>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
>> Norma Krug: Welcome.   [ Noisy crowd ]
On behalf of the Library of Congress,
welcome to the 2010 National Book Festival.
We hope you're having a wonderful hot day,
celebrating the Washington heat and the joy
of reading here in the National Mall.
Before I begin, I just have a couple
of housekeeping matters, unfortunately.
I want to inform you first that the presentations here are being filmed
on the Library of Congress' website for their archives,
so please be mindful of this as you enjoy the presentation.
In addition, please do not sit on the camera risers in the back.
And one more minor detail --
If you were here for the exquisite Corpse event earlier
and you have a red sticker in your book, in your flyer, your program,
sorry, please go to the back table to pick up your book.
There are some people who haven't picked up their books, so.
Without further adieu, I'm Norma Krug.
I am a contributing editor at the Washington Post Book Review,
and I'm here to introduce two legions, and the story I'm
about to tell you has numerous versions and I will tell you one
of them which is -- in the late 50s, Norton Juster
and Jules Feiffer were living
in the same Brooklyn Heights apartment building.
Norton was working on a book and pacing the floors
and he was either bothering Jules
or he was sharing all of his stories with him.
Both. Regardless of the truth, Jules started sketching
and I'm sure you are all aware what the result was --
the legendary Phantom Tollbooth.   [Applause and cheering ]
Jules Feiffer, as you know, has gone on to become a prolific cartoonist,
playwright and book author.
He's won an array of prizes across many, many fields --
a Pulitzer, a George Polk award, an OV and an Academy Award.
Norton Juster is an architect.   He's now retired.
His firm's projects include the Eric Karl Museum of Picture Book Art
in Amhurst, Massachusetts.   [ Applause ]
He taught architecture and planning at the Pratt Institute in New York
and was a Professor of Design at Hampshire College.
Some 50 years since their initial collaboration, I'm sure you know
that the two authors have just published a wonderful new book
called The Odious Ogre, which is a draw fairy tale about an ogre
who is extraordinarily large, exceedingly ugly, constantly hungry
and absolutely merciless until he meets a young lass
who does not fear him.
So, here to tell you more about the book
and about their collaboration are Norton Juster and Jules Feiffer.
[ Applause ]
>> Norton Juster: Since you already know everything about me,
let me say a few words in conclusion, and then we'll leave.
[ Laughter ]
It has been fifty years, almost fifty years since Jules
and I have worked together.   Everybody asks that question.
Some people think it's rather surprising.
It's really quite simple.   Firstly, we wanted to make sure
that The Phantom Tollbooth would still be around and worked.
So we waited a little time.
Secondly, when you would see someone all of the time,
they get a little wearing, so we figured that fifty years was just
about the right time for us to come away from all of the problems we had
with The Phantom Tollbooth.   So, anyway, I wrote this book.
It's not a book that was just written a few years ago.
I started making notes for it about forty years ago,
and this is the way I usually work -- I make notes about something,
I stick it in an envelope and I put it in a drawer where I forget it.
And several months later, I'll take it out and look at it and I'll say,
nahhhhh, and I'll put it back.
So I did this on and off for a long time and one day a few years ago,
I picked this out of the drawer and I looked at it and said, hey,
I think I know what to do with this.   And I started working on it.
Well, as soon as I finished it and brought it into my editor,
almost simultaneously, we just said, Jules has to do this.
And luckily he was available to do it and we did it.
>> Jules Feiffer: Unplugged.   >> Norton Juster: Yes.
[ Laughter ]
I didn't want to bring that out but there was a long stretch
when Jules was really in decline.
He did maybe six or eight books, speaking engagements all
over the country, some plays, a few other things,
but he really wasn't doing terribly well.
[ Laughter ]
So we decided we'd give him a little break and he performed beautifully.
Anyway, why don't you take over for a little bit and talk about it,
whatever you want to talk about?   [ Laughter ]
>> Jules Feiffer: Um.
Well, I don't need this if I have that.
Can you hear me?   >> Is your mike on?
>> Is my mike on?
OK. Are you criticizing my dress, madam?
[ Laughter ]
I have spent hours preparing for this appearance.
I didn't have a beard before I came on here.
[ Laughter ]
This is, um, I have been, when Norton
and I originally did The Phantom Tollbooth,
I was a slashing hard-hitting social and political cartoonist
for the Village Voice and other publications who had no interest
in children's books because I had no interest in children
because I didn't have them.
And, essentially, did The Phantom Tollbooth as a toss-away.
It was something to do for my friend, Norton.
