Parents
Teachers
Librarians
Expatriates
Homeschoolers
Book Discussions

Let us know if there are other forums you would like to see.

My Account is where you register to become a member. All you have to provide is a name, e-mail and mailing address. By registering 1) you don't have to enter you address information each time you order, 2) you access the ability to contribute reviews and tags on books, 3) you become elibile to comment of the various essays and other posts, and 4) you can participate in the bulletin board discussions.

Once you are registered as a member and logged in the My Account tab will then show four buttons:

Log Out - To log out from your session

Edit - Where you can change your address or password

View My Wishlists - Where you can change, delete or create new wishlists

View Orders - Where you can check on the status of your orders.

With the Cohort Project, we are looking for nominations of specific books from your childhood based on when you were born. For everyone, but especially for those of you from among the earliest cohorts, we'd also love to hear any stories related to those favorite books; how did you come by the book, where did you get books to read, did you have access to a library, where did you do your reading, and so on.

Organized by Award, we have created lists for each award of all the winners back to their establishment and have hotlinked those to editions that are still in print.

In addition to these lists of winners in Book Lists, wou can also find information about the history of the awards, the rules and criterion, the sponosring organization, etc. by going to Resources/Awards.

You can find the awards lists under Resources/Book Lists or go straight from the front page. We currently have the Caldecott, Newbery, Carnegie, and Greenaway award winners posted and will be adding others. Contact us if their is an award list you wish to see created sooner than later.