It was an exercise in experimentation because,
although I was not interested in doing childrens books myself,
I was informed on and loved the whole history
of childrens book illustration, particularly the 19th
and 20th century English and American illustration
and I thought I would steal from one of those guys in order to figure
out how to do this book, so, there was an illustrator that I loved
at the time who seemed closest to the looseness
of my own style named Edward Ardizzone and I did my best
to channel him in my work for the book.
But, once I finished the book and once we sold the book,
and both of us were astonished that it would have the shelf life
which goes on and on that it did have, once that was done,
I put childrens books behind me to go on to the more serious work
of my life which was overthrowing the government.
[Laughter ]   which I actually succeeded in doing
[ Laughter ]   with mixed results.
[Laughter ]
But, something funny happened over the years.
What happened was that I married twice, have three children,
and suddenly I, who never wanted children, never liked children,
was mad about children because when you fall in love
with your own children, when you seem to fall in love
with everybody else's children, and what my children did,
what my children forced me to do was tell them stories.
And I started telling these kids stories to my oldest, Kate,
who now writes her own children's books and which I collaborate on.
One is about to come out from Candlewick Press in the spring,
called My Side of the Car, but we did Which Puppy?
a year and a half ago, and we did Henry, the Dog with No Tail,
and she's also done many more with other illustrators.
But that came about because I was making up stories to tell her
as I did with my daughter, Hallie, and Bart George,
a book you may know, began
as a bedtime story for my daughter, Julie.
[Applause ]
And word for word, the story I told her is virtually the story
in that book.
So, I began to love this thing that I had dismissed early,
and what I also found out, as politics began to fail me
as a subject because politics began to fail as a nation,
was that there was something truly reviving and uplifting
about working for children.
Because at the very least, they were the future
and they couldn't screw up anything yet.
[ Laughter ]
And, while, with my adult work, essentially writing the cartoons
and writing plays, they were basically cartoons and plays
in a sense about disappointment,
about being let down, about unmet needs.
But, with a kid's book, I can deal with my silliness for the first time
and use that as a subject; my optimism, you can deal with hope;
you can deal with innocence and, as sour as we get over the years,
as disillusioned as we get, what saves us and has always saved us,
is the continual rediscovery and reinvention of innocence,
of illusion, and nothing is better than children's books as a nest
for that kind of illusion, to give kids the sense, as I had as a kid,
as I needed as a kid, as many kids have and adults have,
if you don't find it at home, a sense of hope,
a sense of identification, if you don't find it in the neighborhood,
if you don't find it with your friends, if you don't find
in a school, my God, there it is in literature,
over and over and over again.   [ Applause ]
And you find what you feel that you're alone,
and no one understands you, you accidentally pick up a book,
and 20 or 30 pages in, you say, oh my God, this is about me.
And it gives you a connection.
It gives you a connection to the world but also a connection
to sanity because you don't feel like quite the freak you felt like.
You don't feel quite that alone anymore.
And what I love about this work is that, once being the recipient
of that kind of feeling from different authors and illustrators
over the years and cartoonists too in comic strips, now I'm the job
of trying to play the same role for a generation
and several generations of younger people.
And it's a great job.   It's a very happy kind of work.
And it's given me as much or more pleasure than any
of the various other things I do and will continue to do and one
of the great pleasures was to finally get back together
with Norton and figure out how best to tell this story
of The Odious Ogre, which we've just done together, and my first reaction
to the book was, all I want to do is do the biggest ogre
in children's book history, so that it can't fit on the page.
And the rest of it, I must say, is story-telling.
I mean, that -- there are great children's book
illustrations around.
And some of them, if you look at these books,
have little to do with the story.
They have to do with the brilliant illustrator showing himself
or herself off.
But it seems to me that the only point in a book, coming at this
from the point of view of a cartoonist, where words and pictures
into play and mix and mingle, is that the words and pictures
in the book, in Norton's, not so much in The Phantom Tollbooth,
because that were illustrations for in a sense a novel,
but in the picture book, they should mix and mingle like a comic strip
so that you can't tell where one begins and the other --
they each affect each other's sensibility.
They are part of the same piece.
They are twin together, and that's what I try to do in this
and I'm very happy with how the book came out which owes a lot also
to our editor, Michael di Capua who guided this
and sometimes force-fed it into the two of us and,
after loving what the illustrations and loving every one said,
I think you have to do this one over, and loving it ever so much,
I think you have to do this one over, and, you know,
if you love doing the work, you love the opportunity
to get it right this time,
even though you thought it was right the last time.
Norton?   >> Norton: Thank you.
[ Applause ]
>> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.